The undeniable miracle at Fatima

[Crossless2.0]

This thread is really long now, so I'm sure someone already said it, but it sounds like bollocks to me.

Didn't some witnesses testify that they saw what could have been "noodly appendages" coming from the sun?  Hmmm.

---

Noodly appe--?!?  :   Have you lost your fucking mind? 

Look, Harry, you know why you won't find testimonies about "noodly appendages" coming from the sun? Because the witnesses to that undeniable miracle tried to tell the truth about the sun's noodly appendages! Shit like that is how you get disappeared in Catholic Land. You should have known better than to mention this. I'd like to help you, but I'm afraid it's way too late for you now. The albino assassin is probably already memorizing your details. Just -- run!

No one should expect the Spanish Inquisition . . . except for those who bring it on themselves!

[Mister Agenda]

Imagine this scenario. A psychic comes up to me and says "Three days from now your cousin who lives in Alabama and who's name starts with a letter B will be struck by lightening at 3pm." And exactly 3 days later I hear that my cousin Bob from Alabama got stuck by lightening at 3pm. There are 2 possibilities: this was some sort of insane coincidence, or the person who gave me this info is exactly what they claim to be. I don't believe in psychics, but if that happened to me, I think it would be more likely that this person actually does have some sort of supernatural ability to see into the future, than for something like that to have been a complete coincidence.  

This works the same way for me. I find it more unlikely that this sun thing was all a string of lucky coincidences and multiple crazy chance events that lined up perfectly, than for it to have been a supernatural phenomenon.

If you wanted your analogy to be good, you should have gone with a much less unlikely prediction; like someone claiming to be a psychic tells you that something unusual will happen to one of your relatives sometime around noon in three days. That would be a lot closer to the predictive element of the Fatima scenario.    

The fact that you broke down and separated literally every sentence I wrote, kind of defeats the whole point I'm making. The whole point is that all those things are applied together. It's the combination of all of those factors that would have made this a crazy, far fetched, freak of nature, impossible coincidence... if it was merely a coincidence.

If you don't want the individual points of your posts addressed individually, try not making so many in one post in the first place.

Thousands of people gathered to see if a miracle would occur, having no idea what it would be or that it would have anything to do with the sun.

So really, not like your analogy at all, where your psychic was ultra-specific.

The miracle was predicted to the hour, months in advance. To me, it sounds like a huge coincidence that on the same day, at the same time which was predicted months before, tens of thousands of people saw the sun moving, and had their clothes dried in seconds.

You had a bunch of people show up looking for a miracle and they found one in a common atmospheric optical phenomenon they ordinarily wouldn't have paid much attention to. Or maybe it was a vision sent by God; but what you haven't established is that what the people experienced was unlikely to be natural under those circumstances.

As an isolated incident where a few people out of nowhere said they saw the sun moving, I would believe the sundog theory.

Why? What is there about a few people seeing it that makes it less of a coincidence? Sun dogs and sun haloes are visible phenomena, fifty million people could see them if they're actually there and they look at the sun. And fifty million people who don't know anything about the phenomenon could be confused about the nature of what they were seeing.

Or that those people were just tired. Or that they just happened to have the same hallucination at the same time. But it's not an isolated incident. It was predicted to the hour. There were thousands of witnesses. Soaking clothes and puddles dried up in seconds.

Come on, even pabsta only claimed they dried in minutes.

You can say these were all a string of coincidences, if that sounds more likely to you. To me, that sounds more unlikely than the claim itself.

Again, in the only study I'm familiar with, sun dogs and sun haloes were visible from San Francisco 21 days in March in 2015. Why do you think it's so unlikely that those or some other atmospheric optical effect would be visible from that location on that day in 1917?

And collective hallucinations aren't a coincidence, they're more like a mental infection rapidly spread through the power of suggestion. Any competent stage mentalist can work a crowd and get them to believe they saw things that didn't actually happen or vice versa. There was a famous experiment where the subjects were asked to watch a film of a basketball game and track the score, and most of them didn't notice the person in a gorilla suit walking onto the court, just because they were focused on something else. Criminal evidence classes routinely stage events and have the class try to reconstruct events afterwards to illustrate the limited usefulness of eye witnesses; and such demonstrations also afford an opportunity to see the propensity of groups of people to arrive at a consensus about what they saw...and there's a good chance it will be incorrect. The best thing to do is separate them and question them individually and do NOT let them discuss what they saw, and see what is consistent between them. Give them an hour to talk about it and their stories will be much more similar, but the human tendency to exaggerate and embellish and fill in gaps with imagination will have started to take effect.

