"Enlightening" discussion with a friend

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Ratburn's picture
"Enlightening" discussion with a friend

Today I got together with my friend who is very religious. He told me that he was going to India in a few weeks, and that he was going to visit a museum with "incorruptible bodies" of saints. According to him, some of these bodies have been around for hundreds of years, and have not decayed due to the fact that they were Catholic saints. My response to him was, "that is total bullshit" and he was shocked by my blunt answer. He said "how do you know they are not real, you have no proof". I told him, that while I don't have exact proof of these bodies in particular, we can look at any human body that has died. After even a month, there is a large amount of decay. These were all bodies of humans, so there is no reason to think they are any different. I told him that surely, people work hard to preserve these bodies.

I don't get how people can be this out to lunch on certain topics. Did it ever occur to them that people will say things to impress others and make them believe?

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watchman's picture
@ Ratburn ....

@ Ratburn ....

Quote from Terry Pratchett.....

"They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance".

Ratburn's picture
thanks for the quote,

thanks for the quote, appreciated it

algebe's picture
I love the way Christians

I love the way Christians call atheists materialistic while they go around praying to bones and blood and so-called incorruptible corpses. What a crock.

An "incorruptible" corpse has something wrong with it that's preventing the decay bacteria from doing their job. Decomposition isn't corruption. It's recycling. All life depends on this beautiful natural process.

Ratburn's picture
I couldn't agree more. It's

I couldn't agree more. It's quite laughable, because according to this guy, it only happens to Catholics, meanwhile, I have actually seen videos of Muslims "digging" up corpses to find them in tact. Apparently, this "proves" Islam. Recently there was a Mongolian monk who was found with a body about 80% in tact after thousands of years-- of course, he was buried in salt and bromine, which is why his body was preserved so well. It seems to me that every single religion boasts the ability to protect its followers by stopping them from decaying after death? What is the point of this anyway? It's not like this would help the person who died-- whether or not they have a soul or continue to live on (which is a different discussion altogether) is irrelevant.

algebe's picture
@Ratburn: "It's not like this

@Ratburn: "It's not like this would help the person who died"

Absolutely right. Back in the 1960s, I saw an unwrapped Egyptian mummy at the British Museum. I wondered then how that person would have felt if he'd known that 3,000 years in the future he'd be lying there bare-arsed naked in a glass case for everyone to gawk at.

Ratburn's picture
@Algebe, that's a funny way

@Algebe, that's a funny way to put it, and it's true. It is interesting that the ancient Egyptians came up with ways to preserve the external elements of the human body, but it is somewhat strange, and useless at the same time.

Big George's picture
Some years ago I was in St

Some years ago I was in St Petersberg in Russia. There, in a museum, I saw a woolly mammoth that had been recovered, perfectly preserved, frozen in ice in Siberia. I am not sure if it was a Catholic mammoth .......

Ratburn's picture
LOL I love that, made me

@Big George

LOL I love that, made me laugh. I remember once in my gym class back in secondary school we had our own changeroom. This changeroom was normal except for one thing: there was an ice cream sandwhich inside one of the lockers. I remember no one wanted to touch it. To make this long story short, at the end of the school year, it was still in the same locker-- untouched, unchanged. It hadn't melted one bit, and everything was still intact. We thought the chemicals must have kept it together, but it must have been blessed by a Catholic Priest before it was shipped to stores. The same must be true with McDonalds potatoes, I hear their fries never decay, even after a year of sitting in the sun...

Old man shouts at clouds's picture
The bog men in the UK and

The bog men in the UK and Denmark, some 3000 years before Catholics must have been early church fathers....and the Glacier Archer in Switzerland, who knew....

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