The wine in communion is of an extraordinarily low alcohol percentage. Several bottles of it would be required to get someone “drunk”. Its not Cabernet Sauvignon the priest is blessing.
I’m relieved to - lets go down the pub and forget all about it! xo
i think an aspirin on a regular basis is better for you than a glass of wine - when it comes to keeping the ticka- ticking
It is not the amount of alcohol it is what you value.
Basically the priest is endorsing the consuming of alcohol.
They don’t think it is alcohol. They think it is the blood of God. They really, generally, think its the blood of God. Just like Buddhists generally think that all dharmas are empty, that is how much most Christians who come from Christianities that celebrate the Eucharist believe that they are drinking something that is not truly alcohol.
Christianity teaches against the consumption of alcohol for the sake of getting altered.
Don’t you think this is even worse than consuming alcohol?
It is cannibalism.
Not particularly. No one in the congregation is generally believed to be God. If ‘He’ partook of Eucharist, perhaps then.
My understanding is God does not have blood and flesh. Aren’t they symbolically eating the flesh and blood of Jesus?
Well, they do not practice what they teach.
This is most likely when comes to so called “specialist”, whether they are doctors , lawyers , scientists , religion specialists and scholars , sometimes they are dead wrong , yet , due to blind faith and “respect” no one dare to voice out !
Especially , when you are in their compound , territory or “office” !
They will definitely chase you out if you disagrees with them .
Nobody wants to rock the boat an lose their job.
I understand your point.
This year I went to a Christmas Party. I was the only one who did not consume alcohol.
However, there was a Christmas pudding made with rum.
I consumed the pudding knowing that it contains alcohol.
Perhaps I broke the fifth precept.
However, I do not consider this is same as the priest consuming alcohol in front of many hundreds of people including young children.
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Yes if you’re a bhikkhu, for the Vinaya classes the 51st Pācittiya as an acittaka rule - one where the mere act is an offence and the bhikkhu’s knowledge, perception and intention are treated as irrelevant.
No if you’re a sāmaṇera, for the Khuddakapātha Commentary makes intention relevant in the case of the fifth of the ten precepts.
Probably not if you’re layperson. The texts don’t actually say so, but one wouldn’t expect a five-precept layperson to be required to hold to a more scrupulous standard than a ten-precept sāmaṇera.
https://dhammawheel.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=87&start=40#p450129
Alcohol, per say, isn’t looked at negatively in Christianity (of course, excessive use and abuse is), and it was only from the 19th century onwards that the temperance movement within Christianity, which advocated total abstinence, got going. A core part of the mass is based upon “the Last Supper”: the last meal Jesus had with his followers just before his arrest and crucifixion where, as was typical for his day, both bread and wine were part of the meal, and the gospels have him saying:
And he took bread, and gave thanks, and broke it, and gave to them, saying, This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me.
And in the same way He took the cup after they had eaten, saying, "This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in My blood.
So sharing bread and wine in this way in remembrance is pretty much what was asked there (though the practice here was that generally only bread, in communion wafers, was shared with the congregation, never the wine, which only the priest drank). Also I doubt many ordinary practicing Christians worry too much about theological questions of how symbolic or literal is the bread and wine becoming the body and blood (though I’m sure there are strongly held views by specialists in the various denominations); probably similar to how most ordinary people raised in Buddhist countries probably don’t get too excised over the controversial finer points of Buddhist doctrine 
.
Anyway, there is the theory that a lot of the historic consumption of alcohol in the West, e.g. watered down wine by the Romans and weak and watered down beers in medieval Europe etc., particularly as populations became more dense, was due to the need for a safe drinking source. Boiling water and the use of teas etc. seems to have been the alternative strategy particularly in East Asia, but tea didn’t arrive in Europe until the 17th century. Probably a lot safer to drink watered down and cheap beer than risk directly dealing with potentially contaminated water supply.
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If the point was the eat the flesh and blood of Jesus, in the sense of eating human flesh and drinking human blood, then Jesus would not have instituted the tradition in the way that it currently is. Instead, he would have had at himself with a knife and invited everyone to join the carnage.
