Apparitions from heaven???

[Jehanne]

You think thousands of people, even if that figure is accurate, reporting having seen the Sun literally flying around off its axis with no physical effects is more convincing than literally millions of people on the rest of the planet not seeing anything at all?

This miracle is even more remarkable than it says on the tin.

You need to understand that some individuals who were there disavowed any miraculous occurrences:

http://www.traditio.com/comment/com1410.htm

(Note that the above is a Catholic website!)

[emjay]

CL, you can read Portuguese, right?
Here's the news story written shortly after:
http://www.deuslovult.org/2009/05/19/mil...-o-seculo/

After hours in the scorching sun, some people claimed to have seen a wobble.
Not your average scorching sun, one of those that comes after some heavy raining (astronomers favorite time to peer through their telescopes, it's when rain forces dust particles to fall down and the atmosphere is clear).
Raining meant that the ground was wet.
Scorching sun evaporates water.
Have you ever seen the refraction of light on a moving column of air?.. A mirage...

Oh right, yeah... is that a similar thing (or the same thing) to how it always looks like everything's wobbling when you see videos of a desert etc, as if it's like hot air currents coming up from the ground?

[Cyberman]

Yeah, I saw that when I researched this stuff before. Even people on the ground weren't convinced, or saw nothing at all. They were there; they ought to know.

[GrandizerII]

That's the story, yes. How was the rest of the Solar System not affected? Why did nobody outside this one tiny village not notice anything? You can see the effects of the Sun's apparent diurnal motion every day. Have the Sun nipping about the sky off its axis and more than half the planet is going to spot something odd, even if everything else is equal.

Because it was a visual miracle for the people who were gathered at that spot. It wasn't supposed to actually have effects in the solar system, or to be seen by everyone in the world.  

The 3 children had been claiming to be seeing and speaking with the Virgin Mary for quite some time. Nobody in the town believed them. So Mary said she'd do something on October 13 at 1:00pm (I think that was the time she said) at that exact spot to show people that they were not lying. So the kids got the word out there that something would happen at that spot at that time. And tens of thousands of people came and gathered there that day to see.

Way more than 3 children in the village where I hail from in my homecountry saw the Virgin Mary, and I was in that village at the time. Worse, I was there with those kids when it apparently happened. And I didn't see her. I suspect it was a stranger nun they saw who came from a faraway village to visit the principal church (Orthodox) in our village. At the time, so-called icon oil-dripping miracles were occurring at the church, and people from all over were visiting it. And I did see a few nuns around then.

[Catholic_Lady]

You think thousands of people, even if that figure is accurate, reporting having seen the Sun literally flying around off its axis with no physical effects is more convincing than literally millions of people on the rest of the planet not seeing anything at all?

my bold

They weren't supposed to. That's why the kids were told to have people come to that spot.

[Cyberman]

Then why fling the Sun around like a ping-pong ball? Was "God" blinding the rest of the planet to the shifting star?

[Catholic_Lady]

It was the actual sun moving, though without disrupting the solar system, and with only being visible to the 50k+ people gathered at that spot. The point of it was to show the town that the children were indeed telling the truth. So it had no effect on the world or on everyone else who was not there.

I just find it very unlikely that tens of thousands of people had the same hallucination at the same time, as predicted by 3 kids. Not everyone there were Catholics who believed the kids and who actually expected to see something. Also, the kids didn't say it would have anything to do with the sun... just that something would happen, but they had no idea what it would be.

The "kids" never predicted the so-called "miracle"; your history is extremely poor.  What they predicted was a miracle, not necessarily one having to do with the Sun; in fact, Lucia never mentioned the Sun prior to the October 13, 1917 event.  Also, the kiddos made other claims, such as being visited by an angel who gave them a consecrated host:

Um, that's exactly what I said. Look at the blue.

[Angrboda]

The 3 children had been claiming to be seeing and speaking with the Virgin Mary for quite some time. Nobody in the town believed them. So Mary said she'd do something on October 13 at 1:00pm (I think that was the time she said) at that exact spot to show people that they were not lying. So the kids got the word out there that something would happen at that spot at that time. And tens of thousands of people came and gathered there that day to see.

The children were obviously under the influence of Satan.

[emjay]

Yeah, how can you know it wasn't Satan who moved the sun?

[Catholic_Lady]

This site actually addresses the fact that out of the thousands who claimed to have seen the sun move in zig zags, there were some who actually didn't see anything at all... and it actually only serves to further support the notion that it was a miracle and not some sort of natural sun effect:

http://www.markmallett.com/blog/debunkin...-skeptics/