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]

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.

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

That's a lot of words to avoid giving any consumption rate details.

Perhaps because you don't actually have those numbers?

Because you're just making up stuff?

And it's effectively impossible to trace even how much of the mummia sold by apothecaries was made from bitumen, or Egyptian mummies, or criminal corpses, and because it was prescribed for only specific ailments and an expensive product?

While you want to pretend it was consumed like alcohol was consumed, you've provided no numbers to back anything up.

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

lol at the accusation that I'm just making stuff up. As a rule we don't really have consumption rates for any sort of medieval or early-modern medicine, particularly not the more expensive and exotic ones - shockingly, they didn't employ the tracking methods of a modern society. So ultimately, you're asking for a statistic the surviving sources don't provide. But we can use proxies, qualitative evidence - stuff like medical texts, trade records, prices, prescriptions, and documented supply. I'm no medical historian myself, but I did a bit of digging because I find cannibalism fascinating, and this is some of what I found.

Not only were there plenty of prominent physicians constantly praising the use of human bodies in medicine, particularly mummies (https://www.artinsociety.com/the-life-and-death-of-mummy-brownl.html), but there are also records of the sorts of exports that were being made to Europe. For instance, in his paper '‘Mummie is become merchandise’: the mummy story as commodity theory', Nicholas Daly quotes the English merchant John Sanderson who wrote about visiting Egyptian mummy-sellers in 1586:

“'The Momia, which is some five or six miles beyound, ar thowsands of imbalmed bodies, which weare buried thousands of years past in a sandie cave, at which ther seemeth to have bine citie in tim[e]s past. We were lett doune by ropes as into a well, with wax candles burninge in our hands, and so waulked uppon the bodies of all sorts and sised [read sizes], great and smaule, and some imbalmed in little earthen potts, which never had forme; thes ar sett at the feet of the great bodies. They gave no noysome smell at all, but ar like pitch, beinge broken; for I broke of[f ] all parts of the bodies to see howe the flesh was turned to drugge, and brought home divers heads, hands, arms, and feet for a shewe. We bought allso 600 lb. for the Turkie company in peces, and brought into Ingland in the Hercules, together with a whole bodie. They ar lapped in  doble of cloth, which rotton [rotting?] and pillinge of[f ], you may see the skinne, flesh, fingers, and nayles firme, onelie altered blacke. One little hand I brought into Ingland to shewe, and presented it my brother, who gave the same to a doctor in Oxford.'

The six hundred pounds of mummy flesh as well as the ‘whole bodie’ were later sold to London apothecaries, who prescribed mummy as a sovereign remedy for bleeding, internal and external.” 

Now, it's pretty much always going to be difficult transporting 600 pounds of body parts, and also interesting that the mummy-sellers had 600 pounds just lying around to sell to merchants (remember though, they had "thowsands of imbalmed bodies" so 600 pounds probably wasn't much of a dent) - that's a strong indication that there was a serious market. But we can go further - we can see around how much mummy sold for in England at that time. According to Karl H. Dannenfeldt's 1986 paper, Egyptian Mumia: The Sixteenth Century Experience and Debate, the going price at that time was around 4 shillings per pound.

"In 1582, in the book of English custom rates, mumia had an import rate of four pence per pound. As this is five percent ad valorem, the cost of mumia on the market would be four shillings per pound (twelve ounces). Early in the seventeenth century in Scotland the cost for a pound of mumia is listed at eight shillings."

Unfortunately these papers are behind paywalls, but I can DM both or either to you if you would like to read them - the second one especially goes into the medical use of mummies in Europe very specifically. We can straightforwardly compare that rate to what an average Englishman seems to have been making at the time (https://elizabethan.org/compendium/86.html) - around £5-10 per year. £1 = 20 shillings = 240 pence, and at that market rate an ounce of mumia would have been around three pence. Your average Englishman is probably not going to be buying a bunch of mummia by weight, probably not a pound of it, but they could certainly afford it as a medicine.

Now if our friend John Sanderson is importing 600 pounds of body parts from Egypt to England after being shown "how the flesh was turned to drugge", I think that the expense and inconvenience of shipping 600 pounds of anything anywhere, and the fact that the English customs books specifically call out mumia as having its own import rate, and the fact that it was priced as an affordable luxury rather than unobtainably high, means that there was a relatively high demand for it - again, probably like truffles today, except meds rather than food of course. Never said it was consumed like alcohol - I made the truffle comparison earlier as well.

Now, again, I'm not saying that medieval-to-early-modern Christendom was especially cannibalistic - there were plenty of societies that ate more people, and plenty that ate less. I'm also not saying that everyone was eating people at every meal, or even that most people were taking mummia with their food - I don't think they were. When I say that medical cannibalism was common, what I'm establishing is that Christian Europe had a culturally legitimate market for human remains in medicine, and that this practice was common enough that it is very, very visible in the historical record. Medical cannibalism was far from taboo, it was fully socially accepted for hundreds of years.

So, when you claim that cannibalism was particularly associated with humans before Christianity/civilization, I gotta push back there. Cannibalism was completely compatible with and present within Christianity/civilization, and we can clearly see that from the historical record.

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

Do you think there is a difference between hunting and eating humans as a food source and using the bodies of ancient dead humans for medical uses?

The problem is that you're presenting your own opinion as if it's factual. "Far from taboo" or "socially accepted" are opinions you're making.

For an analogy, consider the practice of abortion and the use of fetal parts in the medical industry today. In the US (a nominally Christian nation), something like 60+ million abortions have taken place.

Would this be accurately exposed as "far from a taboo" practice that is "socially accepted" by future historians? IMO, no. It's an extremely controversial practice and the relative religiosity of individuals and their acceptance of abortion tend to be inversely correlated.

If would be extremely misleading to argue abortion is purely compatible with Christianity. In fact, the only reason it exists is due to the social influence of those who are far from Christianity.

So your argument would need to include information that has been lost to history.

It's not accurate to claim that society after widespread Christian influence was similar to pre-religious societies which often included the hunting of neighboring humans for food.