Religion is a Mental Illness

Hi, yes I've posted about it before. The thing to keep in mind is that we don't need to explain or demonstrate what actually happened, we can simply notice that the claim, the evidence and the conclusion are unjustified.

This is similar to how the jury doesn't need to figure out who did kill the victim, only to find the evidence for the person on trial to be unconvincing.

Like Joshua 10:13, the claim in particular of the sun "dancing" in the sky is easily rejected based on what we know about the sun, including its size, density, mechanics and the effect on the solar system if it suddenly shifted what would be millions of kilometers back and forth rapidly. More importantly, and as with Joshua, nobody else anywhere on the planet noticed this happening. Not even everyone at the site observed the "miracle." Therefore, if something happened, it was a local phenomenon at best.

The evidence is unreliable. Different people report seeing different things. And they offer nothing that anyone else can examine or even confirm. They're also all devout believers and were motivated to believe; they're not unbiased observers.

And the conclusion - therefore Mary - is quite ridiculous. Even if we grant the accounts, there's no line of logic or reason from those to "therefore god sending a message," least of all without identifying and ruling out potential natural phenomena.

The people who were there and believe it - and even those who were not and believe based on the telling of the story - might find it frustrating that others do not believe, they have to realize that "because I said so" or "have faith" are insufficient reasons for most people.

In regard to the children, we have only their word, and we have no reason to expect they could accurately identify a random woman as Mary (did they check her ID?) especially considering cultural depictions of the character don't especially resemble the Middle Eastern Jew she supposedly was. Like Jesus, an historically accurate Jewish woman from the region would be unrecognizable from the white European woman regularly depicted in statues and paintings.

The best answer is "we don't know." That's not a concession or loss, though, because neither do the believers. We don't have to disprove what has not been proven, and the burden of proof resides squarely with them. We don't know what they actually saw or what caused it, or whether it happened at all, and they can't show it. We don't know that it wasn't mass delusion or hysteria. And neither do believers. We don't have to accept their claim until they can back it up more thoroughly.

They've already drawn their conclusion, but it's unjustified, as demonstrated, and they aren't interested in actually substantiating their case or considering an alternative. They believe based on faith, and that ultimately means that what really happened that day doesn't actually matter at all; they don't want to know the truth, whatever it is, they just want magic to be real, evidence be damned.

We have nothing to go on, no reason to believe it happened, and can go on with our days without worrying about it. It's interesting that other Xian denominations don't acknowledge it.

For the Greatest Story Ever Told, it sure is derivative.

No.

And we know that they're not.

Take note here that they wanted to punish someone for finding truth. They wanted to worship a lie without the intrusion of the truth. They weren't disappointed that it wasn't true, they were angry at the person who figured out that it wasn't. They didn't want to know, they wanted to believe. This is what "faith" means.

If the sun had "danced" in the sky at Fátima, it would have been visible at more than one specific location to only a minority of people of Earth, who were true believers and told contradictory stories anyway.

Prophecies are fantastically easy to fulfil. Particularly when they're vague, unverifiable, or the events predicted are inevitable, such as wars, diseases or the political rise of good and bad leaders. Here's an example all three:

If you make enough predictions, some are statistically going to land, or may even be self-fulfilling (the act of predicting it encourages people to make it happen).

It's Nostradamus' entire schtick. If we're keeping score Nostradamus is ahead of Xianity. Especially since Xianity's most important prophecy - the return of Jesus - has already been falsified.

Mark 9:1

Matthew 16:28

They never account for their history of "misses," yet still expect to be treated as reliable.

Importantly, and hopefully obviously, we don't have to be able to explain these events otherwise in order to reject them as "miracles." It's not up to us to disprove what has not been proven. "You can't explain it, therefore god" is not just an argument from ignorance, it's a contradiction: "you can't explain it, therefore it's explained" is self-refuting. The only thing you can say about an unexplained thing is that it's unexplained. And it's useless to claim that people who weren't there and had no access to the events can't explain a thing.

We can insert anything into that gap. For example, it's no less justified to assert that the Miracle of the Sun was the evil lord Xenu deploying mind-control programming to those at Fátima to be his guards in the afterlife. Prove that this isn't true.

They must be able to make the case that the only, or most likely, explanation is the the laws of the physical universe were violated, specifically by their preferred god. And to do that, they must be able to justify why other more mundane explanations - or simply "we don't know" - are either false or less likely. And most of the faithful couldn't even name a single other explanation - and won't accept the intellectually honest "we don't know."

One of the biggest reasons of all to remain skeptical of human claims of miracles and prophecies isn't what we don't know about those miracles, gods and virgin mothers, but what we do know about humans themselves.

We're pattern-seeking creatures, and meaning-making organisms. It's been an advantage in our evolution, but it also makes us unreliable, as we're prone to finding meaning or making connections that aren't there.

This is not an elephant. This is not Mother Teresa.

So the question becomes, what's more likely: an unverified woman who supposedly became divinely pregnant without having sex, giving birth to a man who was killed, came back to life and flew up into the sky is communicating through a vague outline of herself on a wall under a freeway, or humans see what they're motivated to see among millions of stains of various types and causes?

Isn't it odd that we never hear about the millions of stains that aren't in the shape of the Virgin Mary if you squint and know what to look for? If this stain had appeared on a wall in South America or Japan 1000 years ago, who would they have interpreted it as? Would they have even given it a second glance? If you have to already know about Mary to see Mary in it, how is it a "miracle"?

It's really unfortunate that the lord of all creation, who made everything, who got the physics of the universe, the functioning of human bodies, the position of the Earth in the solar system just so, who spoke directly to people and made bargains, covenants and plans directly with humans - yet somehow thought the Earth was flat, stars are tiny lights, didn't know about the Americas or Australia, or how rain works - is now relegated to faint whispering through vague smears on walls, dripping toilet water through human statues, appearing on toast and dog's butt's, and giving out predictions through crazy people and liars.

How the mighty have fallen.

#ImaginaryPeopleProblems

Likelihood is determined from previous or comparable occurrences.

We have no reason whatsoever to conclude that if the biblical characters existed at all in the real world, that a virgin birth is even possible, much less “likely.”

On the other hand, we know that any parthenogenetic pregnancy, devoid of paternal fertilization, quickly hits a developmental brick wall, is therefore non-viable, and in that era, would have certainly killed the mother.

We also further know that on the rare occasion when a parthenogenetic chimera - initially parthenogenetic, but subsequently fertilized prior to reaching the aforementioned “brick wall”, and therefore genetically partially parthenogenetic and partially non-parthenogenetic - comes to full term, it has severe physical and intellectual developmental problems. Thus, had Joseph finished off what “God”/Gabriel had started, Jesus would have been profoundly physically and intellectually disabled, and more than likely incapable of speech.

Considering all of this - the lack of possibility, the resulting biological implications, not to mention the inability to find the characters in history in the first place - the virgin birth is a lie about a birth that wasn’t virginal, or never happened at all.

Virgin Mary worshiping Nergal of Behemoth

You already know why atheists don’t believe you.

Shouldn’t they have served kebabs at the last supper?

#JesusKebab

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenogenesis