Every year on the eve of Pascha, the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem enters the Edicule in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, and sometimes within minutes a blue light appears that ignites a bundle of 33 candles. The flame from these candles is passed around, all over the world, to the faithful. 2017 marks the first time in history that the holy fire has made its way to America.
The fire does not burn, as seen by the hundreds of pilgrims whose hair, skin, and clothes are unaffected by bathing in the fire. It also does not emanate from any known source. The Israeli army checks the Church beforehand for any source of ignition. There are no matches, torches, lamps, lighters, or flints. Magnifying lenses will not work inside the stone tomb in the center of a darkened church. Furthermore, the candles of some pilgrims are said to spontaneously ignite before being touched by fire.
Dr. Steve Turley explains the miracle of the holy fire in two videos below.
Showing posts with label Miracles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Miracles. Show all posts
Sunday, May 7, 2017
Saturday, December 24, 2016
Blood Miracle Forecasts Bad Omen
Cardinal Crescenzio Sepeial holding the vial containing Saint Januarius' blood.
Photo Credit:
Paola Magni
The vial containing the blood of Saint Januarius failed to liquefy. Just who is Saint Januarius, and why is this issue with his blood important? Here's the story, 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]
Skep-dicks have claimed the substance in the vial is a thixotropic gel containing iron oxide. Of course, they've produced bullshit stunts where they've created a similar substance that liquefies when shaken, but that's not proof of anything. A ventriloquist can reproduce the effect of voices coming out of a radio but that doesn't mean that radios are fake. Just because an effect can be reproduced through other means doesn't in any way indicate that those are the only means of producing the effect. There are many ways to produce powered flight, and there are many different types of light bulb, and all sorts of other phenomena can be produced in different ways. Magicians reproducing psychic phenomena does not in the least prove, or even provide evidence that psychic phenomena are fake. It's a confidence trick designed to subvert the rational mind.
From Live Science:
"The blood did not liquefy in 1939, when World War II broke out, nor in
1943, the year the Nazi occupied Italy, nor in 1973, remembered for a
bout of cholera in Naples. Most recently, it failed to liquefy in 1980,
when a devastating earthquake struck Irpinia, some 30 miles east of
Naples, leaving more than 2,400 people dead.
"According to the website storiacity.it,
over the centuries the failed miracle coincided with 22 epidemics, 11
revolutions, three droughts, 14 archbishops death (within a 30-day
period), nine dead popes (over a period of a few weeks), four wars, 19
earthquakes, and three religious persecutions."
The blood failed to liquefy again on the 16th of December this year. Every time the blood has failed to liquefy there has been some disaster.
That could mean one of two things:
1. The liquefaction of the blood is a genuine miracle and failure to liquefy really does portend bad omens.
2a. The liquefaction of the blood is a psychic phenomena involving the collective consciousness of the people of Naples to see into the future and predict when calamities are about to occur.
2b. The blood is fake but unconscious precognition is still involved. Either the priests and other church officials psychically sense the future and purposefully do some trick to keep the fake substance a solid to warn the public, or the collective consciousness of the people of Naples keeps the fake substance a solid because of unconscious precognition.
The skep-dicks have no legs to stand on. The failure of the substance to liquefy has always coincided with disasters. It doesn't matter what is in the vial, blood or iron oxide gel, either a miracle or psychic powers are involved, because no matter what's in the vial, the substance itself or the people around it are still able to predict the future, something materialism says is impossible.
What does that mean for 2017? Let me just say that if I had any travel plans for Naples I would cancel them.
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
Petrus Romanus
Pope Benedict XVI, age 85, has announced that his health is too poor to faithfully fulfill his duties as Pope, and he will step down on 28 February, being the first Pope to step down in 598 years. He is a very courageous man and I applaude his decision.
Pope Benedict is also a theologin, and well aware (as is everyone in the Vatican) of the prophecy of Saint Malachy. The prophecy, which was hidden in Vatican archives for nearly five centuries, reveals a highly accurate list of 112 future Popes, following Innocent II, until the end of days (starring Richard Harris). Pope Benedict XVI, who took his name from Saint Benedict, founder of the Benedictine Order, the symbol of which is an olive branch, was the 111th Pope on the list.
