Hey everyone it's me, your friend Mikhael who had a major mental breakdown over the past 2 weeks, how y'all doin?
So after seeing my shrink and agreeing to go back on my meds I am doing. Considerably better and I apologize for making a circus out of this forum for a hot minute there and thank y'all for being extraordinarily patient with me.
With a more level head now, things are making so much more sense and I'm almost back to my normal. So how about I try all this shit again with a clear mind now that I'm like 60% more sane.
Fatima was a story constructed by a poor child known for her storytelling and by some great coincidence, she happened to have everyones attention around what might have been a sun dog or halo. She claimed years later that Mary gave her 3 great secrets but whoops, none of them were actually predictions before the fact.
Lourdes is another claim of an apparition that supposedly has things she could never know like the fact that Mary should now be called the immaculate conception...cept she was being surrounded by thousands of devout Catholics so I'm sure at least a handful of them were calling Mary that. Supposedly dancing her finger through fire? It's actually an easy parlor trick that any other rambunctious brat could teach her.
Early accounts of miracles are sketch af with little documentation and who is to say the doctor documenting shit wasn't paid off? I didn't realize how FAST Lourdes blew up man, thousands of people within months? Sounds like the church would be invested fast.
Psychosomatic disorders are not what I thought they were. There's not much known but damn theyre amazing. Paralysis, deafness, pain, they can all be the result of a psychosomatic disease which could account for a lot of supposedly miraculous cases, especially modern day. I'm not a doctor and I don't know exactly what they mean when those who examine people at Lourdes say there is no known medical explanation for a healing, but I'm sure with all the doctors involved, many have their own theories. It's very likely many do look at some amazing cases and wonder if they are a case of something psychological at work but we just don't know enough yet
Miracles have dropped off super fast and while some of that is probably due to the fact that modern medicine has made the need for "miracles" lessened or excluded some cases from being considered, it's still 1 or 2 out if 10 million every few years
Miracles or unexplained coincidences ?
Idfk what anyone saw over that church in Egypt but those photos are fake as shit, and as for the Akita case, it's not nearly as straight forward as the accounts first said. Just because, for example, the stories claim the doctors testing the samples were not told what they were testing doesn't make it true, nor does it mean they were given authentic samples of anything.
Finally, I realize now, ibwas putting about 400% more trust in what people claimed happened than I should have. I fail to realize sometimes how the church has absolutely controlled parts of history with an iron fist. I know first-hand how much just our own government can cover up, let alone an entity that controls over 1 billion people
In summary, what did I learn this month?
Fuck Catholicism
Subscription Note:
Choosing to subscribe to this topic will automatically register you for email notifications for comments and updates on this thread.
Email notifications will be sent out daily by default unless specified otherwise on your account which you can edit by going to your userpage here and clicking on the subscriptions tab.
RE: Fuck Catholicism . Well.... it's a good start!
@Mikhael
It is good to hear you are doing better.
My suggestion to you, is to continue to work on spotting unevidenced assertions.
A good way to practice this, is when you see a theist apologist try to explain why you should believe their god idea, you already know that everything they say about their god idea is completely unevidenced to begin with.
But notice how they set up their argument, how they try to hide or obfuscate they have no actual evidence, just words, spoken or written, nothing that could actually be tested and verified. 99% of all theist apologetics are not even "evidence" for their god idea.
The few attempts of actual evidence I have seen, is maybe something like: the shroud of turin, but obviously that "evidence" did not go well for the religious apologetics where the religious apologetics themselves abandoning the idea of trying to evidence their god idea with the shroud of turin.
Yup, definately gonna work on approaching claims from a skeptics point of view and not accepting reports and shit at face value. I got way too caught up In what I /thought/ was evidence and didn't allow myself to be critical of it, ie, I took reports from 1858 as being fact, I put too much stock in coincidences around Fatima, I thought that if modern Lourdes miracles could have been misdiagnosed or psychosomatic the doctors would have known that). I'm starting to understand what everyone means when they say a claim isn't evidence
Re: somatic disorders
Hi. I don't know much about this topic but, and correct me if I am wrong, but isn't it only very recently that we started really taking them seriously as a real diagnosis? That last miracle to be approved at Lourdes was in 2018 but it ""happened"" in 2008, which is ten years of new understanding about diagnosis and stuff. If someone has a somatic issue stemming from a real physical issue it's possible for no one to realize there was a somatic element to it. And I don't know how the doctors supposedly looking through stuff about lourdes works cuz I'm obviously not one, and maybe they did go through and rule out somatic disorders as a possibility, but that doesn't mean it's correct. Like I said, she "got better" ten years ago, maybe her body had been healing for a long time but she had a somatic thing going on continuing her symptoms. Also maybe Lourdes doctors have doubts and theories but they aren't substantial enough to be proven or used as a valid explanation
I admit I'm not 100% better though. I still have a strong compulsion to be researching and reading. My anxiety keeps telling me there's still 60-odd cases at Lourdes that seem miraculous, I'm still very anxious about the man who had a sarcoma disappear and his joint regrow in a way doctors on the 70s called inexicaple, for example. I'm trying hard to not Google though, really hard
Mikhael
I an 69 years old and in 1957 I broke my arm. The doctor did not have an X-ray machine (yes, he set it wrong) and I was anesthetized with ether.
If you are going to delve back to a case 60 years old, please understand the level of medicine and how common such machines as X-rays were.
A 60 year old case is just ten years after WW2, and I speak from experience, I lived in France in the early 60's and there was a lot of rebuilding still going on. It was still a lot of desolation and broken concrete everywhere.
@Mikhael: Why don't you research something useful instead of pumping your head full of crap?