That’s one of the reasons I’m glad to be Protestant. 
Cannibalism is eating your own species. So if a human being eats human flesh, it’s cannibalistic. If a dingo eats human flesh, it’s not.
Black widow spiders are said to be cannibalistic because they eat their mates during or after sex.
No, the eucharist is a cracker that someone has spoken magic words over and other people believe to be the flesh of a god that a bunch of other people don’t believe in.
I don’t personally have a problem with folks doing that, but I do have an issue with Catholics pretending it isn’t symbolic cannibalism when it so obviously is.
I note that there’s a term for eating gods; theophagy. As for whether or not it’s symbolic cannibalism, that depends on whether or not Jesus counts as human.
A bit of a nit-pick, but this has already been covered in this thread: Protestants believe that the eucharist is symbolic canabalism. According to Catholic doctrine, it is actual canabalism. Of course, just because Catholics believe this doesn’t mean that they are right and that the eucharist is not simply a cracker.
I mean dead in the sense of soul-less. Ritual cannibalism (as opposed to the pragmatic cannibalism in the Andes incident) supposes the existence of some kind of life-force that can be transferred from person to person via the eating of flesh. Christians hold that the soul is indivisible; thus your flesh is not alive in this sense, even if Hannibal Lector has only just bitten it off.
Theologians often assert the notion that pagan practices reflect a yearning for a reality that’s just out of reach. In this case, ritual cannibalism is the soul’s imperfect attempt to re-create the transfer of a share in god’s life through matter that can be eaten.
But no one who has had the real thing can abide the imitation; thus, equating the Eucharist to cannibalism is going to get the same reaction as if you tell your friend his fancy imported havarti is just like American “cheese.”
Clearly I was giving a definition of cannibalism for humans.
Human cannibalism is a human eating human flesh.
Jesus was human.
The eucharist, according to doctrine, involves eating Jesus’s flesh.
Hence the eucharist, according to doctrine, involves humans eating human flesh.
Hence the eucharist, according to doctrine, involves cannibalism.
That Jesus is God according to doctrine is irrelevant, since the definition of cannibalism is “eating human flesh,” not “eating the flesh of an entity that is human and nothing else.”
It wasn’t clear to me.
Well, I’ll drop the analogy then - it’s not really mine anyway. (You are no doubt shocked to discover that a person who chooses a login name that’s been taken twice already is not terribly creative.)
Personally, I’m willing to accept either “bread is not flesh” or “god is not human” or maybe some combination thereof. (Humans have two dimensions, matter and spirit - and in neither dimension is the definition of cannibalism satisfied.)
But you seem to be more interested in the “Why is my wife mad at me? I just asked a simple question” angle, and I’ve tried to shed some light on that. Thanks for taking my remarks seriously. 