The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #158223   Message #3742693
Posted By: DMcG
09-Oct-15 - 12:34 PM
Thread Name: BS: The Pope in America
Subject: RE: BS: The Pope in America
"Someone did that to you" - a bit of a negative way of expressing things, you know. And not one you have evidence for as it happens. There are people like CS Lewis, for example, who moved from an atheist position to a believer, though the majority of the movement is certainly in the other direction. So isn't it an assumption I am a birth-Christian rather than choosing it later in life?   

As it happens, you are right in that I was brought up Catholic, and though a Catholic primary and secondary school. But you are quite wrong to imagine I accept these ideas without demur. You brought up some time ago the topic of transubstantiation. And I can see, wearing a science hat, that's there's something wrong there. Indeed, I could see it at seven year old. Now, the superficial thinker either rejects that out of hand, or accepts it uncritically. The deeper thinker says there appears to be something wrong, so maybe I am just not understanding it properly. Which leads you into exploring Aristotle and Plato and the discovery that, not only is the term 'substance' in transubstantiation dramatically different to the same word in the scientific sense (being closer to the sense of 'the substance of an argument') but that transubstantiation in the Aristotelian sense happens the whole time in ordinary life, such as when a person leaves work where he has the substance of 'call centre operative' and walks into a club he gains the substance of 'folk singer'.

Not that the well meaning nuns who taught me appeared to understood any of that. But I say it just to illustrate the point that things are not necessarily just 'accepted without demur'.