I agree. Imagine if Christ decided to be "fair" and become (no pun intended) the devil's advocate in this case, and consider his arguments as potentially right—for academic reasons! Part of satanic relativism is precisely in the assumption that all religions have some truth and therefore must be treated as equal.
Satan convinced Eve that God is a liar. He also convinced many throughout the history that Christ and His Church were a lie, and ultimately, that the Eucharist is a dead "symbol," a"memory." He did that by changing theology! That's why we have a crop of cultists and heretics all over the place.
(See above which I mean to address to stfassisi.)
I think neither of you has thought enough about Regensberg, about reason and faith.
I trust the Truth to be, self-disclosing. I trust the Logos, the Word.
Look at Popepipus the First's response. He reasserts Sola Scriptura and then pretty much throws out the entire enterprise of trying to understand one another's doctrines before disagreeing with them.
It seems to me that such a response offers a couple of lines of approach, one good, one bad.
The bad one is the "HOGWASH!" approach. This reminds me of a pro-Mao demonstration years ago in Honk Kong. The Maoists brandished their :little red books", the Sayings of Chairman Mao", and the Hong Kong police retorted by brandishing their manuals of the rules and regulations and yelling the name of the Police Cmmissioner. Well THAT brought peace and understanding, didn't it? We already know we disagree.
The good one is to try to present a sincere good will and to try to understand and to explain.
So shall we just yell, "Are too!", "Are not!" at each other? You think Dominic would hqve converted the innkeeper if he'd just said, "You're wrong -- wrongitty wrong wrong!" Don't you see that the Albigensians had a legitimate complaint about the luxurious clergy and the neglect of askesis -- even though they took it to disastrous extremes? You think he never said, "Well, you've got a point there ...."
Hosepipe, I think, demonstrates that he doesn't understand either what we teach about the Eucharist or what we think about the role of the persons of the Trinity in it. But I suspect that, like HarleyD, he doesn't get that a big part of the problem is what a "thing" "is" in the first case, and that if he wants his rebuttals to hit their target, it would help if he knew where the target was.
I think if he really knew where the target was, he might not want to shoot at it so much. So I think time spent on establishing communication and common vocabulary is time not wasted.
And, while it grieves me when the Protestant/Ockhamist/Voluntarianist ideas that God is utterly unreasonable (that there is no way human reason can "get" anything important about God) and that all we can do, once we are given Faith in Him, is try to work out (with the aid of the Spirit, to be sure) His incomprehensible rules and follow them, I think it's important and worthwhile if the disagreement is clearly seen to rest in questions about the Transcendence of God and the role of Reason -- about what it means to call IHS the Logos.
Gotta run.