There is one Pope left. The final part of the prophecy (according to wiki translation) reads: "In the extreme persecution of the Holy Roman Church, there will sit Peter the Roman, who will pasture his sheep in many tribulations:
and when these things are finished, the city of seven hills will be destroyed,
and the terrible judge will judge his people.
The End.
If the prophecy is correct, and it has been scary accurate so far, the next Pope, who is expected to be selected before Easter, will preside over the Church during the end of days. Just when the end of days will begin no one can say, but there are supposed to be seven years of tribulations ultimately culminating in the creation of the new Heaven and new Earth; the final defeat of sin and death, and the glorious reign of the Lord forever.
Now, the official position of the Catholic Church and fundamaterialist archskep-dicks is that the prophecy is a 17th century forgery, which is probably the only thing both groups agree on. Supposedly, since the prophecy is "too accurate" it must have been fabricated to take into account the past Popes, and that, supposedly, all the predictions after the document was released to the public have to be fudged to fit. Unfortunately for both that's not true, as anyone can see that the later predictions have indeed been eerily accurate. Here are just a few:
* Benedict XV (1914-1922) was prophecised as "religion destroyed." He reigned during the rapid rise of Communism, which saw hundreds of millions of people forced into atheism, attempts by the Soviet Union to destroy the Russian Orthodox Church, and the First World War that led to widespread disillusionment with religion among the peoples of Europe.
* Pius XI (1922-1939) was prophecised as "intrepid faith." He stared down fascist dictator Benito Mussolini to establish the Vatican as an independent state, freeing it from decades of oppression by the Italian government.
* Pius XII (1939-1958) was the "angelic shepherd" who first sheltered the Roman Jews during the Holocaust, and later made pleas to the Hungarian government to protect the Jewish population of their country as well.
* John XXIII (1958-1963) "Shepherd and sailor." He was Patriarch of Venice, the spiritual leader of probably the world's most famous maritime city.
* Paul VI (1963-1978) "Flower of flowers." His coat of arms contains three fleur de lis.
* John Paul I (1978) "From the midst of the moon." His reign began during a half moon, and lasted one month.
* John Paul II (1978-2005) "From the labour of the sun." He was born during a solar eclipse and later entombed during another solar eclipse.
The past seven Popes have been predicted with stunning accuracy. If the document were a forgery how could a forger have gotten such a remarkable string of hits three hundred years after the document was supposedly written for political purposes? Even if you don't believe the prophecy to be genuine (I do), this is still a highly significant time historically. We are living during the last days of a prediction made 900 or 300 years ago, depending upon which side you take, which may or may not have had a significant influence on the past several centuries of Church history. Either way, we are living in interesting times.
Always love.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Miracles in Japan
I know, I've been neglecting the troubles in Japan. Earlier this month Japan was struck by the largest earthquake ever recorded in the region. It sent a tsunami across the Pacific, and irreparably damaged several nuclear power plants. The death toll is estimated at 18,000 the last time I heard on the radio. Officials in Japan are saying this is the worst disaster to hit the country since the end of the Second World War.
What with the ongoing "Kinetic Military Action™" the US is waging in Libya, and arming al Qaeda, and the Iranians releasing a video saying the Mahdi has come back from wherever he's been the past thousand years, and Israel has to be destroyed before the year is over so he can begin the end of days, and that Mahmoud Ahmadinajad is the only one on the planet who can see or hear him, so you better do what Ahmadinajad says, I haven't had the time to get to yet another depressing topic.
But all is not bad news! We are blessed to live in the time of Charlie Sheen and The Donald running for president. Need more proof? I bring you good tidings from Japan.
While the Japanese military was digging out bodies, 2,000 of them, one turned out to be alive. A four month old baby was found amidst the wreckage. The little girl has been returned to her family, who were also spared by the devastation.
Elsewhere (no map is provided, so place names mean nothing to me), a 70 year old woman, and her house, were harmlessly transported by the waves to a new location. A 60 year old man was also found floating on his roof ten miles out to sea. The fact that they were searching that far out is astonishing enough, let alone finding a surviver out there.
It's stuff like this that almost makes up for all the crap people are doing to screw the world.
-Dee
What with the ongoing "Kinetic Military Action™" the US is waging in Libya, and arming al Qaeda, and the Iranians releasing a video saying the Mahdi has come back from wherever he's been the past thousand years, and Israel has to be destroyed before the year is over so he can begin the end of days, and that Mahmoud Ahmadinajad is the only one on the planet who can see or hear him, so you better do what Ahmadinajad says, I haven't had the time to get to yet another depressing topic.
