The undeniable miracle at Fatima

[downbeatplumb]

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

Maybe he has a life.

[pabsta]

As someone who doesn't appear to believe in the incorruptibles, and given this phenomenon only occurs with devout Catholics, the question you should be asking yourself is how even a single incorrupt body could exist.

That is a question for science, not religion.  By not doing what I asked you to do -- that is, to set up a proper examination where religious bias cannot interfere -- you are making it rather difficult to properly answer that question.

It completely defies science no matter who's incorrupt body we are speaking about. They are on display all over Europe for you to go see.

 
No, it does not "completely [defy] science."  It completely avoids science.  I also have no interest in looking at bodies on display unless it's for the purpose of being an observer at a medical/biochemical experiment on those bodies, and somehow I doubt the custodians of the bodies would permit that to happen.

There are also "incorruptible bodies" in Buddhism, by the way.  Whatever they really are, they aren't unique to Catholicism.  Get over yourselves.

It appears to me you are just making excuses for not looking into this phenomena.

There are no incorruptibles in Buddhism or any other so-called religion. Every time they have been found over the last 2000 years (I recall reading there are about 250 of them), they have all been found to be devout Catholics who have not been embalmed. You can stay there at your keyboard and remain bitter for the rest of your life, or you can get out and take a vacation and look into these things. No one is going to do the work for you or pay for your plane ticket - it's up to you.

[Catholic_Lady]

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.

Perhaps it sounds likely to you that this was a sun dog/sun hole that happened to magically fall on the same day and time as predicted months before hand, and mass hallucination of the same thing at the same time (even though nothing about the sun was even expected), along with clothes and puddles drying up impossibly fast. It doesn't sound likely to me at all. I think it sounds extremely far fetched. 

I take pride in being honest with myself and in being objective. So the accusations of some people here (not you Agenda) that I'm simply making myself believe because I am desperate to do so comes very unappreciated.

[Minimalist]

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

Maybe he has a life.

Unlikely.

[pabsta]

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?

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It was a visionary thing caused by a supernatural phenomenon - a miracle. Not caused by optical illusion or mental illness/delusion.

No, that is not what we are arguing.

10s of thousands did show up sure. But thousands and thousands of people go to Vegas to see Penn and Teller catch a bullet in their mouth or saw a lady in half. Most Penn and Teller fans know it is just an illusion, but many also think they really are defying science, but they admit themselves they are not. 

A few were in on it sure, and 10s of thousand of gullible people merely wanted to believe it. Again there are millions worldwide who believe all sorts of claims you may not buy yourself. Vampires, Big Foot, Loc Ness, chupacabra(sp).

Now again, if you do your research you are cherry picking because not all of the people that showed up were buying it. Out of those 10s of thousands I doubt seriously it was 100% all accepting it. 

This is really no different than knowing that a long time ago most of the world's population falsely believed the earth was flat.

Yes, lots of people showed up, so? Lots of people go into a Mosque and think Allah is real, how is it you dont if it is all a numbers and popularity game?

I am sorry you bought it but again, it still amounts to you merely wanting to believe it. The sun in reality does not behave like the claimants claimed.

Dont just read the apologists part of this article, go down to the "Critics" section and read that too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_of_the_Sun

Brian 37,

You admit tens of thousands showed up. They wouldn't have gone there if the children had not mentioned the miracle 3 months earlier. Then thousands of testimonials confirm they all saw something at the SAME time. It's embarrassing that you are trying to equate that to individual people claiming they saw Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster. And you're not going to convince anyone that something just HAPPENED to occur at the same time and location the children stated, but that was just coincidental. Yeah right.

You and others in this discussion have also tried to claim that other people who showed up at Fatima that day didn't see with the others saw. READ the testimonials - many people were asked if they knew of anyone else who was present that didn't see anything. ALL ANSWERS to this question were NO. Saying other people there didn't see the same thing is a false claim that the atheists love to throw out there and it is baseless. Rather, the book "Meet the Witnesses" confirms otherwise.

The text under the critics section of the Wikipedia article is EMBARRASSING. The writer actually tries to make excuses for what could have happened with the sun and clouds that day (admitting something happened), and completely fails to take into account that all testimonials unanimously confirmed that everyone's clothes and the ground dried within minutes which CONFIRMS that SOMETHING DID HAPPEN WITH THE SUN. This completely lays to waste the entire critics section.


