A Pocketful of Miracles

From the original Urban Mystic, 19 August 2007. The tone of some of the older posts appears to be a bit harsher. I was coming out of being a skep-dick and while materialism had been dropped it would be a few years before the desire to attack everyone fell away as well. Accept this post for what it is.



From Michael Talbot's Holographic Universe (p. 119-120):


"Every year in September and May a huge crowd gathers at the Duomo San Gennaro, the principal cathedral of Naples, to witness a miracle. The miracle involves a small vial containing a brown crusty substance alleged to be the blood of San Gennaro, or St. Januarius, who was beheaded by the Roman emperor Diocletian in A.D. 305. According to legend, after the saint was martyred a serving woman collected some of his blood as a relic. No one knows precisely what happened after that, save that the blood didn't turn up again until the end of the thirteenth century when it was ensconced in a silver reliquary in the cathedral.


"The miracle is that twice yearly, when the crowd shouts at the vial, the brown crusty substance changes into a bubbling, bright red liquid. There is little doubt that the liquid is real blood. in 1902 a group of scientists from the University of Naples made a spectroscopic analysis of the liquid by passing a beam of light through it, verifying that it was blood. Unfortunately, because the reliquary containing the blood is so old and fragile, the church will not allow it to be cracked open so that other tests can be done, and so the phenomenon has never been thoroughly studied.

"But there is further evidence that the transformation is a more than ordinary event. Occasionally throughout history (the first written account of the public performance of the miracle dates back to 1389) when the vial is brought out, the blood refuses to liquefy. Although rare, this is considered a very bad omen by the citizens of Naples. In the past, the failure of the miracle has directly preceded the eruption of Vesuvius and the Napoleonic invasion of Naples. More recently, in 1976 and 1978, it presaged the worst earthquake in Italian history and the election of a communist city government in naples, respectively.

"Is the liquefaction of San Gennaro's blood a miracle? It appears to be, at least in the sense that it seems impossible to explain by known scientific laws." [emphasis added]



He goes on to suggest psi phenomena are involved, but more on that later.



There you have it, folks. The substance in the vial has incontestably been proven to be blood. However some skep-dicks and fundamaterialists will tell you that it is a thixotropic gel (like ketchup) that liquefies when stirred or shaken hard enough. How they can say this when hard, irrefutable proof they are wrong is staring them in the face is beyond my comprehension. Because the study happened in 1902 does not in any way refute the results or make them less acceptable. If that were the case we should throw out Newton and Galileo because their findings are hundreds of years old. Are their moons around Jupiter? Hell no! The most recient findings were in the 70's, and that's way before modern skep-dickal science was invented in 2007. We shouldn't believe it at all. Give me a break. Vintage does not detract from science. If the blood miracle is fake the priests would have to know in advance when horrible events were about to happen. Either way the skep-dicks lose. Either they say it is blood in the vial or that predicting the future is real. There's a bullet in every chamber. Psychic phenomena are the only two options. Good times.



-Dee