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I know. Without allegorizing that which is meant to be taken literally, a lot of doctrines just collapse under their own weight. Actually, I'm just trying to keep this thread at the top of my ping list because of a lot of the information that you provided here that I keep returning to.

BTW I just finished a discussion on another Catholic thread regarding Communion. I find it interesting that the explanation for their doctrine of Transubstantiation is Aristotelian philosophy of substance vs accidents [appearance], which is actually an early form of Gnosticism or Dualism --- the fact that something can appear to our senses to be one thing when it is really something else entirely.

Believers in this Aristotelian doctrine call that a "good thing" or a miracle from God, but I can't find any miracle from God that was one thing disguised as something else entirely. When Jesus healed people, they weren't still sick under the appearance of health, but they were healed in both substance and appearance. The facts on the outside reflected the facts on the inside.

The ability to perform this dualistic transubstantiation supposedly came from none other than "Peter in Rome", who we now know to have been the sorcerer Simon Magus, who was well versed in Greek literature, and no doubt Aristotle and his substance/appearance theory.

One wonders if Simon Magus and the priesthood descended from him were not performing such apparent magic tricks in Rome from their earliest days, and rather than really changing things from one substance into another, he would say to his followers that the substance has changed from one thing into another, it just appears to your senses as if it has not changed. I am transforming this sheep in front of you into a goat; it is now a goat under the appearance of still being a sheep. And the followers of Simon the magician bought it, just as Roman Catholics today buy into the same kind of Aristotelian magic regarding their Eucharist.