The  atheist reasoning in this forum is getting more and more pathetic as the days pass.

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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?

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Again, you are desperate to believe the story put out by the church.  You do understand that in any fish story the fish always gets bigger, right?
Who counted the crowd, btw?  Donald Trump?  We know what his ability to judge a crowd size is.  I doubt they sold tickets.

Story put out by the Church? The story was initially put out by MULTIPLE NEWSPAPERS which confirmed an incident happened pertaining to the sun. Those newspapers at the time were controlled by atheist revolutionists who took over the country seven years earlier. Do you think they REALLY wanted to admit the incident? Secondly, the story was then put out by the PEOPLE of Portugal. It was not until 13 years of research that the Catholic Church publicly confirmed it.

As for how many were at Fatima that day, it is irrelevant. Whether it was 10,000 or 100,000, if you have that many testimonials, then you know SOMETHING happened.

[Minimalist]

Yes, something happened.  Dipshit jesus freaks acted like assholes.  Something that is frightfully common.  Grow up, moron.  There are no fucking miracles.

[pabsta]

A visionary thing that caused puddles and wet clothes to dry? What is this, Superman's heat vision?

A visionary miracle, which miraculously, also caused clothes and puddles to dry... as was told by thousands of witnesses.

You are right Catholic lady. Though I've come to realize that atheists simply don't except testimony from witnesses unless it gives them a cozy feeling. That's why the books in the public schools only tell half of what went on in history.

Hopefully I'll never have to sit on a jury with atheists who close their eyes to testimonies from people, no matter how many. A crowded bank watches an armed robbery take place and all ID the man who did it? Sorry, the man is innocent because a mass fear overtook all of the witnesses. Or better yet, the robbery never happened at all. I feel like I just stepped into an asylum coming to this forum.

[Harry Nevis]

That is a question for science, not religion.  By not doing what I asked you to do -- that is, to set up a proper examination where religious bias cannot interfere -- you are making it rather difficult to properly answer that question.

 
No, it does not "completely [defy] science."  It completely avoids science.  I also have no interest in looking at bodies on display unless it's for the purpose of being an observer at a medical/biochemical experiment on those bodies, and somehow I doubt the custodians of the bodies would permit that to happen.

There are also "incorruptible bodies" in Buddhism, by the way.  Whatever they really are, they aren't unique to Catholicism.  Get over yourselves.

It appears to me you are just making excuses for not looking into this phenomena.

There are no incorruptibles in Buddhism or any other so-called religion. Every time they have been found over the last 2000 years (I recall reading there are about 250 of them), they have all been found to be devout Catholics who have not been embalmed. You can stay there at your keyboard and remain bitter for the rest of your life, or you can get out and take a vacation and look into these things. No one is going to do the work for you or pay for your plane ticket - it's up to you.

You recall nothing of the sort.  You're lying out of you ass.

So, if I go to Europe, they'll let me examine the bodies?  Or do you think just looking from a distance will tell for sure that they haven't been doctored up to look good?  Of course not.  Just like you, there is nothing to go on but blinded believer's bullshit stories.  You're really pathetic.

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Perhaps it sounds likely to you that this was a sun dog/sun hole that happened to magically fall on the same day and time as predicted months before hand, and mass hallucination of the same thing at the same time (even though nothing about the sun was even expected), along with clothes and puddles drying up impossibly fast. It doesn't sound likely to me at all. I think it sounds extremely far fetched. 

I take pride in being honest with myself and in being objective. So the accusations of some people here (not you Agenda) that I'm simply making myself believe because I am desperate to do so comes very unappreciated.

Objective, in the Catholic sense?  Because your beliefs are not objective.

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A visionary miracle, which miraculously, also caused clothes and puddles to dry... as was told by thousands of witnesses.

You are right Catholic lady. Though I've come to realize that atheists simply don't except testimony from witnesses unless it gives them a cozy feeling. That's why the books in the public schools only tell half of what went on in history.

