Closed as an argument for the Catholic faith in particular, you mean? Because there's obv still lots we don't know about this phenomenon.
Even so, it seems the fire meditation aspect is important both in the Buddhist case and the meditative experiences Scott discusses previously. I'm not sure to what degree the Fatima witnesses can be said to have done a similar "meditation".
Also, the aspect of the sun seemingly falling towards the Earth does not seem to be paralleled here.
So, I don't think Fatima proponents are completely KO here.
Do you actually think it’s plausible that God (the Catholic God) moved the sun around in the sky in 1917 to prove he exists? Can any adult pretend to believe in this without deep embarrassment?
Me personally? No. But I'm also not a Christian, many of whom do believe in all kinds of miracles, with a corresponding prior. And generally speaking, something being very strange or seemingly absurd can still be true, as we've discovered again and again. I don't think you need to be embarrassed of coming to strange conclusions, unless your epistemology is ridiculous, as well.
Also, the miracle could be a God-induced mass hallucination (whyever he would do any of this). Even if it was the physical sun moving, clearly he prevented it from having any global physical effects. So I guess it doesn't really matter whether the sun was moving or just appeared to be to many people, either one can be claimed a great miracle.
Oh, leave us not be embarrassed, as we are all so terribly, terribly, Adult here!
The older I get, the less I care about being adult and cool (not that I ever was) or about other people's opinions of me.
Honestly, when you're not keeping up with the Joneses, that is so much more relaxing and liberating. And that includes "but the Joneses would *never* believe the likes of this!"
What is that Lewis quote again?
“When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
Honey, I believe in transubstantiation. A mere spinning sun is nothing to that, if you ask me about "beliefs you should be embarrassed to hold as an adult".
A serious question from a (non-Catholic) Christian:
What exactly *is* transubstantiation? Like what do you believe physically happens? The blood is one thing, but what exactly does the bread become? Like pieces of miscellaneous flesh that genetically are pieces of Jesus' human body, but that don't correspond to an actual body part? What do you, specifically, believe to be happening during communion?
For my part, it's hard for me to gather that Jesus is saying that the bread and wine become literal human flesh and blood, but because God (and Jesus) are Spirit, I do believe that, spiritually, the bread and wine are Jesus' flesh and blood, in a similar way that the Church is the body of Christ in the world. Just not His individual, human body.
You seem to be quite knowledgeable about Catholic things, so I'm curious what you personally believe transubstantiation to be.
This is indeed a deep question; there's the various Protestant views of the Eucharist/Lord's Supper/Holy Communion which arose at the time of the Reformation (but some of which certainly had been percolating for a long time before), the Catholic view as it became defined, and I think the Orthodox view but I don't know enough about the fine points of their theology to comment. All I know there is that Catholics can, if necessary, receive the Orthodox sacrament but from the Orthodox point of view they are not in communion with us and would not practice open communion since they feel the theologies are too divergent.
Short answer (since this is something I do need to get deep into, but haven't the exact time right now): yes, I do believe His flesh is real food and His blood is real drink (see John 6) and so I have a very, very high view of the Eucharist (and rather deplore the modern Catholic emphasis on it as a celebration/shared meal than the older view of it as the sacrifice of the altar):
"52 The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” 53 So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. 54 Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. 55 For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. 56 Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. 57 As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever feeds on me, he also will live because of me. 58 This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like the bread the fathers ate, and died. Whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.” 59 Jesus said these things in the synagogue, as he taught at Capernaum."
Now, as to *how* this happens, yeah that's where all the arguing starts. But it's not merely spiritual or under the form of or only if you're a believer. But neither is it "chopping up" the glorified human body of Christ or lumps of His flesh or Luther's mockery of splitting up the body that is in Heaven. What we've got are best-guess philosophical statements necessary to define the doctrine, but in the end it is indeed a Mystery, the mystery of faith. Setting aside Eucharistic miracles, you are not going to take a communion host or the wine after both have been consecrated, stick them into a mass spectrometer or other fancy scientific process of your choice, and find the bread is now human flesh and the wine is now human blood. That is not how it works, and the basic easy sceptical approach of "foolish believers, it's just a cracker!" (thank you PZ Myers and don't think I've forgotten that stunt you pulled yet) is not going to disenchant those who truly believe it into "oh my gosh, all this time I was fooled!"
"1376 The Council of Trent summarizes the Catholic faith by declaring: "Because Christ our Redeemer said that it was truly his body that he was offering under the species of bread, it has always been the conviction of the Church of God, and this holy Council now declares again, that by the consecration of the bread and wine there takes place a change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood. This change the holy Catholic Church has fittingly and properly called transubstantiation."
1377 The Eucharistic presence of Christ begins at the moment of the consecration and endures as long as the Eucharistic species subsist. Christ is present whole and entire in each of the species and whole and entire in each of their parts, in such a way that the breaking of the bread does not divide Christ."
I do need to take time to think about this and go into it, to give you a proper answer as well as I can, because as C.S. Lewis so sensibly and wisely said in "The Screwtape Letters":
"The real fun is working up hatred between those who say "mass" and those who say "holy communion" when neither party could possibly state the difference between, say, Hooker's doctrine and Thomas Aquinas', in any form which would hold water for five minutes."
I also have a very high view of the Eucharist (is it technically not the Eucharist if I'm not Catholic? Like would it just be considered a false imitation? I really don't know much about Catholicism, nor do I know what Luther had to say about it) seeing how it is something Jesus commanded, and people died when they took it in a dishonoring way.
I think it is a little bit of an error to say that the Eucharist isn't "merely" spiritual, because spiritual things are superior to physical. The triune God Himself is Spirit, and wasn't phsyical until he humbled himself and became human. Even other sacraments, such as marriage, are physical images of spiritual truths. It seems that God created the physical world so intricately that it can represent spiritual truths in countless ways.
As for John 6, I still just don't get from what Jesus said that the Eucharist is physically, literally the human flesh and blood of Jesus. Earlier in the chapter:
31 Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written: ‘He gave them bread out of heaven to eat.’” 32 Jesus then said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, it is not Moses who has given you the bread out of heaven, but it is My Father who gives you the true bread out of heaven. 33 For the bread of God is that which comes down out of heaven and gives life to the world.” 34 Then they said to Him, “Lord, always give us this bread.”
35 Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; the one who comes to Me will not be hungry, and the one who believes in Me will never be thirsty. 36 But I said to you that you have indeed seen Me, and yet you do not believe.
In regard to verse 36, I'd like to point to 1 Corinthians 10:
1 For I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that our fathers were all under the cloud and they all passed through the sea; 2 and they all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea; 3 and they all ate the same spiritual food, 4 and all drank the same spiritual drink, for they were drinking from a spiritual rock which followed them; and the rock was Christ. 5 Nevertheless, with most of them God was not pleased; for their dead bodies were spread out in the wilderness.
In the same way as the Jews Jesus was addressing, the Israelites in the had Christ *truly* with them, but they did not believe and died in the wilderness. But that spiritual rock that they drank from was, actually, Christ, just not His human flesh and blood. Anyway, taking these two passages together, it seems to me like the true food and drink are spiritual, not physical.
Earlier in John, Jesus says that His food is to do the will of the One who sent Him, and then later in chapter 6 in this interaction we've both referenced he says "For this is the will of My Father, that everyone who sees the Son and believes in Him will have eternal life, and I Myself will raise him up on the last day." It is God's will for everyone to see and believe in Jesus, and this is what gives life, which Jesus repeatedly says that He is the bread of life, and whoever eats of it will not see death. Finally, at the end of this John 6 passage, Jesus tells his disciples:
"It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh provides no benefit; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit, and are life."
All of this together makes it seem clear to me that the true bread and drink that Jesus is talking about is purely spiritual, and that is why it can be called "true". In that case, maybe none of these passages have anything to do with communion, but then there still seems like there isn't any scripture support that communion is actually human flesh and blood. I can only conclude that it is a sacred physical representation of spiritual truth, just as mostly every kind of ritual God commanded man to do is.
But I didn't mean by my question to start a debate and I know you didn't intend to from your reply. I just wanted to give as thoughtful an answer as you gave instead of just a "nice 😃👍" I do appreciate you taking the time to engage me on this.
So there's no materially observable difference, just esoteric residue usable to identify affected organisms later on? Sort of like how carbon-12 and carbon-14 are effectively indistinguishable in terms of chemical properties.
One analogy I use for the process: if there's a callus of dead skin on your toe, you would consider that part of your body. But if something causes part of that skin to flake off, then it is no longer part of your body, even though its chemical composition is unchanged. Thus, the status of something being part of your body isn't simply a matter of material composition, but has a metaphysical element (and it can't be reduced to a matter of contact or chemical joining either - if I glued someone's hand to a chair, most people would not consider the chair part of their body).
Obviously, it's still a big step to go from there to believing that someone (Jesus) can metaphysically make bread and wine part of Himself, while the physical entities still appear distinct. As a Catholic, I consider this part of the mystery of the Eucharist, and a result of a God who perfectly loves Creation, and thus cannot offer us anything less than the entirety of Himself.
Oh thank you, I wanted to respond, but mine would have been from a point of less conviction. (I'm a crazy old man, who puts ufos at >80%.)
I also wanted to add, that with ufo>80%, esp > 90% and all that entails, I'm way more likely to just believe in other peoples miracles. It becomes the 'easiest' explanation. Maybe it's all easier to understand if all the gods are real. And maybe it's true, at least at some level.
I'd have to listen to the podcast to find out what exactly he said and how he said it, and I come out in lumps when I have to listen to podcasts. I do wonder if Vance was pulling legs over the recent ruffle around UAPs.
If Vance is tying it to his faith, let me note that the Catholic Church has no official position on aliens and UFOs, so if individuals consider these may be demonic phenomena, they can do so, but it's not necessary or required to believe that aliens exist, don't exist, or are demons if you're a Catholic:
Not even closed as an argument for the Catholic faith, since if it's a miracle and Catholics are right, it was a miracle that God did for a bunch of pagans. Tons of testimony of that happening in the bible.
That's fair, though I guess the Buddhists could claim the same. However, IIUC these miracles happen more often in Catholic contexts, which would favor the Catholic interpretation.
I dunno man it's ineffable or something. I'm not allowed to speculate because that's for the Church Hierarchy and reading the Bible is for heretics but He has His reasons.
Someone should do a similar deep dive on Ethan Muse's recent post about a totally different miracle (actually, a group of miracles) related to St. Pio of Pietrelcina. He reportedly had stigmata that oozed large amounts of blood and emanated a pleasant odor. He could also allegedly raise his body temperature to very high levels that should have killed him. Muse has a long post about all this. https://motivacredibilitatis.substack.com/p/st-pio-of-pietrelcina
I thought https://thetowerofbabble.substack.com/p/when-is-a-miracle-of-god-not-a-miracle was pretty good. It's a bit unfocused and more interested in the personalities than in an exact deconstruction of what's going on, but if you CTRL+F "carbolic acid" you get to a discussion of claims that Padre Pio ordered various chemicals that could be used to fake wounds.
Yeah, that's an old one that has been knocking around for a long time. I'm agnostic on Padre Pio; a lot of people have deep devotion to him, but there's a substantial minority which have been sceptical (up to accusing him of fakery) as well all along.
An anecdote, which has fascinated me, and which may be relevant given our friend who likes to discuss UAPs, is the one about American pilots allegedly seeing visions of Padre Pio during the Second World War. We've got an (alleged) American general of our own testifying to this! Hold on to your hats, chaps! Veracity of this not established and I'm certainly not going to make any claims here about monks zooming airplanes 😁 (One of the things I do like about being Catholic, as well as it being so terribly, terribly non-adult and embarrassing a la Jeremy's critique, is that we go big or go home on stuff like this):
"THE TESTIMONY OF USAF COMMANDING GENERAL NATHAN F. TWINING
Stationed at the base was General Nathan F. Twining and upon hearing these bizarre reports of a flying monk, he decided to lead the bombing squad himself to see what was going on.
He couldn’t believe that there was a monk who was flying in the air and that the stories the pilots were telling about their bomb bay doors refusing to open or their bombs falling harmlessly to the ground and not exploding were true, let alone the even crazier reports that planes were being turned around in midair by the flying monk.
General Twining happened to be in Bari at the time he kept hearing these incredible stories. He didn’t believe the pilots and he thought that they were seeing things. He decided to launch another bombing raid, so he got into one of the bombers and they all took off for San Giovanni Rotondo to hit their target. He reported that as they neared the monastery in San Giovanni Rotondo, a monk appeared in the clouds right in front of his plane and that he was flying at the same speed that he was. He reported that the monk had his hands extended and immediately, all the bombers bomb bay doors were opened, the bombs fell harmlessly into the open fields below and their planes turned around by themselves. They aborted the mission and returned to Bari where he filed his own incredible eyewitness account."
"This extraordinary story about Padre Pio is told by Fr. Damaso di Sant’Elia, superior of the Pianisi convent, in Italy. The report appears formally in “Positio”, the official document that exposes the defense of the canonization of the famous Capuchin friar, who was awarded the stigmata of the Passion of Christ.
“Several pilots of British and American aviation, of various nationalities and different religions, who, during the Second World War, after September 8, 1943, were in the area of Bari to carry out missions in Italian territory, were witnesses of a unusual fact. In carrying out their duties, some airmen passed through the Gargano region, near San Giovanni Rotondo, and saw a ‘monk’ in the sky who was forbidden to drop bombs on the spot.
In Foggia and Apúlia almost all there were bombings on several occasions, but, incredibly, in the area of San Giovanni Rotondo (where Padre Pio lived) a bomb never fell. Direct witness of this fact was the general of the Italian air force, Bernardo Rossini, who, at the time, was part of the Air Unit Command together with the allied forces.
General Rossini told me that, among the military, there was talk of a ‘monk’ who appeared in the sky and made the planes withdraw. Many laughed in disbelief at these stories, but, due to the repeated occurrence of the episodes, and always with different pilots, the general decided to intervene personally: he took command of a squadron of bombers to destroy a German ammunition depot that was right in San Giovanni Rotondo.
We were all extremely curious to know the result of the operation. Therefore, when the flight returned, we immediately went to find the general, who, astonished, said that, as soon as he arrived at the site, both he and his pilots saw the ‘monk’ figure in the sky with their hands raised; the bombs dropped by themselves and fell in a forest; and the planes came around without any pilot intervention.
Everyone wondered who was that ‘ghost’ that the planes obeyed. Upon hearing that in San Giovanni Rotondo there was a friar with stigmas, considered holy by the community, the general thought that perhaps he was the ‘monk’ seen in heaven and decided to check it out as soon as possible. When the war was over, this was the first thing he did. Accompanied by some pilots, he went to the Capuchin convent and, crossing the threshold of the sacristy, found himself facing several friars, among whom he immediately recognized the one who had stopped his planes.
Padre Pio came over and, placing his hand on his shoulder, said: ‘So it was you who wanted to kill us all?’. The general knelt before Padre Pio, who, as usual, had spoken to him in the Benevento dialect. The general, however, was certain that the ‘monk’ had spoken to him in English. The two became friends and the general, who was a Protestant, converted to Catholicism ”.
Source: Positio III / 1, p. 689-690"
Julie over at Happy Catholic has some posts about Padre Pio, the story I like is this one:
"Deacon Greg Kandra has, in years past, featured a 2009 homily he gave focusing on Padre Pio and tells this story which reflects the saint's fine sense of humor and irony.
One of my favorite stories about him happened during the early 1960s.
Italy was in crisis. The Red Brigade was sparking violence in Rome, and it was considered dangerous to travel around the country. For protection, people began carrying pictures of Padre Pio.
During this time, Padre Pio had to leave his village to visit Rome, and one of the other friars asked him, “Aren’t you worried about the Red Brigade?”
"The 'testimony' attributed to Twining is much more dubious. When you trace the actual source, the story undergoes a significant transformation. The testimony that appears in the official Positio (the canonization document for Padre Pio) comes not from Twining but from General Bernardo Rosini of the Italian Air Force. Rosini described an unnamed "commanding general" who led a bombing squadron and encountered the apparition. In Rosini's account, this unnamed American commander is never identified as Twining.
The Italian Tribune article and many popular retellings have grafted Twining's name onto this unnamed "commanding general" — but I could find no primary source, military report, memoir, or official document in which Twining himself gave this testimony. As one researcher noted, 'this article says Twining also converted to Catholicism, but I can't find anything to confirm that,' and the same blogger observed that "allegedly there are Army Air Force reports about this, but nobody seems to quote one or show pictures of them, online."
A skeptical analysis also raised a logical timeline problem: the Italian Co-belligerent Air Force was only formed in October 1943 after the Italian Armistice in September, while the last air raid on Foggia occurred on September 17–18, raising questions about how an Italian general could have been fighting alongside the Allies before the armistice."
Yeah, like I'm gonna believe a Talkie Toaster over a bona fide saint 🤣
This is one of the "nobody says you have to believe it's true (thank God)" kind of stories that pop up all over the place in the likes of the Golden Legend.
Weirdly, while doing research into the Dhammakaya Sun Miracle, I found Buddhist analogues of this, too. There are stories in Thailand about Buddhist monks and nuns appearing in the sky to thwart Allied bombing raids during WWII
Levitating saints are part of the tradition; the one everyone knows about (or they used to in my day) is St. Joseph of Cupertino because he's the guy you pray to for help with your exams, due to him being so hopelessly stupid he kept failing when applying to join a religious congregation until he finally (whether it was the bishop taking pity on him or what) got an incredibly easy question that even he could answer:
"His struggles in being ordained to the priesthood required two providential coincidences involving his exams. These incidents have earned him the title of the patron of students, exam takers and those with learning difficulties or disabilities, while his levitation has earned him the patronage of pilots and those traveling by air.
...Feeling drawn to religious life, in 1620 he applied to the Conventual Franciscan friars, but was rejected due to his lack of education. He then applied to the Capuchin friars in Martino, near Taranto, by whom he was accepted in 1620 as a lay brother, but he was dismissed as his continued ecstasies made him unfit for the duties required of him.
After Joseph returned to the scorn of his family, he pleaded with the Conventual friars near Cupertino to be allowed to serve in their stables. After several years of working there, he had so impressed the friars with the devotion and simplicity of his life that he was admitted to their Order, destined to become a priest, in 1625. However, he struggled greatly with the required academic studies. He could not comment on any scripture passage except one: "Beatus venter qui Te portavit" (Blessed be the womb that bore Thee), Luke 11:27. In his exam for ordination to the diaconate, the Bishop giving the exam opened the Gospels at random and requested that Joseph expand upon this[,the] only verse that he knew. He was able to expand upon it well and was ordained to the diaconate. Then when he was going to be tested to be ordained a priest, the Bishop questioned several of Joseph's fellow candidates, and when they replied excellently, the Bishop did not question the rest, including Joseph, assuming all the candidates were equally prepared. This allowed Joseph to be ordained a priest on 28 March 1628. He was then sent to the convent of Santa Maria della Grotella, just outside Cupertino, where he spent the next 15 years."
I wasn’t particularly impressed by this post. Stan omits testimony that corroborates St. Pio’s explanation of the veratridine and doesn’t meaningfully engage with Ethan’s arguments about the infeasibility of creating and maintaining the wounds through chemical burns, or the implausibility of him doing so given what we know about his character. I recommend reading Ethan’s original post if you haven’t—I’m not Catholic, but it’s compelling and I think deserving of a better response.
Pio’s explanation of the veratridine is that he used it to play a sneeze-inducing prank on his brothers, since Father Ignazio had done the same to him. Father Ignazio, when questioned, corroborates that this occurred.
Here is the relevant testimony:
"Q. Whether, specifically, he has ever put veratridine in it. A. No, I have the veratridine. In another convent we had a pharmacy for the Community, which was very numerous: There was no pharmacy in town. A pharmacist gave me one gram of it, and I still have some. One evening, joking with the Brothers, I made them try the effects it produces when it is drawn close to the nose. Padre Pio, too, took some, and he had to go back to his cell because he couldn’t stop sneezing."
He asked for four grams. And I think he only asked for veratridine once. The first time he asked for carbolic acid, supposedly for a different purpose.
If you can make a plausible case that at least some of this person's alleged miracles were produced through fraudulent means, that goes a long way toward casting doubt on the rest, without needing to account for every single instance individually.
I agree, but I’d be interested in something more comprehensive. I feel like I have a total explanation of Fatima after Scott’s post not just something casting slight doubt on the miracle.
Even though I haven’t read those articles yet, it might be worth mentioning that in southern Italy, Padre Pio of Pietrelcina is still one of the most revered and beloved saints. It’s almost impossible to count how many statues of him you see. he’s everywhere.
I am a little unclear on one point: do the Buddhists believe that āloka kasina creates visions of the Sun in the mind/spirit of the practitioner, or in reality ? That is to say, if the meditating Buddhist glances up at the Sun and beholds all those swirling colors and the floating figure of Luang Pu Sodh; and a regular guy happened to be passing by on his way to work; would the Buddhist expect that guy to also see Luang Pu Sodh up in the sky ?
