Heck, if you're willing to posit that trasubstantiation actually takes place, it's not that far a leap to say that everyone ingests the same eternally renewing Body and Blood of Christ, over and over again.

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According to the literature in the bathroom at my in-laws....the Catholic Church belives this to be true today...not just as recently as 1965.

Maybe I misunderstand what you're saying.

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Actually, it's really more of a loaves and fishes thing.

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Did you just discover Frink?

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A and B don't add up. I'm assuming A takes into account that many people who are baptised catholic eventually eschew the religion once they are old enough to think for themselves.

Communion wafers are much smaller than Ritz crackers. I'm guessing 1/4-1/8 the size of one Ritz, and with less fat.

Catholics nowadays almost never drink the "blood". The priest will "transubstantiate" some wine and take a sip, but it's almost never given to the general public. Maybe they're running out of blood?

The average person sheds 18kg/40 lbs of skin in a lifetime (source: Human Anatomy, Marieb & Mallatt, PeArson Education 2003).

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I'm way too lazy to look it up, but I'm pretty sure communion wafers are a *lot* thinner than a ritz cracker.

So it's quite possible Jesus is only 250x larger than a blue whale.

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In 2001, Clarke claimed that the ratio of dead to living was 30:1, but I don't know whether this was a projection made when 2001 was written, or based on the time that it was written.

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I remember hearing that at one stage, there were enough relics of the cross floating around Europe to make a dozen of them. Noow we know why.

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Humans allegedly shed about 40 pounds of skin in their lifetime. I can't find out any facts on how much of that ends up in other peoples' food, though.

What always got me is this: if you can use anything as the host for communion, and the host "becomes" the flesh of Christ, why not use a cadaver? Wouldn't that essentially bring Jesus back to life into someone's body?

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We shed 1.5 million skin cells every hour with a new skin surface every 28 to 30 days or so.

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Wow, you truly are a gentleman of leisure.

Actually, catholics can (and often do) take the Eucharist at every mass, which would mean every week (or even everyday, for hardcore believers). My childhood memory going to the church was that roughly half of the congregation every week stood up to take communion. OTOH, as people have pointed out, nobody except the priest drank the wine. And of course, I don't know to what extent this is extrapolable to the last 2000 years.

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For people who take communion in my church (Methodist), the ritual is merely symbolic cannibalism. For Catholics, though, it's actual cannibalism. Cool. Thou art God.

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catholicism is so funny, they _really_ sit down and think some things out, and other things it seems like they ran with a whim on drugs.. but of course I guess it was the 60's.

I'm not religious, but if I was going to be I would go (back) to catholicism, if they would only say 'we sat down and thought about it and it makes best sense to us if...' instead of 'the holy ghost came to us and said'.

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This math is assuming each person were to receive only One communion in their lifetime?!

Don't most Catholics take up the cup Every week?

therefore we'd have to take
23,000,000,000 (the typical lifespan in years - 8) so for an easy number let's take 78 as the "typical" liespan and then subtract 8 *calculating* = 70...X56 weeks/year...

so we have 23,000,000,000 (70*56) = 90,160,000,000,000
so let's toss that into the equation and see where it brings us!

23,000,000,000 people
× 12 %
× 3920 communion
× 2000 years
= unGodly number here

(this moment of sheer stupidity has been tossed your way out of complete desperation to avoid thinking about homework-sorry to take it out on you)

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What did you have for breakfast today? Because I want some.

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I once heard that 75% of household dust is dead human skin cells. Now you just need numbers for how fast it accumulates.

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And to think I always thought regeneration in omnipotent beings was assumed. Stupid me.

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Your formula does not include the all powerful nature of God.

The formula should read:
23,000,000,000 people
× 12 %
× 1 communion
× 2000 years
= 5,520,000,000,000 servings

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

× 0.25 fl. oz.
= 10,781,250,000 gallons of blood

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

× 20 grams
= 243,390,340,000 pounds of flesh
= 121,695,170 tons of flesh
x (n=Alpha+Omega)=
Whatever the bible says it does...

This is the answer that the nuns always gave me (a recovering catholic) whenever I tried to introduce logic into the teachings of the Catholic Church.

God bless

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this begs the question: does transubstatiated flesh run the full digestive course?

if yes, there is a huge ammount of literally holy shit out there.
that also puts a new spin on the Pisschrist work.

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Now my question is, does Jesus have an excess of either flesh or blood? What's the normal ratio of blood:body in an adult male? If he's got extra blood, he may be regularly donating it - you could have a bit of Jesus in you.

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Hi
I saw this on BoingBoing, and thought you might be interested to know about another problem with the whole transubstantiation thing....

If, when you eat the wafer, it transforms into the flesh of Christ, then it's not the actual wafer you're eating, is it? it wouldn't matter what was in the wafer

So why the heck do they make gluten free communion wafers for people with allergies?
Could it be that they don't have *that* much faith that it really will turn into the flesh of Christ?

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