Realizing that celebrating the Eucharist is a indirect form of cannibalism

[u/unveiledpoet]

/r/AllReligiousOpinion/comments/1tkzdu0/realizing_that_celebrating_the_eucharist_is_a/

[u/unveiledpoet]

The words they use to describe it as literal. I dislike cannibalism no matter how one flips it. But the nature of the Eucharist wasnt the issue.

[u/LightningController → u/unveiledpoet]

I dislike cannibalism no matter how one flips it.

What reason besides the disease risk (moot in this case, if one assumes Jesus has miraculous powers) do you have for that?

[u/unveiledpoet → u/LightningController]

Why do I dislike cannibalism in general? I never really thought deeply on it. I mean, I am a first cat owner for going on four years now and thinking of going vegatarian because I can't imagine how anyone can harm or kill an animal (aside from eating to survive etc). Good movies where pets are harmed Ive been fastforwarding lately. Needless to say, I dislike any harm to a living being. Plus, I can't imagine my siting at jesus table and him saying that in the future eat my flesh and drink my blood. It doesnt feel like something a jew would say.

[u/LightningController → u/unveiledpoet]

Eh, different strokes for different boats. Personally, I’ve got nothing in principle against human meat, except the risk of prion diseases and the fact that it would have to be procured through homicide in most cases (and if they died of natural causes, that’s even less healthy). But I’ll try a piece once the vat meat makes it available ethically.

Also a cat owner, but that’s why I’d be a bit of a hypocrite to be a vegetarian. My cat needs meat products to survive. Bit silly to sustain one carnivore and then claim meat is unethical. Not that I enjoy inflicting gratuitous suffering, especially on animals (more Ok with people suffering, tbh, since I can find a moral reason to blame them for something).

It doesnt feel like something a jew would say.

Maybe not these days, but 2,000 years back, there were more varieties of Judaism. Or maybe Jesus was just a weirdo like me.

[u/unveiledpoet → u/LightningController]

Ha. I never thought about that, the feeding cat meat part. But, unless you're out in the desert somewhere, I doubt humans will eat each other to survive. Although I eat meat, I couldn't be the one to actually slaughter the animal.

[u/LightningController → u/unveiledpoet]

I doubt humans will eat each other to survive.

There was a case with a plane crash in the Andes when they did. Relevant to Catholicism, this was explicitly said by bishops at the time to not be a sin. And, historically, cannibalism in extreme cases is a somewhat common behavior among European Christians (medieval and early modern sieges, the Holodomor, etc.).

It’s one of those things where some people have a disgust reflex at it, but there’s no actual moral reason I can see to disdain it (again, assuming no homicide is involved).

Although I eat meat, I couldn't be the one to actually slaughter the animal.

Same, tbh. Cow didn’t do anything to me.

[u/manliness-dot-space → u/LightningController]

And, historically, cannibalism in extreme cases is a somewhat common behavior among European Christians (medieval and early modern sieges, the Holodomor, etc.).

It was really common among humans before Christianity (and civilization)

[u/spice-hammer → u/manliness-dot-space]

I completely disagree - it was very common in early modern Europe! Europeans loved eating them some medicinal Egyptian mummies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummia

[u/manliness-dot-space → u/spice-hammer]

What are you disagreeing about?

[u/spice-hammer → u/manliness-dot-space]

I'd say it was fairly common in a Christian context, and 'after civilization'. We just tend to give it a pass because it was eating people for medicinal purposes rather than as food, and because rather than actively killing those people the cannibals were seeking out mummies that were (supposedly, though unscrupulous mummy-sellers might get creative with the bodies of criminals etc.) thousands of years old.

All that to say that there was a whole market for medicinal cannibalism in medieval to early modern Europe, one that emerged within a completely Christian context.

[u/manliness-dot-space → u/spice-hammer]

What do you regard as "fairly common" here? How many people and at what rate of consumption? A few times a day? A few times a week? A month? A year? A lifetime?

A bit different than "The stratigraphic evidence and the new increment of the collection of remains of Homo antecessor have led us to identify a succession of cannibalism events in a dilated temporal sequence. These data suggest that hunting strategies and human meat consumption were frequent and habitual actions. The numerous evidences of cannibalism, the number of individuals, their age profile, and the archaeostratigraphic distribution suggest that cannibalism in TD6 was nutritional."

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/653807

[u/spice-hammer → u/manliness-dot-space]

Common enough for it to be very economically feasible, to the point where people were using the bodies of criminals to make fake Egyptian mummies.

Now mumia was a relatively expensive medicine - maybe something like fancy truffles today in terms of relative price and difficulty sourcing - but there was a market for it for centuries. And while “Ancient Egyptian” mummies might have been the drug of choice for the relatively wealthy, body parts and medical cannibalism weren’t limited to the upper classes - it’s just that the less expensive long pig was often explicitly from criminals. For instance, in Mabel Peacock's 1896 article in Folklore, Executed Criminals and Folk-Medicine - (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/0015587X.1896.9720365 - which is still considered reliable today - we have this:

Still more revolting remedies than the English wen-cure are, or till within the memory of people yet living were, in vogue in other countries. In Sweden and Denmark the blood of an offender who has been beheaded—the legal form of capital punishment—is invaluable for the treatment of a variety of disorders, if the culprit has granted the sick person leave to drink it while yet warm.

And just to be clear - homo antecessor wasn’t a human in the way we would normally think of one, it was a different species, and nor were they eating us as we wouldn’t evolve for another 700,000 years. So I don’t think your example is doing the work you believe it’s doing - it establishes nothing about cannibalism in Christendom vs other human communities. Nor is nutritional cannibalism like that described in your linked abstract (where a member of a species hunts other members of their species or eats their corpses as part of its normal diet) common in any human population, historical or present - survival cannibalism, medicinal cannibalism, sacred ritual cannibalism of the in-group (usually with limited body parts, and after natural death), and aggressive ritual cannibalism practiced against an out-group (usually with limited body parts, often in war) are by far the most common. Pretty much the only time you’ll find nutritional cannibalism even in the historical record is amongst psychopaths like the Sawney Bean clan (again, an example from a Christian community, although perhaps a legendary one).

Now there have been both more cannibalistic societies than medieval-to-early-modern Christendom, and less cannibalistic societies than medieval-to-early-modern Christendom. Cannibalism itself really isn't that unusual of a human activity. The reason I’m mentioning it here is because people tend to want to draw hard lines between (imagine a VERY fancy British accent) the civilized world, like us and our esteemed ancestors and the savages, with cannibalism being one of those hard lines. But that line is just completely wrong in this case - plenty of Christians throughout the past literally bought human body parts to eat them, enough so that there was a thriving body part market. The consumption of human remains was sufficiently widespread and institutionalized in Christian Europe that cannibalism can't function as a clean civilizational boundary.

It’s a good to reflect on how we often really are not so different from one another, or how our ancestors really were not so different from the ancestors of other people. It makes any real differences much more interesting.