(January 24, 2017 at 1:22 pm)sneroul the thinker Wrote: OK I see your arguments are good so far perhaps i should give a little more detail on it. well that would be hard since it was described in many diffrent even contradictory ways but they seem to involve spinning and the sun falling,sun dogs are stationary though so that does not explain the dancing although it could have only existed in the observer's minds,wikipedia says that mass hysteria is unlikely although 3 other websites disagreed with it. never the less the catholic church says its worthy of belief but I am not sure of how high there skeptism is. There are some photos of it online I am not very good with black and white photos so maby some of you can analise them for me please.
The dancing, spinning sun reports came almost exclusively from a Catholic Priest, Father John de Marchi, interviewing witnesses years later. Not too biased, nope, not at all...
The effects are most likely a combination of several things. Again, remember, the vast majority of the people there were Catholics already expecting to see a miracle. Their minds were susceptible to anything from outright hallucination, to misinterpretations of natural phenomena, to being convinced by the masses around them that they saw something they really didn't. The human mind is known to be susceptible to all these.
But you seem to be missing another point.
There is no need to invoke any kind of supernatural explanation, if there are possible, more likely, natural explanations.
You'd believe if you just opened your heart" is a terrible argument for religion. It's basically saying, "If you bias yourself enough, you can convince yourself that this is true." If religion were true, people wouldn't need faith to believe it -- it would be supported by good evidence.
