the Bible clearly states
The Bible clearly states that we must eat the body and drink the blood - see John 6 as I quoted above, as well as the Pauline epistle quoted by another used. How do you interpret that away to NOT require the Eucharist?
The only thing irrelevant was Claud's argument - for the simple fact that it wasn't so much an argument as a whine.
- a god dying and resurrecting is a pagan idea, does that mean Christianity is pagan? Of course not.
It does if the dying and rising god continues to do so over and over and over again. That's the whole point. Christ's sacrificial death and resurrection was punctiliar. It was never viewed by early Christians through the sort of "sacred time" lens which you implicitly demonstrated in your previous statement, and which was the the common way of thinking about Tammuz/Dumuzi and Osiris' yearly dyings and risings. Despite the extremely superficial detail of "a God dying and then coming to life", these pagan stories had no other similarity to that of Christ's death and resurrection. They differed in just about every other detail BUT the dying and rising part, and in those pagan myths, the dying and rising was by and large not even the primary event of interest in the myth-cycle.
So yes, there's quite a bit of difference between Christ and the dying-and-rising gods - integral storyline details, the whole "sacred time" issue, everything. Claud's argument, far from being profound, was merely profoundly ignorant of the subject of religious symbology.
The Bible clearly states that we must eat the body and drink the blood - see John 6 as I quoted above, as well as the Pauline epistle quoted by another used. How do you interpret that away to NOT require the Eucharist?
What I find profoundly ironic is that while Catholics love to quote John 6:51-56 in support of their error, they conveniently forget to also cite v. 6:63,
"It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life."
The words Jesus spoke were meant to be understood by his hearers in a figurative sense. They are spirit, and they are life. A spiritual understanding gives life as we believe on Him and "ingest" Him by faith (actually a very similar idea to that found in Jeremiah 15:16 - "Thy words were found, and I did eat them; and thy word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of mine heart: for I am called by thy name, O LORD God of hosts."). Having a fleshly, carnal understanding of Jesus' words "profiteth nothing". This is shown, too, in that those who became offended by His saying and departed were those who took His words woodenly literally - THEY (the people who thought He literally meant to eat His flesh and drink His blood) were the ones who had a carnal, fleshly understanding, THEY were the ones who demonstrated that they had never been called by the Father to come to Jesus to begin with (cf. vv. 64-65). The faithful disciples, in contrast, understood that the eternal life being offered was a result of Christ's WORDS (v. 68). It was believing on Christ's message of Messiahship and being the one God had given to His people to nourish their SPIRITUAL needs, that gave eternal life - as Peter understood.
Elsewhere, the Scripture gives no indication of any sort of understanding of the transubstantiative sense of the bread and wine. In Luke 22:18, in the very act of instituting the Lord's Supper, Jesus said, "For I say unto you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine, until the kingdom of God shall come." Jesus clearly says it was "fruit of the vine", and He gave it to them while He was yet living. If we are to take Catholicism literally on this, we have to believe that Jesus gave His disciples blood and flesh pertaining to His sacrificial death, when He hadn't even been crucified yet. They were eating His flesh as a re-presentation of a sacrifice which had not even occurred yet. And one which Jesus had clearly and specifically said was NOT His actual blood, and which He then said (v. 19) was "in remembrance of Him". Jesus outright TELLS them that the Lord's Supper was not anything more than a symbolic remembrance of what He was shortly going to do for them.
The other major place in the NT besides the Gospels where the Lord's Supper is dealt with is in I Corinthians 11. In this passage, again, Catholics like to pull a verse out of context (in this case v. 26 - "For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord's death till he come."), while ignoring the surrounding context and the lexical analysis. I've seen Catholic apologists point to this verse and argue that the act of "shewing" the Lord's death till He comes means that the act is occurring again and again in the transubstantiated Eucharist. Of course, this is not what "shew" (Gk. kataggelo) means. the words actually means "to proclaim, announce, report, or publish", and refers again to the act of remembrance (which Paul makes explicitly clear in vv. 24-25, where he again states that these were "in remembrance of" Christ's sacrifice - not a re-creation or "re-presentation" of it. The act of the Lord's Supper is exclamatory and evangelistic, not re-presentational.