With all due respect, no, it is simply you who do not know what you are talking about. Plenty of Christians live, on principle, completely alchohol-free lives, specifically and only because of religious prohibitions on its consumptions.
No one gets drunk at church, Catholic or Protestant. And its ridiculous that someone would think that. Perhaps that what the British told the Sri Lankans. that would be quite in-character as this is a well-established myth about Catholics, but it is just as much as lie in Sri Lanka as it is in Whitby, Ontario. For instance, my grandmother also told me that “the Catholics” get drunk every Sunday in church because that level of extreme anti-Catholic rhetoric was simply a part of her generation. As much as extreme anti-semetism used to be normalized in Europe before WWII etc.
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I think Bible is full of promoting consumption of alcohol.
Jesus converting water into the vine etc.
This is another example of what I was talking about before. Your various preconceptions of Christianity are not Christianity.
The story about Jesus and the water and wine is about intercession, not getting smashed. Jesus does not want to make the wine. He does it because his mother asks him. The intercession of the Theotokos.
- And when they wanted wine, the mother of Jesus saith unto him, They have no wine.
- Jesus saith unto her, Woman, what have I to do with thee? mine hour is not yet come.
- His mother saith unto the servants, Whatsoever he saith unto you, do it.
John 2:3-5
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I wouldn’t use the word “promoting”. It was just part of everyday life. The water to wine story described him turning water to wine when it ran short at a wedding (reluctantly performing a miracle at his mother’s insistence). I suppose the point of the story was that he could, rather like the story where he was supposed to have fed a huge crowd of people using just a few loaves of bread and fish.
The fact that it was an alcoholic drink was besides the point. This wasn’t promotion or endorsement. It was just another everyday item with no particularly positive or negative connotations (probably the general attitude to it within Judaism and later Christianity). I don’t think there’s anything in the bible that would encourage one to drink alcohol. However, I don’t think there’s anything that would particularly discourage one either (except for drunkenness and excessive use, I think there are some examples that do discourage that).
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This is my point. Alcoholism was there even when Buddha alive. He took some effort to eliminate this damaging everyday habits. But there is no any effort in Jesus to stop this.
Consuming alcohol is prohibited even in Koran.
Never before that I seen such severe Dunning-Kruger syndrome being so loudly advertised. You do not know what you are talking about. Open up the Book of Psalms (in fact, the entire OT is believed to be the ‘words’ of the pre-incarnated Jesus, a.k.a. “the Word of God”) if u want to hear Jesus talk about alcohol. If you are unwilling to familiarize yourself with even the basic tenents and texts of this religion, why do you feel qualified to spread lies about it?
Look up some Church Fathers if you want an early Christian notion of how drunkenness was seen. This kind of misinformation about Buddhism would never fly here, yet, routinely, people spread all sorts of misinformation and lies about Christianity here, pretending as if they have a decent grounding in the tradition, pretending at if they are qualified to say anything about it.
I don’t even think the OP has read any wikipedia articles on this subject matter that they feel very qualified to be proliferating on. I suppose because the OP is a Dhamma teacher?
What happens when you find a hole in your understanding of the Dhamma? Do you just improvise and make stuff up like you are doing here, pretending you understand?
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The teetotalitarianism is strong with this thread…
It’s also a very long thread; I find that the precept is about inebriation and lack of mental clarity, not about substances. I see some people opt out of alcohol use for this reason, above, but these are personal choices based on personal reflection. The precept is a call to mindfulness & investigation, not a call to mindless adherence.
Substance effects vary between people whether the substance is medicinal or not. Alcohol in and of itself as a chemical is no problem at all, it is ethically inert. The problem is not a lack of perfectly sustained ritual avoidance, nor a lack of perfectly sustained ritual morality. Inebriation is the problem.
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Someone can’t hurry down the Path at a faster pace due to having a fundamentalist black-&-white attitude towards Sila.
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