But all is not bad news! We are blessed to live in the time of Charlie Sheen and The Donald running for president. Need more proof? I bring you good tidings from Japan.
While the Japanese military was digging out bodies, 2,000 of them, one turned out to be alive. A four month old baby was found amidst the wreckage. The little girl has been returned to her family, who were also spared by the devastation.
Elsewhere (no map is provided, so place names mean nothing to me), a 70 year old woman, and her house, were harmlessly transported by the waves to a new location. A 60 year old man was also found floating on his roof ten miles out to sea. The fact that they were searching that far out is astonishing enough, let alone finding a surviver out there.
It's stuff like this that almost makes up for all the crap people are doing to screw the world.
-Dee
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Faith
Shoshana Garfield writing for The Guardian has a wonderful article on the faith of people who have been tortured. The message is clear:
"I believe that they are telling the truth.... beyond displaying typical impacts of deep trauma, 100% of the clients who reported such miraculous interventions in my clinic room were perfectly sane. I can therefore only come to the professional conclusion that these reports are, to the best of our knowledge, generally true."
This article is fantastic. It is very short, and although you will finish it in a few minutes the uplifting feeling that comes from reading it remains long after you are done.
-Dee
"I believe that they are telling the truth.... beyond displaying typical impacts of deep trauma, 100% of the clients who reported such miraculous interventions in my clinic room were perfectly sane. I can therefore only come to the professional conclusion that these reports are, to the best of our knowledge, generally true."
This article is fantastic. It is very short, and although you will finish it in a few minutes the uplifting feeling that comes from reading it remains long after you are done.
-Dee
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
It's Just Like Watching The Detectives
Last night I watched a program on the new Oprah Winfrey channel, OWN, called "Miracle Detectives," and I must say, this is one program that disappoints on every page. First I should say that I don't watch Oprah's program (although as a boy I did, on rare occasions), but I had just finished three solid hours of research into the history of psychiatry and needed to relax so I turned on the seed (a term that has been used to refer to the television in my family for years) and was met with a rather anemic selection. I came across something called "Miracle Detectives" and read the synopsis. A man was cut in half by a train and survived (actually, he just had his legs cut off, but it was still a very serious injury), and a house drips holy oil. I decided to watch it and had to write notes out of disappointment.
The program features a man, Randall Sullivan, who owns exactly one outfit, and a woman, Indre Viskontas, who changes her clothes at least ten times an episode. Randy, if I can call him that, was in a war or something and he saw purple lightning and now he believes everything is a miracle and testing God is a sin. Indre claims to be some sort of doctor, I guess, and she believes nothing is a miracle and will latch on to any explanation no matter how unlikely or asinine it may be.
They go around investigating miracles to see, well, if they really are miracles, or at least that's the premise of the show. The truth is anything but.
On tonight's show, they go to investigate a woman who went to Lourdes in France (loading the page will resize your browser) and got some of the water. She brought it back and put it in a font in her house. When she woke up she discovered the water had turned into perfumed oil. Some time later she turned her house into a shrine, filled to capacity with icons, each of which exudes holy oil, along with the walls of the room as well. Now, I have a shrine in my house, millions of people do, but this is bordering on psychotic. There are more icons in her house, which is really tiny too, than in any church I've ever been to, even those huge old ones in the big cities that they turned into museums.
The oil has been associated with many healings. People have been healed of cancer and blindness, among other illnesses not mentioned in the program. The team goes to investigate. They visit one woman who was losing her vision due to a macular hole. Her friend gave her a cotton ball dipped in the oil, and she rubbed it on her eye every day for a week and when she went to the doctor he said the hole was gone. Randy was totally convinced. He threw his hands in the air and said "It's a miracle!" Indre said that the woman is very sad and she is using her faith as a crutch. Randy takes some of the oil to the world's leading expert on holy oil in Utah or somewhere and he smells it and says if it's real it can't contain any synthetic chemicals. Indre goes to some random eye doctor and asks about the woman's condition. He said that in 20 years of practice he has only seen two "spontaneous" healings in which a macular hole sealed up. Indre takes this to mean that the woman's case is the result of the atheist's supreme god of chance, not questioning about the two other "spontaneous" cases, which themselves might have been miracles, or, if not, were at least fantastically unlikely events and may have nothing at all to do with this woman and the oil. There might have been any number of other factors involved in those other cases, but she's not skeptical of her own skepticism, so it doesn't matter. She doesn't have to disprove the miracle, she just has to come up with any cock and balls story that might in some distant planet explain it away, and she did and was satisfied.