I don't know what they believe, but it seems that nobody else in Bangkok saw anything odd about the sun that day, which matches all the Catholic miracles besides the first (Ethan claims there were distant witnesses to the first; the later ones included gatherings in big cities where nobody else in the city saw anything).
I spent over a decade in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, and I don't think there's a single answer as different people obviously believe different things, but Buddhism is strongly biased towards the first-person experience, so creating visions in people's minds would probably be the go-to belief.
Then again, the absolute distinction between a mind inside and a world outside is considered suspect in much of Buddhism, so this gets more nuanced.
The story/legend of Milarepa (11th-century Tibetan spiritual figure) has lots of miracles in it IIRC. At one time he supposedly made himself fit within a goat horn, without his body getting any smaller or the horn getting any bigger. This is looks to me like it's meant more as a miracle in conceptual space than in pure physicality.
> Then again, the absolute distinction between a mind inside and a world outside is considered suspect in much of Buddhism, so this gets more nuanced.
That's a very good point, thanks, I should've remembered that. If the entire world is an illusion and so is the self, then the boundaries between miracles and reality to indeed become quite blurred.
I am confused that people still struggle with translations. Aren't machine translation a solved problem? Or is my outlook too rosy because the two languages I speak are extremely common?
The Russian word for blackmail (шантаж - pronounced shan-taj) is actually French in origin (chantage), and the Russian word вымогательство (usually translated as extortion) is often used to refer to blackmail as well, so perhaps that's the word Zelensky used (in Russian/Ukrainian) or meant to use (in English)?
My understanding is that Ukrainian is used widely in Lviv and other western Ukrainian cities, as well as rural Ukraine, especially west of Kyiv, but the city elites in Kyiv and most central/eastern Ukrainian cities indeed mostly speak Russian (or at least spoke until the war).
I took the person to mean not that “we now have the technology to perfectly render every meaning perfectly clear in every language” but rather “we now have the technology so that anyone can get the basic sense of anything written in any language”.
The trick is that sometimes "getting the basic sense of something" can be actively misleading as to what it means. It might be in some sense 'accurate to the basic sense' to translate "I'm going to punch your lights out" as "I'm going to break your lamps with my fist," but a person could get a very confused idea about what the phrase means.
Idioms aren't the only problem, just one of the most obvious ones (the fact that, as noted above, some languages distinguish between related concepts like blackmail and extortion while others do not is another good example.
I find it fascinating how can you turn any topic (now literally including the Buddhist Sun miracle) into debating Ukraine.
I suspect that this entire debate about electricity is mostly a political stunt for both sides. The part of electricity that Ukraine received from Slovakia was relatively small, and it is sold on a common market anyway, so Ukraine can simply buy more from Poland, probably for the same price. The electrons do not come with "made in Slovakia" tags.
Seems like an LLM could even do the searches in Thai, assuming that the newspaper allows robots to browse old pages. (But it’s possible they haven’t digitized newspaper articles from 1998 - I don’t know if the press in Thailand is still mostly the same companies that were operating 30 years ago or if there’s been a lot of churn over the past few decades).
Are the two languages you speak in the same family or structurally similar?
While the situation has improved significantly in the last few years, Japanese ->English machine translation can still get very confused because the Japanese language omits details (often pronouns) that are required to make a grammatically correct sentence in English. So in a sentence with multiple people doing verbs, it can be near impossible to translate without context and an accurate world model. (There are other issues like cultural terms or set phrases that don't translate well, concepts that are distinct in one language but come under a single word in the other, and sentences that trail off getting mangled because the word order is different and therefore the missing word at the end would be in the *middle* of the English sentence).
I'm guessing Thai is far enough from English and Buddhist religious concepts have enough specialized terminology that a human translator would have to rephrase, give a longer explanation or add some footnotes. But LLM-powered translation generally isn't able to step back and make that kind of editorial decision, it just kind of picks the "closest" word, and that can end up with the resulting passage being... if not wrong on the level of individual words, confusing or misleading in the impression it gives compared to the original.
LLMs surely aren’t doing the translation word by word! The whole point of the attention mechanism is that they can get some of the long range connections and context!
I’ve observed that when Google Translate tries to translate Japanese to English, it doesn’t do a word for word translation, but it silently omits stuff that it doesn’t know what to do with. In some cases, a word for word translation would be better than what Google Translate does because it would be confusing rather than misleading.
I haven’t tried using chatbots to translate Japanese, but here is a Deepseek translation from Latin to English:
Input:
Ut te quaeram mente pura,
sit haec mea pri-ma cura.
Output:
With a pure mind to seek you,
may this be my first care.
This is pretty close, but while Deepseek reorders the words in the first line, the order it chooses is wrong. It should be something like:
To seek you with a pure mind,
may this be my first care.
I’m not sure whether the second line is comprehensible unless you know what it is trying to say; could you tell that “this” refers to “seeking you with a pure heart?”
**"That I may seek you with a pure mind, let this be my first care."**
This is a line from the *Jesu dulcis memoria*, a medieval Latin hymn. It expresses a devotional longing — the speaker's primary concern being to seek (God/Jesus) with an undivided, sincere heart.
ChatGPT Extended Thinking says:
“Yes, of course. A natural translation is:
**“That I may seek you with a pure mind, let this be my first care.”**
More literally:
* **Ut te quaeram** = “that I may seek you”
* **mente pura** = “with a pure mind”
* **sit haec mea prima cura** = “let this be my first concern/care”
The split **pri-ma** is just a line break in **prima**.
