Transubstantiation
Transubstantiation is the (largely Catholic) tenet that when a communion wafer is appropriately blessed it literally becomes the body of Christ (and is now called the "host"). This tenet has led many, Christians among them, to ridicule Catholicism. However, the issue is not so simple and in misreading the Catholic position, these Christians undermine their own position.
I'm going to define some existing English words in a special way. "Absurd" will refer to assertions that are unfalsifiable. I don't care if they are true or not. "Silly" will refer to claims of truth that are falsifiable and are falsified under experiment but that are still asserted. Now, the usual attack on transubstantiation is that it is a Silly assertion -- obviously we can examine the host and determine that it is in fact still bread and not flesh.
Catholics, however, are dead serious. They are not silly. What's going wrong is that when they say that the host is "literally" or "really" the body of Christ, they are in fact using the terms "really" and "literally" in ways that are completely unlike the way we would normally use these terms. The Catholic assertion is that the host is in every material way still bread but that it acquires a spiritual attribute (its "essence") that makes it the body of Christ in an undetectable but much more important way than its material attributes (its "accidents" in official terms). This is unfalsifiable by definition -- they assert that no material test could possibly uncover this essence. So the real Catholic claim for transubstantiation is in fact Absurd and not Silly.
Of course, another possible fact that might be derived from the tenet of transubstantiation is that the host is materially the body of Christ but that Christ was in fact made of bread. This turns out to be unfalsifiable -- it is not Silly like the naive reading of transubstantiation. It's Absurd but has as much going for it as the official line.
Now, the Silliness of transubstantiation is often wielded by Christians-Who-Are-Not-Catholics to point out how wacky Catholicism is, but the actual tenet is only Absurd. In being Absurd it is no more unlikely than any other Christian tenet, all unfalsifiable. And thus the mine is undered.
I'm going to define some existing English words in a special way. "Absurd" will refer to assertions that are unfalsifiable. I don't care if they are true or not. "Silly" will refer to claims of truth that are falsifiable and are falsified under experiment but that are still asserted. Now, the usual attack on transubstantiation is that it is a Silly assertion -- obviously we can examine the host and determine that it is in fact still bread and not flesh.
Catholics, however, are dead serious. They are not silly. What's going wrong is that when they say that the host is "literally" or "really" the body of Christ, they are in fact using the terms "really" and "literally" in ways that are completely unlike the way we would normally use these terms. The Catholic assertion is that the host is in every material way still bread but that it acquires a spiritual attribute (its "essence") that makes it the body of Christ in an undetectable but much more important way than its material attributes (its "accidents" in official terms). This is unfalsifiable by definition -- they assert that no material test could possibly uncover this essence. So the real Catholic claim for transubstantiation is in fact Absurd and not Silly.
Of course, another possible fact that might be derived from the tenet of transubstantiation is that the host is materially the body of Christ but that Christ was in fact made of bread. This turns out to be unfalsifiable -- it is not Silly like the naive reading of transubstantiation. It's Absurd but has as much going for it as the official line.
Now, the Silliness of transubstantiation is often wielded by Christians-Who-Are-Not-Catholics to point out how wacky Catholicism is, but the actual tenet is only Absurd. In being Absurd it is no more unlikely than any other Christian tenet, all unfalsifiable. And thus the mine is undered.