She brings in a building contractor who gives a very quick lookie loo of the room and says that because of the way the plaster on the walls is he can tell the room has not been tampered with, no hoses have been put in the walls to pour the oil out. He says it looks like someone splattered the oil on the walls, then he leaves.
She then calls in Joe Nickell, the skep-dick who found no evidence of anything paranormal, ever, so we know he's biased. She has an orgasm or two describing how he "debunks" things, meaning she's not interested in objectivity or science, since "debunking" is not part of the scientific method and no scientist ever has debunked anything. Science is open ended. Despite being a smug bastard he is the only one in the team with any sense and he sets up two tests. He has a camera watching a few statues for 24 hours, to see if oil spontaneously appears or someone puts it on it when no one is looking, and he takes a sample of oil to get a chemical analysis. The results are in. After one day no new oil appeared. Well, not exactly. A little oil did appear in the font, but he said it was just residue, so it didn't count, not surprisingly. He declaired it a fake and left after smelling his own farts. Randy interjected, the owner of the house says the oil comes out mostly on feast days, and only very little appears at other times in the year, and since the test was not on a feast day then it's not surprising only a little oil appeared. He just leaves. Joe just leaves. Now, if it was me I would have run a six month study on the house, not content to make pronouncements after only one night, but hey, we're not interested in science here.
The results of the chemical analysis? The oil is mostly vegetable oil with a glycol in it, most likely* propylene glycol, a synthetic chemical used in perfumes (and has it's own website, not many chemicals I know of can say that!). Randy is willing to admit he is very disappointed but falls short of saying it's not a miracle, even though according to that guy he visited when he went skiing in Utah, God doesn't use synthetic chemicals because synthetic chemicals don't know how your body works and natural chemicals do, somehow. The show ends with them looking at each other, him sad she indifferent. The camera holds on them for forth seconds with no audio.
Now Oprah is always talking about miracles. She believes President Zero is a miracle, and Deepak Chopra said on her show he was a product of "the all knowing quantum field," the kind that comes around once every thousand years. I was surprised that the Oprah channel had a show that seemed openly antagonistic to the idea of miracles. The chick on the show is a stereotypical skep-dick debunker, and the guy is extremely gullible and antagonistic to science. This is exactly how NOT to perform science and how NOT to investigate miracles. I won't be watching this program again.
-Dee
*I forgot, so this is just a guess.
P.S. At 1,252 words this is officially the new longest post on The Urban Mystic!
The program features a man, Randall Sullivan, who owns exactly one outfit, and a woman, Indre Viskontas, who changes her clothes at least ten times an episode. Randy, if I can call him that, was in a war or something and he saw purple lightning and now he believes everything is a miracle and testing God is a sin. Indre claims to be some sort of doctor, I guess, and she believes nothing is a miracle and will latch on to any explanation no matter how unlikely or asinine it may be.
They go around investigating miracles to see, well, if they really are miracles, or at least that's the premise of the show. The truth is anything but.
On tonight's show, they go to investigate a woman who went to Lourdes in France (loading the page will resize your browser) and got some of the water. She brought it back and put it in a font in her house. When she woke up she discovered the water had turned into perfumed oil. Some time later she turned her house into a shrine, filled to capacity with icons, each of which exudes holy oil, along with the walls of the room as well. Now, I have a shrine in my house, millions of people do, but this is bordering on psychotic. There are more icons in her house, which is really tiny too, than in any church I've ever been to, even those huge old ones in the big cities that they turned into museums.