Gemini 3 says:
Gemini said
Here is the translation of your Latin text:
"That I may seek you with a pure mind, / let this be my first concern." (You can also read it as: "To seek you with a pure heart, / may this be my primary care.")
Word-by-Word Breakdown
Ut te quaeram: "That I may seek you" (or "To seek you")
mente pura: "with a pure mind" (or "with a pure heart")
sit haec: "let this be" (or "may this be")
mea prima cura: "my first care" (or "my first concern"). Note: The hyphen in "pri-ma" is just a syllable break, which is very common when Latin text is printed under musical notes in a choir score.
A Bit of Context
These lines are drawn from the Oratio Rhythmica, a famous medieval Latin poem (often attributed to the 13th-century monk Arnulf of Leuven) that meditates on the body of Christ. If you encountered this couplet recently, there is a very good chance it was from sheet music! It was famously set to music by the Baroque composer Dieterich Buxtehude in his 1680 choral masterpiece, Membra Jesu Nostri (specifically in the second cantata, Ad Genua, which translates to "To the Knees").
Would you like me to translate the surrounding lines of this stanza for you, or help you with any other Latin from this text?
That's interesting that Claude and Gemini both confidently identify the source, but name different sources! (I don't know if this might be a text that is shared between those two sources, or if both might be wrong, or what.)
Yes, they can get *some* of the context, which is why the situation has gone from "near useless" to "okay with a grain of salt", but to give an example, about a year ago a Japanese artist I follow on X posted about being flashed by a pervert. Because, in Japanese, you can easily construct a complete sentence without saying "he" or "she", there was no pronoun, but any human who read it would immediately understand from context this was a man flashing his bits. Grok got confused by the lack of pronouns, and (as it often does in these situations) just picked semi-randomly, using "she" 2/3 times.
People have noticed that tweets about celebrities, fictional characters and also Pokemon often have the names substituted at random. Like it knows 'this is a Pokemon name' but not a 1 to 1 correspondence with the English name, so it just throws a random pokemon in there based on whatever its weights are (even though fansites document the localized names so it should be in the dataset somewhere). This happens to human names reasonably often too. Most wordplay gets totally mangled, because there's no mechanism for Grok or Google Translate to step out of the immediate translation and put a footnote like a human translator might do. In the same way, it can hallucinate about or simply silently omit specialized terminology that doesn't have an easy English equivalent.
If you're using the chat interface, you can somewhat get around this by asking it to *explain* certain passages rather than translate, but that requires you to know where the problematic sections are in the first place. If you just ask it to 'translate this', it will go top to bottom with the usual failure modes just like if you pasted into Google Translate or DeepL.
A few months ago I complained about many online translators failing in situations where the same English word is used for two different meanings. For example "state" can mean either "country" or "configuration". Both Google Translate and DeepL treated these words as synonyms, to the degree that they used it interchangeably e.g. when translating from Russian to Slovak, despite that these are different words in both languages, so there is a simple 1:1 relation.
Generally, Google Translate sucks at translating from non-English to non-English, because the result is as if it translated through English (even if most likely this is not what actually happens; but the results seem similar for some reason). Like even where the translation from Russian to Slovak consists in 90% of transcribing Cyrillic into Latin, and the remaining 10% is changing some vowels, Google Translate somehow manages to rearrange the words randomly, and flip a coin for each word's grammatical gender.
In practice, if I want to read an article in Russian (but also in Swedish, etc.), translating it to English works *much* better than translating it to Slovak.
That said, LLMs are much better at translating, probably because they understand the context. Claude can translate from Russian to Slovak almost perfectly -- and the few remaining imperfections are because it generally has some small problems with Slovak, not with translating per se. (That is, when it makes a mistake, it is typically using a word from some other Slavic language, not choosing a word that would be a synonym in English.)
A rock-ribbed Protestant of yore would believe there was little to no difference between the two, they both have monks and nuns and relics and saints and all kinds of heathen nonsense!
While I’ve unfortunately still not been able to find any OG newspaper accounts (except for a very brief mention in the NYT, which does include ONE eyewitness) or anyone willing to chat, I HAVE collected about 40-50ish testimonies atp, mostly from temple publications but probably about a dozen from forum posts and Facebook. I definitely intend a follow-up post at some point, but I think I’ll hold off snd see what others can find out.
Also, a friend of mine may have found ANOTHER Buddhist sun miracle in Sri Lanka. No first person accounts yet, but the brief description (I’ll post link when I get home) is VERY suggestive. Rainbow rays of light, sun “looking like the moon,” colors reflecting on the crowd, etc.
Overall the biggest difference is many more people in Thailand seem to have seen “holy figures” in the sun than saw the same in Portugal, but besides that I’d say the visual effect is basically identical,
I visited the Dhammakaya temple a couple years ago. “Culty” is an apt description. Its sheer scale is quite impressive though. The grounds are said to be big enough to accommodate one million meditators.
This is the first time I’ve heard of that fatima miracle happening there.
I visited in January after attending a Dhammakaya meditation retreat in Pai. It was an object of fascination (and meditation distraction) to consider what exactly I was inside of. My conclusions:
On the cult spectrum, it’s pretty harmless, especially to the westerners they’re trying to attract. The retreat staff was clearly there for CSAT scores, not as an obvious exploitation funnel. They did a great job. At the end of the retreat we were invited to join weekly zoom meditation sessions, that’s about it.
