The fanatical members of the evangelical Christian Right hate his guts because he has exposed them and their agenda as they should be exposed. He has done so in his book entitled “American Fascists”. A fascinating and daring exposure.

I,for one,have admired what he has written sofar;and I must admit that I have become addicted to his ways of structuring his essays/columns. I take my time to read them and sometimes I study them,depending on the topic he writes about and the degree of interest I have in the topic. If this is not called addiction,I just do not know what is. Perhaps,just perhaps,because I am a scientist by formal education,training and experiences I have found the writings of Chris Hedges so admirable and fascinating,indeed.

The doctrine of transubstantiation, discussed above, depends on its conception of substance which, I was arguing, is an idea so alien to the language of natural science that the scientist, qua scientist, has nothing to say about it to its believers. In the paragraph below, C. S. Peirce explains this with admirable lucidity:

Substantial form: a form which constitutes a nature, i.e. a species or genus. Thus, the accidental form of a musician is music; but his substantial form is the rational soul which makes him a man. When men’s thoughts became turned from theology to the investigation of physics, those who were animated by the new spirit found themselves confronted with objections based upon allegations of substantial forms. That these substantial forms, so used, were merely a hindrance to the progress of science, was quite plain to them. But the objections were urged with a logical accuracy, born of centuries of study, with which the new men were utterly incapable of coping. Their proper course would have been quietly to pursue their own inquiries, and leave the theologians to square their results with philosophy as best they could. But circumstances did not permit this. The theologians had the popular intelligence and the arm of power on their side; and, when an apparent opposition arose, they naturally exerted themselves to put it down. Thus, the innovators were led to protest against these senseless and harmful substantial forms; and they had to formulate their objections to them — a business for which they were entirely unfitted. But since the discoveries of the physicists were plainly adding to man’s knowledge and power, while their antagonists were simply obstructive, the former soon carried the day in the general opinion of mankind. The history proves that there was something vicious about the theological application of substantial forms; but it in no degree goes to show that the physicists accurately defined the objection to that application. In reviewing the arguments at the present day, when the position of the mechanical philosophers is becoming almost as obsolete as that of the scholastic doctors, we first note that when the new men denied that the substantial forms were “entities,” what they really had in mind was that those forms had not such a mode of being as would confer upon them the power dynamical to react upon things. The Scotists, for it was they upon whom, as being in possession of the universities, the brunt of the battle fell, had in fact never called the substantial forms “entities,” a word sounding like a Scotistic term, but in fact the mere caricature of such a term. But had they used the word, nothing more innocent than the only meaning it could bear for them could be imagined. To call a form an “entity” could hardly mean more than to call it an abstraction. If the distinction of matter and form could have any value at all, it was the substantial forms that were, properly speaking, forms. If the Scotists could really specify any natural class, say man — and physics was at that time in no condition to raise any just doubt upon that score — then they were perfectly justified in giving a name to the intelligible characteristic of that class, and that was all the substantial form made any pretension to being. But the Scotists were guilty of two faults. The first — great enough, certainly, but relatively inconsiderable — was often referred to, though not distinctly analyzed and brought home to them. It was that they were utterly uncritical in accepting classes as natural, and seemed to think that ordinary language was a sufficient guarantee in the matter. Their other and principal fault, which may with justice be called a sin, since it involved a certain moral delinquency, was that they set up their idle logical distinctions as precluding all physical inquiry. The physicists and Scotists, being intent upon widely discrepant purposes, could not understand one another. There was a tolerably good excuse for the physicist, since the intention of the Scotist was of an abstract and technical kind, not easily understood. But there was no other excuse for the Scotist than that he was so drugged with his metaphysics that ordinary human needs had lost all appeal to him. All through the eighteenth century and a large part of the nineteenth, exclamations against the monstrousness of the scholastic dogma that substantial forms were entities continued to be part of the stock-in-trade of metaphysicians, and it accorded with the prevalent nominalism. But nowadays, when it is clearly seen that physical science gives its assent much more to scholastic realism (limited closely to its formal statement) than it does to nominalism, a view of the history more like that here put forward is beginning to prevail.

From Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, The Macmillan Co., New York, vol. 2, pp. 50-55 (1902). Reprinted in C. S. Peirce Collected Works, 6.361.

Of course, the non-theologian who believes in transubstantiation may have little or no clue as to its metaphysical underpinnings. They believe, but without much understanding of the doctrine in which they believe. That may seem a bit hard to understand for the rest of us. My best guess is that what they are believing is the authority of the Magisterium from which they’ve learned that doctrine (so far as they have learned of it). But that’s not for me to say; and I know that I don’t have any argument or evidence that would dissuade them from their belief, however that may be.

There’s a perfect analogy at

http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=851

(he also makes the connection with Chris Comer’s case)