Oops
21 September 2005 by BobHow to Piss People Off: Naples Blood Boils at Miracle’s ‘Debunking’
Every year Neapolitans pack into the city’s cathedral to witness the “miracle”. In an atmosphere nearing hysteria, the archbishop holds up a glass phial that is said to contain the dried blood of San Gennaro, the city’s patron saint, and declares that it has liquefied. [...] Margherita Hack, an astrophysicist, said: “There is nothing mystical about this. You can make the so-called blood in your kitchen at home.” [...] The dark brown gel was solid until shaken , when it liquefied. Professor Hack said that the compound was hydrated iron oxide, or FeO (OH), which had the characteristics of blood.
And the clincher:
Marchese Pierluigi Sanfelice, an aristocrat who is one of the official guardians of the phial and takes part in the liquefaction ceremony, said that the Church had conducted tests on the phial in the 1980s which showed that its contents included haemoglobin, the key pigment in blood corpuscles.
Because we all know that if the church does a “scientific experiment” on a miracle, it’s just GOTTA be accurate…
22 September 2005, on 1:46 am
Hysterical. Yes, we need more controlled experiments conducted by the church.
22 September 2005, on 8:22 am
Agreed. Even though, I did post the entire Creation Science Textbook for all to read.
Trust me, it doesn’t take too long. Praise be to his meatballs.
22 September 2005, on 3:50 pm
If any of you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend Penn & Teller’s show on Showtime, Bullshit. They do an episode on ‘maricles,’ which is both funny and desturbing. These ‘events’ always remind me of the (geek alert) poster on Fox Mulder’s office wall that said “I Want To Believe.” These events show that the human animal, when it truly wants to believe something to be true, can and will ignore reason, proof, and common sense. Hard to believe we survived the evolutionary obstacle course to survive this long.
22 September 2005, on 3:50 pm
Sorry, I have to start proofreading my posts…………
24 September 2005, on 8:38 am
God can create the universe but he can only clue us in to his existence by screwing around with some crap in a vial once a year. I get it.
Seeing miracles like this makes me want to congregate with likeminded wackos and pretend to eat corpse.
24 September 2005, on 9:04 am
Right on, Ben. Ever read Carl Sagan’s “Contact”? Good movie, but way better book. Has these awesome moments where Ellie Arroway, Jodie Foster’s character in the movie, goes head-to-head with a Jimmy Swaggart character (named “Joss”) over issues of faith and superstition. Deals with many of the same issues you are raising here. I always think of the lyric the line in “Jesus Christ Superstar”:
“Every time I look at you I don’t understand
Why you let the things you did get so out of hand.
You’d have managed better if you’d had it planned.
Why’d you choose such a backward time in such a strange land?
If you’d come today you could have reached a whole nation.
Israel in four B.C. had no mass communication.”
From “Contact”:
“Now that’s an interesting one,” said Joss. “You’re talking, of course, about DNA. But you know the physician’s staff, the symbol of medicine? Army doctors wear it on their lapels. It’s called the caduceus. Shows two serpents intertwined. It’s a perfect double helix. From ancient times that’s been the symbol of preserving life. Isn’t this exactly the kind of connection you’re suggesting?”
“Well, I thought it’s a spiral, not a helix. But if there are enough symbols and enough prophecies and enough myth and folklore, eventually a few of them are going to fit some current scientific understanding purely by accident. But I can’t be sure. Maybe you’re right. Maybe the caduceus is a message from God. Of course, it’s not a Christian symbol, or a symbol of any of the major religions today. I don’t suppose you’d want to argue that the gods talked only to the ancient Greeks. What I’m saying is, if God wanted to send us a message, and ancient writings were the only way he could think of doing it, he could have done a better job. And he hardly had to confine himself to writings. Why isn’t there a monster crucifix orbiting the Earth? Why isn’t the surface of the Moon covered with the Ten Commandments? Why should God be so clear in the Bible and so obscure in the world?”
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Here are a bunch of these.