For Thais, Dhammakaya looked more like Texas Megachurch than “cult”. Buddhism is (and always has been) “dying out” due to its fundamental disgust with materiality. Thailand is a Buddhist country in name only, Thais go to temple to light incense for ancestors and pray for good luck. You have to search hard to find a meditator, even in the temples.
Dhammakaya has an appealing prosperity gospel wrapping a meditation revival.
Rather than *cult*, the label I left with was *bulletproof money laundering scheme*. Thai Buddhist political influence survived into modernity and is well insulated.
The other forest retreats I attended were all prototypically austere, enforcing Theravada lay precepts, old school chanting and alms bowls and silence, and purely donation-funded. The Dhammakaya retreat was closer to spa weekend. Private air conditioned private bungalows on a manicured compound. Quite lovely!
Pretty good retreat container, less so the content. Genuine Buddhist Monks (TM) with iPads and PowerPoints. Ten “Great Master” quotes per Buddha quote. I felt bad for uninitiated retreatants getting their introduction to the dhamma there.
Thank you that was an informative response. I used to attend vipassana retreats at Wat Kow Tham on Ko Phangam. Very austere and very very effective.
My wife of 30 years is from Bangkok. What you said about most Thais not really practicing Buddhist meditation is spot on. They are “Buddhist” like most Americans are “Christian”.
I was skeptical of the 'divine miracle' explanation even before this.
It would be a little strange for the omnipotent creator of the universe to suspend the laws of physics to create an honest-to-goodness miracle, only to produce... a strange optical effect, basically identical to a fairly common optical effect you get from staring at the Sun. If you're going to break the laws of physics in order to convince people, why not write I AM THE LORD YOUR GOD in fiery letters a thousand miles high across the stratosphere? Approximately a billion people would see it, and there would be no possible way to write it off as anything other than a divine miracle.
But no, instead we have a group of people who would fit into a single subway car, talking about an optical effect they saw when looking at the Sun, eerily similar to the exact kind of optical effect people often get when looking at bright lights.
As weird as it was, and your efforts to investigate it were fascinating, but it still doesn't pass the smell test.
One thing I find interesting about this is that the Old Testament is absolutely full of miracles which would be far more compelling evidence of the existence of a particular god with specific intentions than anything we normally hear about in the present day, if they could be properly authenticated as actually happening, and yet they simply don't fall within the sphere of what most believers think we should expect miracles to ever be like.
To a lot of people, "miracles" are essentially synonymous with apparently purposeful, surprising coincidences. Sometimes, a personalized voice which speaks inside a person's head and offers uplifting or useful messages. Occasionally, some hard to explain but unobserved event, like "I was alone in the pool, and should have drowned, but when I woke up, I was lying by the side of the pool."
Where are all the cases of the ground opening up and swallowing people into the underworld? Or people being smote by heavenly fire? Or religious leaders bringing people back from the dead? It's not as if God ever makes any statement in the Bible that he's going to stop doing that sort of thing.
For the "heavenly fire" bit, I thinking of stuff like Elijah calling down heavenly fire to light the offering to Yahweh, after it's been soaked with water, while the offering to Baal is stacked with dry kindling. If that kind of thing happened for real, and was well documented, it would be pretty strong evidence in favor of "Yahweh is real, stronger than Baal."
"Earthquakes and landslides" is a very different matter from "Every single person who was protesting that we don't need a priestly class, and Israelites should just be able to commune with God directly, has the earth open up underneath them and gets dropped into the underworld." That would also be super compelling evidence, if it were reliably attested to as something that actually happened. Imagine how differently the Protestant/Catholic split would have gone, if God had stepped in to provide that kind of unambiguous feedback!
I don't believe distilled alcohol had been discovered yet, let alone barrels and barrels of it being accessible to pour over the offering. The highest concentrations of alcohol you can get by fermentation, rather than distillation, are not flammable.
I think that by far the simplest explanation of the story, like so many others in the Bible, is that it was made up. Which also explains why, at the time it was written, there were still Baal-worshipers around, rather than the authors of the Bible being able to write "and because of all these obvious miracles, the followers of Baal all started worshiping Yahweh instead."
Yeah I don’t think there’s any interesting question about divine miracles here. The interesting question is about what the visual effect is, and what it takes to trigger it, since it seems to have a few similarities to basic features of looking at bright lights, but also a lot of very specific and distinctive effects.
"Approximately a billion people would see it, and there would be no possible way to write it off as anything other than a divine miracle."
You probably weren't around for similar discussions years ago on SlateStarCodex where a few people said that if they witnessed something like that, they would prefer to believe they had gone raving mad and were hopelessly insane and delusional and hallucinating, or that it was aliens trying to trick us, or something, anything other than yes, God exists.
Any explanation so long as they could hold on to rational materialism and science/scientism.
"30 And he said, ‘No, father Abraham, but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.’ 31 He said to him, ‘If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.’”
I'm probably not sitting at the extremes, but I'm pretty far towards the end of being absolutely convinced that nothing like the God of the Bible exists in any form, and that purported evidence for such is imaginary, and if I observed something like flaming letters in the sky proclaiming to be a message from God almighty, I'd probably chalk it up to delusion on my end. But if a billion people at the same time all saw the same thing, and documented and discussed this with each other to the point that I couldn't chalk it up to delusion without supposing that I was imagining an ongoing parallel coherent societal framework, I'd conclude it had probably genuinely happened.