Hopefully I'll never have to sit on a jury with atheists who close their eyes to testimonies from people, no matter how many. A crowded bank watches an armed robbery take place and all ID the man who did it? Sorry, the man is innocent because a mass fear overtook all of the witnesses. Or better yet, the robbery never happened at all. I feel like I just stepped into an asylum coming to this forum.

Fuck off, asshole.  You just feel like it's an asylum because no one ever taught you what rational, critical thinking is.

First cut is the deepest.

[pabsta]

As someone who doesn't appear to believe in the incorruptibles, and given this phenomenon only occurs with devout Catholics, the question you should be asking yourself is how even a single incorrupt body could exist.

The phenomenon certainly is NOT confined to Catholics. There are obvious natural explanations, including secret mummification, which the RCC has been known to do; and climate and soil conditions.

It completely defies science no matter who's incorrupt body we are speaking about. They are on display all over Europe for you to go see. I am not the one having a problem understanding and believing in them, so it is up to you to go and see them. Next time you schedule a vacation, make it in Europe so you can go see them.

There are hundreds of naturally well-preserved human corpses in the world, if not thousands. Scientists seem not to have gotten the memo that they defy science at all, let alone completely.

Mr. Agenda,

You have obviously done ZERO research on incorruptibles. Preserved bodies discovered over the centuries fall under 2 categories: accidentally preserved (i.e. through radioactivity or being buried in sand) or intentionally preserved (through some type of embalming). In BOTH cases, these bodies are dark brown, distorted, rigid, shriveled up like a piece of jerky, and have a bad odor as you would expect. The examples you give fall under one of these two categories.

The incorruptibles on the other hand do not fall under either category - they are not embalmed. Yet they are LIFELIKE, flexible, have flowing blood, and don't have a bad odor. This after years or even centuries underground, and even buried in proximity to other bodies that are not incorrupt. Every time one of these incorruptibles has been found, it has been determined that person was a devout Catholic. If you disagree with me, show me even ONE photo of a lifelike incorruptible that is not a Catholic. You will not find one.

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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.

I can't speak for everyone but I'm not saying there was a string of coincidences.  Watch the video I posted, people are already convinced at what is going to happen and you can't tell them otherwise.

As Catholic lady stated, the people who arrived in Fatima that day were only told that a miracle would happen "to make the people believe". They had no idea it had anything to do with the sun. So they obviously weren't "already convinced on what was going to happen".

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Maybe I missed this thread, but the so-called "miracle" was LATE, by 20 minutes or so!  It had been raining all morning, and around 1:30 local time, people started getting antsy.  Lucia, seeing the clouds starting to clear, started screaming, "Look at the Sun, look at the Sun!!!"  The crowd complied, and they saw what they wanted to see; HOWEVER, some individuals there, believers included, disavowed any supernatural occurrences of any kind!!

So if the miracle happened at 12 noon you would believe it, but if it happened at 12:20 that invalidates all the testimonials and we can disregard the whole thing? You crack me up.

"They saw what they wanted to see"? As previously posted, no one knew what was going to happen that day - they were just told it would be a miracle. Funny, all the testimonials agree the same thing happened!

And there we have another baseless claim that some people there didn't see anything. The testimonials say the opposite.

[vorlon13]

"Undeniable miracle at Fatima"

OK, are the folks asserting this view acting accordingly then? That is; are they militant (or even more stringent than that) in their lack of tolerance for other faiths now, they are PROVEN false after all. Do they advocate loudly for adoption of an entirely Catholic government and want the country to amend the Constitution to recognize the Pope as the ultimate authority for all matters religious and secular ??

Time to convert the Jews, at gunpoint if necessary, and if they won't, let them PAY for murdering Jesus.

Lutheranism is now revealed as an especially false religion, enforce Martin Luther's excommunication with the full might of the US military everywhere ??

Purify, with His Holy Flame, all the abortion providers, women who've had one and all the clinics !!

Burn every copy of Baby Doll, and any surviving cast/crew members that are left get crucified.

Burn any McDonalds that serves meat during Lent.

{I could go on for a while, you get the idea}


So, why aren't we seeing this? What's wrong with the Believers? In fact, they aren't Believers anymore, they KNOW. Shouldn't they act like they've won ??