Lies do not become more truthful simply because they are repeated. They typically become less credible. That is the case with the lies that form the basis of Roman Catholic claims of miracles, such as the appearance of the Virgin Mary in Fatima, Portugal, as well of the miracles performed by the head of St. John the Baptist, and the foreskin of Jesus, which is miraculously supposed to be held as a holy relic by 31 different Christian churches.
These miracles aren’t hard to explain. They’re blatant lies told for the sake of crass economic benefit.
Full Transcript:
Welcome to Not Everyone Believes Ross Douthat.
This is a podcast that is devoted to an examination of a single book.
That book is believe why everyone should be religious.
The author of that book is Ross Douthat, a right wing Christian pundit.
So we are now on page 71.
We have entered into chapter 3 and chapter 3 begins with a pretty wild story, and it ends with that story.
So we'll get back to that because it's kind of a frame for this entire chapter here.
I want to remind you that Ross Douthat is claiming that, um, he is going to establish a reasonable grounds for belief in religion that doesn't require faith.
He says that you just should be able to think with your logical mind and be rational about it, and it'll be obvious to everybody that religion is true. And so, this this chapter is about miracles.
Now, miracles are by definition exceptions to the rule. They are moments when the ordinary rules are the standard ways of reality working are broken and anything can happen at all.
So this is a really odd kind of thing because Ross Douthat has claimed that the existence of laws in the universe proves that there's a divine Lawgiver, but now he's arguing that the universe is actually lawless that, you know, anything can happen at any time. You can have miracles occur.
Ross Douthat refers to one miracle in particular on page 71: The Miracle of the Sun in Fatima, Portugal in 1918.
The official Catholic Church storyline of this is that there were these three children who started telling the adults around them that they had been talking to the Virgin Mary.
The adults were like, “Really? You've been talking to the Virgin Mary, prove it.”The children said, “Well, the Virgin Mary told us that there's going to be something really funky happening up in the sky.” Okay, they didn't use a word “funky.” They used a Portuguese word which means, you know, something really fancy.
It's going to happen up in the sky, and so thousands and thousands of Catholic believers, actually tens of thousands came to see if that would be true.
Then, according to Ross Douthat, “The sun appeared to dance before tens of thousands of witnesses.”
All of those witnesses were Catholic believers. You gotta wonder, why did tens of thousands of Catholic believers show up at a single location, simply because three kids said that they had been talking to the Virgin Mary.
I mean, kids say a lot of things. Kids say, “I’m a superhero.” Kids say, “I’ve got an imaginary friend.” Kids say stuff like that.
This is where the miracle begins to be suspicious. It begins to look like something of a setup, because, you know, I think most adults understand very well that when children say outlandish things, you need to take it with more than a grain of salt.
So why did those tens of thousands of Catholic believers show up? Well, we'll get to that.
The way that Ross Douthat describes this supposed miracle is kind of suspect on its own.
He describes them merely as witnesses, but these were not disinterested witnesses, these were people who already were true believers in Roman Catholicism, members of the church, devout people who had been organized. To show up in this place.
Let's get to the miracle part. The sun appeared to dance in the sky.
According to Ross Douthat, that's really what happened.
Actually, if you look at descriptions of the event that were gathered, That's not really what happened?
Now, some of them may have used the word dance, but others got more specific.
They said that the sun was going in great big circles and spirals in the sky.
Yet other observers said that they saw the sun go in great big zigzags back and forth in the sky, and yet more, thousands of people who had gone there, as Roman Catholic, loyal witnesses to a predicted event that everyone was expecting to happen, said that nothing happened at all.
The sun didn't move in the sky. So what was really going on?
Ross Douthat says, well, this is clear evidence that God is is truly real, and that the Roman Catholic church is real, and that the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus who was an incarnation of God, actually, is around all the time and talking to people, and it's a miracle. Yay, it's magic! It's Christian magic!
Therefore, you should be a Christian. Case closed, right? Yeah, not really case closed, actually.
You see, the thing is, Ross Douthat seems to discount quite a bit of things. For example, people are really fond of telling lies, and when other people are telling a lie, they are awfully fond of joining in.
We have a well-known story that describes this principle of human behavior. It's called the Emperor's New Clothes.
When everyone in town, you know how it goes, everyone in town says to the emperor, he's got great new clothes. In fact, he's naked, but no one wants to say, hey, the emperor's not wearing clothes.
I think that's what we've got going on here. Let me tell you why I believe that.
When it comes to the Roman Catholic Church, Well, there's no nice way to put this.
Roman Catholic Church has a long, long history of lying about miracles, absolutely lying about miracles.
I will give you a very specific example. It has to do with holy relics that are supposed to have uh, magical powers, okay?
The head of St. John the Baptist, for example. The head of St. John the Baptist has been claimed as a relic by multiple Roman Catholic churches.
I mean, not just the church, but we're talking about specific cathedrals, specific churches. For example, uh, the head of St. John the Baptist is said by the Church of San Silvestro, in Rome, to be there, and they've got it right there in the church, and pilgrims come, and they pay homage to it, and they, um, expect that the, The head of St. John the Baptist is going to perform miracles for them.
