coatta@cs.ubc.ca (Terry Coatta) (11/30/89)
J. Buehler writes: >Eventually, transubstantiation was expounded, when the philosophy of >Aristotle was re-discovered in Europe. And the Church started to think, >"hey, this fits in pretty well with my idea of the Sacrament." And >eventually, there was the "AHA! *That's* it! That sums up my >historical thinking on the matter *exactly*!" And so, implicitly, the Church acknowledges that the context of Aristotelian philosophy is a necessary part of the Faith. As Aristotelian philosophy is not, to my knowledge, taught as a standard component of Catholic religious education, and as the majority of so-called Catholics (myself included) either implicitly or explicitly reject it as a means of categorizing, explaining, etc. I'd say there is a substantial rift between common Catholic belief and Catholic doctrine. Am I making some unwarranted assumptions somewhere? If not, how can the Church ask that I accept as meaningful terms like ``substance'' or ``accident'' which simply do NOT have any meaning to me (they are symbols or sounds which signify nothing to me). Terry Coatta Dept. of Computer Science, UBC, Vancouver BC, Canada coatta@cs.ubc.ca `What I lack in intelligence, I more than compensate for with stupidity'