[CapnAwesome]

Catholics are so gullible. Children have vivid imaginations and if the sun danced then the whole world would have recorded it, not just a small part of religious Portugal. Also nobody owned a camera in that region? They were certainly around in 1917. You'd think that with that prophesy there would be one or two around. It's amazing how none of this stuff ever happens in the age of smart phones.

A small group of children are basically the least credible witnesses you can have, and there are a number of explanations for the 'sun dancing'. None of which are the sun actually dancing, which is what was predicted and would have been observed by the whole world. So the prophesy was actually a huge failure that somehow has been spun as being accurate. This is basically just an extension of when people get together in large groups and speak in tongues and have mass religious experiences. There is group pressure to believe what everyone is believing. It's happened tons in history. There is nothing special about Fatima. In the 1600s people in France swore a statue of the Virgin Mary changed the direction it was looking. Nobody believes that today. With the rise of skepticism and the demanding of actual proof it happens less and less.

[Nay_Sayer]

Imagine this scenario. A psychic comes up to me and says "Three days from now your cousin who lives in Alabama and who's name starts with a letter B will be struck by lightening at 3pm." And exactly 3 days later I hear that my cousin Bob from Alabama got stuck by lightening at 3pm. There are 2 possibilities: this was some sort of insane coincidence, or the person who gave me this info is exactly what they claim to be. I don't believe in psychics, but if that happened to me, I think it would be more likely that this person actually does have some sort of supernatural ability to see into the future, than for something like that to have been a complete coincidence.  

This works the same way for me. I find it more unlikely that this sun thing was all a string of lucky coincidences and multiple crazy chance events that lined up perfectly, than for it to have been a supernatural phenomenon.

If you wanted your analogy to be good, you should have gone with a much less unlikely prediction; like someone claiming to be a psychic tells you that something unusual will happen to one of your relatives sometime around noon in three days. That would be a lot closer to the predictive element of the Fatima scenario.     

The fact that you broke down and separated literally every sentence I wrote, kind of defeats the whole point I'm making. The whole point is that all those things are applied together. It's the combination of all of those factors that would have made this a crazy, far fetched, freak of nature, impossible coincidence... if it was merely a coincidence.

If you don't want the individual points of your posts addressed individually, try not making so many in one post in the first place.

Thousands of people gathered to see if a miracle would occur, having no idea what it would be or that it would have anything to do with the sun.

So really, not like your analogy at all, where your psychic was ultra-specific.

The miracle was predicted to the hour, months in advance. To me, it sounds like a huge coincidence that on the same day, at the same time which was predicted months before, tens of thousands of people saw the sun moving, and had their clothes dried in seconds.

You had a bunch of people show up looking for a miracle and they found one in a common atmospheric optical phenomenon they ordinarily wouldn't have paid much attention to. Or maybe it was a vision sent by God; but what you haven't established is that what the people experienced was unlikely to be natural under those circumstances.

As an isolated incident where a few people out of nowhere said they saw the sun moving, I would believe the sundog theory.

Why? What is there about a few people seeing it that makes it less of a coincidence? Sun dogs and sun haloes are visible phenomena, fifty million people could see them if they're actually there and they look at the sun. And fifty million people who don't know anything about the phenomenon could be confused about the nature of what they were seeing.

Or that those people were just tired. Or that they just happened to have the same hallucination at the same time. But it's not an isolated incident. It was predicted to the hour. There were thousands of witnesses. Soaking clothes and puddles dried up in seconds.

Come on, even pabsta only claimed they dried in minutes.  

You can say these were all a string of coincidences, if that sounds more likely to you. To me, that sounds more unlikely than the claim itself.