The oil has been associated with many healings. People have been healed of cancer and blindness, among other illnesses not mentioned in the program. The team goes to investigate. They visit one woman who was losing her vision due to a macular hole. Her friend gave her a cotton ball dipped in the oil, and she rubbed it on her eye every day for a week and when she went to the doctor he said the hole was gone. Randy was totally convinced. He threw his hands in the air and said "It's a miracle!" Indre said that the woman is very sad and she is using her faith as a crutch. Randy takes some of the oil to the world's leading expert on holy oil in Utah or somewhere and he smells it and says if it's real it can't contain any synthetic chemicals. Indre goes to some random eye doctor and asks about the woman's condition. He said that in 20 years of practice he has only seen two "spontaneous" healings in which a macular hole sealed up. Indre takes this to mean that the woman's case is the result of the atheist's supreme god of chance, not questioning about the two other "spontaneous" cases, which themselves might have been miracles, or, if not, were at least fantastically unlikely events and may have nothing at all to do with this woman and the oil. There might have been any number of other factors involved in those other cases, but she's not skeptical of her own skepticism, so it doesn't matter. She doesn't have to disprove the miracle, she just has to come up with any cock and balls story that might in some distant planet explain it away, and she did and was satisfied.
She brings in a building contractor who gives a very quick lookie loo of the room and says that because of the way the plaster on the walls is he can tell the room has not been tampered with, no hoses have been put in the walls to pour the oil out. He says it looks like someone splattered the oil on the walls, then he leaves.
She then calls in Joe Nickell, the skep-dick who found no evidence of anything paranormal, ever, so we know he's biased. She has an orgasm or two describing how he "debunks" things, meaning she's not interested in objectivity or science, since "debunking" is not part of the scientific method and no scientist ever has debunked anything. Science is open ended. Despite being a smug bastard he is the only one in the team with any sense and he sets up two tests. He has a camera watching a few statues for 24 hours, to see if oil spontaneously appears or someone puts it on it when no one is looking, and he takes a sample of oil to get a chemical analysis. The results are in. After one day no new oil appeared. Well, not exactly. A little oil did appear in the font, but he said it was just residue, so it didn't count, not surprisingly. He declaired it a fake and left after smelling his own farts. Randy interjected, the owner of the house says the oil comes out mostly on feast days, and only very little appears at other times in the year, and since the test was not on a feast day then it's not surprising only a little oil appeared. He just leaves. Joe just leaves. Now, if it was me I would have run a six month study on the house, not content to make pronouncements after only one night, but hey, we're not interested in science here.
The results of the chemical analysis? The oil is mostly vegetable oil with a glycol in it, most likely* propylene glycol, a synthetic chemical used in perfumes (and has it's own website, not many chemicals I know of can say that!). Randy is willing to admit he is very disappointed but falls short of saying it's not a miracle, even though according to that guy he visited when he went skiing in Utah, God doesn't use synthetic chemicals because synthetic chemicals don't know how your body works and natural chemicals do, somehow. The show ends with them looking at each other, him sad she indifferent. The camera holds on them for forth seconds with no audio.
Now Oprah is always talking about miracles. She believes President Zero is a miracle, and Deepak Chopra said on her show he was a product of "the all knowing quantum field," the kind that comes around once every thousand years. I was surprised that the Oprah channel had a show that seemed openly antagonistic to the idea of miracles. The chick on the show is a stereotypical skep-dick debunker, and the guy is extremely gullible and antagonistic to science. This is exactly how NOT to perform science and how NOT to investigate miracles. I won't be watching this program again.
-Dee
*I forgot, so this is just a guess.
P.S. At 1,252 words this is officially the new longest post on The Urban Mystic!
Sunday, December 19, 2010
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
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
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Wonderful Story from France
From AFP comes a wonderful piece about a toddler who fell out a window in France and survived.
The story begins:
"An 18-month-old boy survived after falling seven floors and bouncing off a Paris cafe awning into the arms of a passer-by, witnesses said Tuesday."
The man, Philippe Bensignor, caught the boy who fell out the window!
After the several negative posts and the seemingly endless parade of bad news this story, that was sitting in my in box for quite some time before I read it, and then read it again, really moved me. There's a lot of crap in the world, and I mean a whole lot, but there are events like this that make it all worth it. Enjoy this story.
-Dee
The story begins:
"An 18-month-old boy survived after falling seven floors and bouncing off a Paris cafe awning into the arms of a passer-by, witnesses said Tuesday."
The man, Philippe Bensignor, caught the boy who fell out the window!
After the several negative posts and the seemingly endless parade of bad news this story, that was sitting in my in box for quite some time before I read it, and then read it again, really moved me. There's a lot of crap in the world, and I mean a whole lot, but there are events like this that make it all worth it. Enjoy this story.
-Dee
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