Dennis wrote:

Thank you for sharing that, I can relate. I've grew up on Christian music because of it thanks to that, so I'm not complaining and I'm happy just to love philosophy and know that God loves you and me. 

You're welcome, Dennis.  Thank you for the music.

In 1991, a psychiatrist saved my life because I felt suicidal.  The emotional pain is hard to describe.  But  it's even harder for others to understand it when they believe clinically depressed people can always cheer up at will. For me, that illnesses became a blessing, though, because it replaced my callousness with compassion and empathy.  In high school, when I still listened to contemporary Christian music, Barry MacGuire sang, "I walked a mile with pleasure.  She chattered all the way, leaving me non the wiser for all she had to say.  I walked a mile with sorrow.  Never a word said she, but oh, the things I learned from her when sorrow walked with me."  Compared with the earthly trials others endure, mine are trivial partly because of an essential lesson I've learned from writings by some canonized saints.  Suffering is hardly the worst evil in the world.  Sometimes, while I cope patiently with it, it gets nearly easy to bear.  On the other hand, if I fight it or feel angry with God for it,  it increases.  That's why I remember a line from a song by Jamie Owens-Collins, another Christian who sang when I was young: "The bitter tears you've tasted will be diamonds in your crown."

Before I felt suicidal, I attended a holy Catholic Mass for people with AIDS when I thought most people suffering from it deserved to die of it because they caught the virus during immoral sex, especially during homosexual sodomy.  After Mass, when I met a Franciscan brother with advanced AIDS, I could think only about the agony he must have felt because of it.  So to try to feel compassion, I listen to this song by Sir Elton John.



Since I'm an opera buff, Sir Elton is the only pop singer I listen to partly because to me, the words mean much more than the music does.  In fact, if you get to know me well, you'll see how much I hate superficiality.  And there's nothing superficial about The Last Song.

Alexander wrote:

BillMcEnaney wrote:

Here's an analogy I thought up to help other people think about Transubstantiation.  Suppose you  invent a machine that converts margarine molecule-by-molecule to butter.  The margarine looks, tastes, smells, feels and acts like butter.  But it's not butter, since butter and margarine have different natures.  Anytime someone or something loses any essential property, the loser becomes something of another kind.  A wood chipper changes a tree limb into wood chips, death turns a body into a corpse, a fire reduces a log to ashes.
 

The immediate problem that will be pointed out with this analogy is that in no other case of substantial change do the accidents of substance A remain with substance B. The remaining of the accidents may be the bigger issue for many people than the change in substance.

Another obstacle: in all the cases you mention, some material element persists - there is a physical continuity between a log and ashes, for example, or a living body and a corpse. There is no such continuity in transubstantiation, as the Body and Blood of Our Lord pre-exist the change - they are not produced "out of" the bread and wine, if you get my meaning. Simply put, transubstantiation seems too far removed from ordinary substantial change for the analogy to be very helpful.
 

There's still another major problem, Alexander: A lab technician can tell the difference between margarine and butter.  Maybe my imaginary machine can change an egg substitute into an ego with no shell?

Here's an analogy I thought up to help other people think about Transubstantiation.  Suppose you  invent a machine that converts margarine molecule-by-molecule to butter.  The margarine looks, tastes, smells, feels and acts like butter.  But it's not butter, since butter and margarine have different natures.  Anytime someone or something loses any essential property, the loser becomes something of another kind.  A wood chipper changes a tree limb into wood chips, death turns a body into a corpse, a fire reduces a log to ashes.