Again, in the only study I'm familiar with, sun dogs and sun haloes were visible from San Francisco 21 days in March in 2015. Why do you think it's so unlikely that those or some other atmospheric optical effect would be visible from that location on that day in 1917?

And collective hallucinations aren't a coincidence, they're more like a mental infection rapidly spread through the power of suggestion. Any competent stage mentalist can work a crowd and get them to believe they saw things that didn't actually happen or vice versa. There was a famous experiment where the subjects were asked to watch a film of a basketball game and track the score, and most of them didn't notice the person in a gorilla suit walking onto the court, just because they were focused on something else. Criminal evidence classes routinely stage events and have the class try to reconstruct events afterwards to illustrate the limited usefulness of eye witnesses; and such demonstrations also afford an opportunity to see the propensity of groups of people to arrive at a consensus about what they saw...and there's a good chance it will be incorrect. The best thing to do is separate them and question them individually and do NOT let them discuss what they saw, and see what is consistent between them. Give them an hour to talk about it and their stories will be much more similar, but the human tendency to exaggerate and embellish and fill in gaps with imagination will have started to take effect.

Come now, People have flawless recollection, Right CL?

[CapnAwesome]

So tens of thousands of people coming from all different parts of the country collaborated to fabricate this lie about seeing a moving sun, all before cell phones and the internet existed?

chwebel states, "not only did not all those present not see the phenomenon, but also there are considerable inconsistencies among witnesses as to what they did see". Schwebel also observes that there is no authentic photo of the solar phenomena claimed, "despite the presence of hundreds of reporters and photographers at the field" and one photo often presented as authentic is actually "a solar eclipse in another part of the world taken sometime before 1917"

So there are a few things:

A. It is a lie that everybody saw the phenomenon. It's now up to believers to explain the people who did not see it.
B. It is a lie that everybody who saw the phenomenon, saw the same thing. So now you have to explain why different people saw different things.

[Harry Nevis]

Didn't some witnesses testify that they saw what could have been "noodly appendages" coming from the sun?  Hmmm.

---

Noodly appe--?!?  :   Have you lost your fucking mind? 

Look, Harry, you know why you won't find testimonies about "noodly appendages" coming from the sun? Because the witnesses to that undeniable miracle tried to tell the truth about the sun's noodly appendages! Shit like that is how you get disappeared in Catholic Land. You should have known better than to mention this. I'd like to help you, but I'm afraid it's way too late for you now. The albino assassin is probably already memorizing your details. Just -- run!

No one should expect the Spanish Inquisition . . . except for those who bring it on themselves!

I'm sorry.  The party you are addressing is....busy at the moment....

(help me.)

[Cyberman]

A. It wasn't meant for everyone.

B. That proves how miraculous it was.

[WinterHold]

Just curious what atheists think of the miracle at Fatima in 1917? A quick summary of the facts:
 

• 3 young children claimed a "lady from heaven" appeared out of nowhere in a remote field in Portugal where they were watching their animals
  

They enjoyed smoking weed in their free time.
Fatima is an Arab name. "Fa ti ma". Not "Fatiiiiiiima".

[Jehanne]

Solar Eclipses foretell major life changes and events about to happen

This is a common interpretation found in astrological forecasts, which are themselves based upon coincidences and non-scientific beliefs in how celestial events control human behavior. A common qualification is that if the eclipse doesn’t foretell a change in your life it may foretell a change in that of your friends. This is a logically-flawed used of confirmation bias in which you prove a cause-and-effect relationship by ignoring failures and only consider successful forecasts. There is nothing other than human psychology that connects eclipses with future events in your life.

https://eclipse2017.nasa.gov/eclipse-misconceptions

The Wreck of the Titan: Or, Futility (originally called Futility) is an 1898 novella written by Morgan Robertson. The story features the fictional ocean liner Titan, which sinks in the North Atlantic after striking an iceberg. The Titan and its sinking have been noted to be very similar to the real-life passenger ship RMS Titanic, which sank fourteen years later. Following the sinking of the Titanic, the novel was reissued with some changes, particularly in the ship's gross tonnage.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wreck_...,_Futility

[Harry Nevis]

What happened to PBR?  I wonder if he gave up or grew up.