The problem is that the cathedral in Amiens, this is in France, also claims to have the head of St. John the Baptist, as does the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul.
All of these places are saying, “Hey, we've all got the head of St. John the Baptist.”
Now, I don't think that even Roman Catholics believe that there has been a miracle where this head of St. John the Baptist has split into three copies of itself so that there can be three magical objects so that pilgrims. Will come to a church and pray at that church and leave financial donations at that church.
You see, these holy relics are at shrines, and one of the things that happens at a Roman Catholic shrine is that people leave financial donations in exchange for the miracles that they believe they are going to benefit from the magic Roman Catholic spells that they are going to be the beneficiaries of while at these shrines.
Do you know what those three little kids said that the Virgin Mary said to them, when she appeared to them, but nobody else could see her, they said that the Virgin Mary said that everybody had to build a shrine there to the Virgin Mary at Fatima in Portugal.
Guess what? That shrine is still active today. And there are hordes of people who go to that shrine every year.
It's a major destination, and the town surrounding the shrine has all of these shops that sell religious relics, and people give money to the church, at the shrine, and people are making a killing, a killing for these relics.
Let me give you another example of the kind of relics that are out there in the world.
There is, um, the foreskin of Jesus. The foreskin of Jesus.
You know where the foreskin is, right? It's the little bit of the penis that is cut off from the body of a little boy when he's just a baby in Judaism, but also in most parts of Christianity. This is ritualized genital mutilation.
The Roman Catholic church has claimed that the foreskin of Jesus is a magical object that can perform miracles. Specifically, it can help women to give birth to babies, to get pregnant.
It can help men to become fertile when they have been infertile. It has magical powers, the foreskin of Jesus. There's just a little bit of a problem here.
The foreskin of Jesus has been claimed to be kept as an object by 31 different churches. 31 different churches in Europe have claimed that they have the holy foreskin of Jesus in France alone.
We have a church in Paris, one in Toulouse, one in shark, one in Metz, one in Conch, one in Lang, one in Besancon. You get the idea. There's one in Le Puy en Velet. I'm not pronouncing that exactly right. There's one in the abbey of Sharu, and we go up to Belgium and the Notre Dame Cathedral, not the famous one in France, but this one's in Belgium, just across the border. Oh, but back down in France. The church of Cologne, also has that foreskin of Jesus.
The foreskin of Jesus.
There was this problem in the Roman Catholic Church that so many churches said, we have it. We have it. We have it. We got it while we were on a Crusade, and we brought it back, and now we've got the foreskin of Jesus.
It began to look pretty ridiculous, and then, you know, people started telling jokes about it. It got really out of control.
So back in the 1600s, there was a Roman Catholic scholar and Vatican librarian named Leo Alatius. He said that what actually happened to the foreskin of Jesus was that when Jesus ascended to heaven, his foreskin ascended separately.
It rose through the sky into the heavens into outer space, and the foreskin of Jesus is what became the rings of the planet Saturn.
I'm not making this up. This is from a Catholic scholar, which tells you quite a bit about the quality of Catholic scholarship.
I hope that you understand what I'm talking about here. The main point is that this is all flamboyant bullshit.
There is a thousand year old, probably longer than that, tradition in Roman Catholic religion of just making up blatant lies about having a holy relic, which is, claiming, “We have the cup that caught the blood of Christ while he was on the cross. We have it in the shrine. Make a pilgrimage to our shrine and leave a financial donation. Oh, we have the toenail of Jesus. Come to our shrine. We have the foreskin of Jesus!”
Also, at shrines can be made when these undead spiritual beings appear.
An angel of the Lord came down and spoke to three children. It was the it turned out to be the virgin Mary in Fatima, Portugal, and let's build a shrine, and there are miracles. You can have your sicknesses healed if you come to our shrine. Give us money for this completely fraudulent faith healing that actually doesn't help anybody get healthy.
But boy, do they rake in the money, and it's not just the Roman Catholic church in that town, it's all the people in the town, the people in the restaurants, the hotels, the little shops that sell religious knickknacks, so that you can feel like you're closer to the Virgin Mary, and they're sold at a remarkable markup.
These are not just lies. These are cynical lies, and they're fairly blatant.
Just as we know that 31 different churches did not have the foreskin of Jesus, we know that in fact, on that day in 1918, the sun did not move around in the sky.
You know how we know it? No one else anywhere on earth reported the sun doing anything unusual, except for the people of Fatima, the Roman Catholic population of Fatima, which was already planning on building a shrine, and they just needed an excuse to get gullible people to come. And give them their money.
So this isn't just lying. It's not just dishonesty. It's exploitation. It's the use of faith to deceive people, to tell them that they can have miracles, that their health can be miraculously restored by the Virgin Mary if they come to Fatima.
I want you to think about this: What kind of Virgin Mary, what kind of God would only heal people's sicknesses, illnesses that they are suffering from, causing them terrible pain, and fear of death, would only do that if you come to Fatima, Portugal, and stay at a hotel and eat at a restaurant, and make a financial donation?
What kind of God is that? Well, that is the God that Ross Douthat is saying that everyone must believe in.
No, thank you, Ross Douthat. Yes, there are gullible people out there, but not everyone believes.