Recently on TikTok, someone tagged Catholic Answers in the comment section of a video featuring this quote from atheist Sam Harris:
If you wake up tomorrow morning thinking that saying a few Latin words over your pancakes is gonna turn them into the body of Elvis Presley, you have lost your mind. But if you think more or less the same thing about a cracker and the body of Jesus, you’re just a Catholic.
This to me, is the true horror of religion. It allows perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions what only lunatics could believe on their own.
Harris thinks he has demonstrated the lunacy of eucharistic belief by comparing it to a silly example of pancakes and Elvis. But here’s the problem: simply changing a few words does not a good comparison make. Not if there are other substantial differences.
For instance: Elvis never said anything (that we know of) about eating his flesh and drinking his blood. Jesus did, several times. Elvis never gave his fans what looked like bread and wine and told them, “This is my body” and “This is my blood.” (Again, as far as we know. I didn’t see the movie yet, so no spoilers.) Jesus did, to his closest followers, and then told him to repeat this in his memory.
Elvis never performed miracles in front of his fans or gave them the power to perform miracles themselves, changing their perspective on what’s possible. Again, Jesus did. And Elvis never claimed multiple times to be God, and never came back to life three days after being executed, thereby validating those claims and all the other ones he ever made. Jesus did all of that. (Or at least Christians believe that he did, which is what’s important if we’re judging whether they’re lunatics for believing in the Eucharist, too.)
And maybe most important: no one ever “woke up [one] morning” and just believed in the whole doctrine of the Eucharist in one fell swoop. No one comes to believe anything in that manner—except, as Harris correctly intuits, lunatics. Crazy people might wake up and believe in things for no reason. The doctrine of the Eucharist has been professed, studied, developed, and defended across a 2,000-year period dating back to before the Bible even existed. That’s a little more rigorous a thought process.
This argument is like saying, “If you wake up tomorrow morning thinking that putting toothpaste in your car is gonna make it run, you’re nuts. How is it any less nuts to think the same thing about gasoline?”
Okay, cool. I’ll remember that for the next dude I see in a parking lot with a tube of Crest and a weird look in his eye (don’t ask about the first time . . . that poor Maserati). But that’s got nothing to do with the second thing, which has decades of study and research and authority behind it that I can investigate for myself.