The undeniable miracle at Fatima

[GUBU]

Just curious what atheists think of the hoax at Fatima in 1917? A quick summary of the lies
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Sorry for changing your post (the bolded bits are the changes), but better to go with accuracy than dogma, don't you think?

To be more thorough, we have a young girl who loves being the centre of attention, has a vivid imagination, is strong willed enough to be able to persuade two others that her "visions" are real and was described by her own mother as the kind of girl who pulled off stunts like that very often. So you've got the vessel.

On top of that you've in an area of a country which is on the cusp of modernism which has low schooling rates and still largely ignorant (which is a lot different than stupid, fyi). Added to that there is the biggest war in history going on at that point and the Spanish flu pandemic (the biggest single medical killing event in history) struck very shortly after. Now you've got the right atmosphere.

And finally you've got a church that's beginning to lose it's grip on the population (despite the lack of education, there were a lot of Portuguese around the turn of the 20th century abandoning the church) and desperate to create something, anything to maintain the grip. So here's the motive (not for the act in this case, young girl wanting attention was that, but for propagating and propagandising it).

The final nail in the coffin though is the "prophesies" themselves. They were not made until 1942 or 1943, thus meaning the first two were predicting events that had already happened, the girl's (now a cosseted nun) two cousins had died in 1919 of the flu, and Hitler (which the church still at this time saw as a saviour) had invaded the USSR. And the third "prophesy" is the other type of prediction, the strange vision full of vague and pretentious language you could make fit to any scenario.

So thus, why I call it a hoax. And that's even before we get into the various impossibilities with the "dancing sun", the fact that only one person ever saw or heard the apparition or how easily it is to scam people into thinking they saw something happen when it didn't (especially so when you tell people to look directly at the sun for long periods of time).