Fatima: Did 70,000 people witness a miracle?

bassplayer142

Interesting story. Not that I believe this, but has anyone thought of the influence of some kind of airborn drug that caused a mixture of suggestion and hallucination. I doubt it, but it is worth thinking about.

baywax

Could be... remember that Hieronymus Bosch and his entire village were under the spell of a lysergic acid (LSD) trip because of the rust growing on their rye crops. In fact the spores from the rust could have infiltrated everyone's blood stream even if they didn't eat the bread.

Here's a detail of a painting that is thought to be influenced by the rust (LSD) by Bosch.

Max Faust

With all due respect, but this sounds like an urban myth. Although ergot poisoning is a well-documented phenomenon, I fail to see how it can take on that kind of apocalyptic proportions.

Do you have any link to any kind of material on this?

As for the OP... and all y'all other true believers... *facepalm*.

DaveC426913

???

So... in the same post you let us know that you think the miracle was not a miracle at all, that it has some more plausible explanation - and then you outright dismiss an explanation offered?

Ivan Seeking

Are you suggesting that to ask a question and present the relevant information makes me a true believer? If so, technically, your post merits a penalty for making a false claim.

MotoH

Only the people there know what they saw, and it is hard for us on the outside, to fully understand what happened no matter how documented a case may be, it is just one of those "you had to be there" kind of things.

No one can believe me when I told them what I felt during a Eucharistic Adoration, but does that make it false because someone else can not explain what happened? No it does not.

Max Faust

Basically, yes.

I am eagerly awaiting a link to some study which shows how ergot poisoning can happen on a mass scale, but in the meantime I am happy with whatever ad hominem critique I may be gathering for my drug-related skepticism. It doesn't matter. I *know* that this is not the way LSD works.

MotoH

This is the supposed 1950s LSD "attack" by the CIA on a small french village. clicky

The article is crappy at best, but it is the only one I could find on it. In the end the CIA didn't do it, but it was something wrong with the crops.

Max Faust

Oh they most definitely did!!!

I know about that one. It was a part of the MKULTRA program. They did similar things in the US as well, both with troops and with civilians. They probably still do.

MotoH

I suppose you wear a tinfoil hat?

Max Faust

Nope. Tinfoil doesn't look good with my complexion.

Look, I am not trying to exchange one crazy idea for another. If you can vapourise LSD in order to distribute it through the air, you can probably intoxicate a large number of people simultaneously, but this would have to be very technical and very deliberate, and the outcome of such an act would be highly unpredictable (although it is fair to assume that the subjects would be greatly incapacitated as soldiers, which is why the CIA was interested in it in the first place, and made it part of their MKULTRA - click it! - program).

But we are going off topic. My point is that a spontaneous event of mass ergot poisoning cannot explain any kind of mass simultaneous experience, and if nothing else than for the simple reason that LSD cannot "induce" anything into your psyche that wasn't already there (which is why all LSD experiments show a subjective and highly variable response pattern to the drug).

So, in conclusion: I don't buy either the "miracle" or the "LSD" idea.

DaveC426913

OK, I can accept that. Doubting it to be a miracle doesn't automatically mean one must accept the next explanation that comes along.

Max Faust

I am uncomfortable with the concept of *miracles* in general. There are certainly a lot of things we don't understand in this world, but resorting to supernatural "explanations" is a bit of an intellectual cop-out, innit?

However that may be, the only hypothesis I can suggest for why 70,000 people experience a simultaneous, similar and very unusual phenomenon is some kind of mass suggestion. (For an in-depth explanation, the right person to ask would probably be David Copperfield.) I'd also tend to think that people will be more suggestible if they already *believe* very strongly in something. The cynical evergreen of Lenin comes to mind: Who benefits from this?

mikelepore

Ot maybe they didn't experience anything. We don't have 70,000 written testimonies. We have a considerably smaller number. If 10 people say that there were 70,000 witnesses, that's not 70,000 reports, that's 10 reports.

bjacoby

So your "scientific" argument is that if you didn't see it, then 70,000 witnesses or no, it simply did not occur!

chuck654

Fatima is the name of place where it happened, so the story goes in the 12th century a moorish princess named Fatima had been made captive and was given in marriage to the count of Ourem, the place was named after her. After converting to christianity her name was then changed to Oureana in the year 1158 (source http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fátima_(Ourém))

cephron

To me, this take is among the more interesting:

(From the http://www.answers.com/topic/the-miracle-of-the-sun link)

If the newspapers were accurate about the children's predictions, then even a perfectly natural, explainable phenomenon occurring on the specified date would be...suspiciously coincidental.