If I *only* observed that as the one grand-scale, well-authenticated miracle which testified specifically to the reality of the God of the Bible, I'd be pretty confused, and not be sure what to think, because this is a highly artificial situation which we probably shouldn't expect to arise in a real world, either one where the God of the Bible does or doesn't exist. But if I lived in a world where well authenticated miracles occurred on a regular basis, testifying specifically to the reality of the God of the Bible and not other deities, I'd absolutely believe in the God of the Bible. The Bible itself depicts just such a world, and I think too many religious people allow themselves to reconcile themselves to the idea that *of course* the world we observe in real life doesn't look like the one depicted in the Bible, and we shouldn't expect it to, even granting that the religion is true. But I don't think that's a particularly reasonable thing to grant in the first place. The Bible *could* simply depict a world like we actually observe, and make a much better case for itself.
Yeah, that was always a major disconnect for me. In the holy books -- Buddhist as well as Christian -- you see holy men walking around casting miracles left and right. And I'm talking big miracles here: mass healing, turning staves into snakes and people into animals, levitation at will, etc. The texts themselves also say, "if you follow these practices and believe, you too can perform such miracles". Yet when I look at the real world, I see none of that; and the events that are claimed as miracles are always closer to "burnt piece of toast looks kind of like Jesus maybe" as opposed to "look, I can hover above the parking lot while juggling fireballs".
"But if a billion people at the same time all saw the same thing, and documented and discussed this with each other to the point that I couldn't chalk it up to delusion without supposing that I was imagining an ongoing parallel coherent societal framework, I'd conclude it had probably genuinely happened."
Oh, I think those who are inclined to be sceptical would write off a mere billion - "if it's real, why didn't *everyone* on earth see it, huh?"
We have the multiple witnesses at Fatima being dismissed as crowd hysteria and contagion, after all. "So what if a hundred people said they saw it? why wasn't it five hundred people? why wasn't it everyone in Portugal? in Europe? in the Western hemisphere, huh?"
Skeptics would not use crowd contagion for a continent spanning thing. You can explain one pre-primed crowd with crowd contagion, you can't explain 200,000 independent crowds of many different types across multiple countries witnessing the same event.
Crowd contagion affects one place and one group; it makes "10000 people in this crowd saw this" stories less convincing (and the exact crowd size less important) because it makes the individual observations less independent than they may appear. Like if an angel flew over a city, it'd be more credible if 50 independent groups of 100 reported it than a singular megachurch of 50000 in one spot reported it.
Do you think the event at the Dhammakaya Temple was a genuine Buddhist miracle then?
An omnipotent God very easily *could* provide miracles to everyone on earth. If there were one miracle witnessed by a billion people, I definitely wouldn't write it off as delusion or mass hysteria, but I'd also be confused, because this still isn't what we'd probably expect a world with an omnipotent God which wanted the whole world population to believe in and worship him to look like. We absolutely *could* live in a world where decisive evidence favoring a specific religion is available to everyone in the world, but the one we live in doesn't look like that. So people dismiss things like the sightings at Fatima as mass hysteria, or optical illusions or something, for the same reason that people (likely including you?) dismiss the Dhammakaya Temple sightings as optical illusions or mass hysteria or something. The world as a whole is just so far from what we'd expect it to look like if the religion were objectively true and a reliable generator of real miracles that it leads us to conclude "Whatever the specific explanation for this phenomenon is, it's almost certainly not that."
If you think that your religion is true, and these are testimonies of real miracles, then this is liable to look like unjustified skepticism. But when you have a strong predictive model of the world, grounded in good evidence, this kind of behavior is exactly how it cashes out. Do you remember years back when a team of physicists ran an experiment and put out a statement that, as far as they could tell, their results showed faster than light signalling? And the consensus of pretty much the whole world community of physicists was "We haven't worked out what the specific error was that generated that result, but we're sure there wasn't actually any faster than light signalling going on here." And then after a few weeks, they figured out what the error was that had led to that result, with no faster-than-light signalling involved. Because they weren't engaged in irrational skepticism, they were engaged in totally rational skepticism motivated by the fact that the evidence against faster-than-light signaling was substantial enough that it was more likely that there was some fault in the experiment than that the whole edifice of evidence was mistaken.
As someone who considers himself to be a firm agnostic. God is true ~50%. I've always been able to understand those with higher belief. (Let's just say their life experience gives them ~100% God is true) But I've never been able to understand the atheist*. How can you put it at 0%? Sure you can call it anecdotal testimony, but you've got large swaths of humanity telling you God does exist. How can you disregard all of that? Is it not at least at 10%?
*I was a member of the local UU church for many years and have had several discussions with atheists.
So, I don't put the odds that *something* that could reasonably be described as a god exists at around 0%. But, I think that a lot of members of monotheist religions, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, etc. accept some basic arguments for the existence of some sort of God, and conclude "Naturally, it follows from that that my religion is true." But I think that the likelihood of those religions being true is overwhelmingly lower than the likelihood of some sort of god existing.
As far as how I'm willing to give so little weight to the evidence of their belief, I start by acknowledging that people have believed lots of things throughout history that we almost universally accept as wrong now. And on top of that, there's no religion in the world today that *most* people in the world don't think is wrong, if we consider the particulars and not just the very broadest strokes. But also, personally, I'm much more comfortable than most people putting aside groupthink and recognizing when the people around me think something that doesn't make sense.
There's one example that sticks in my memory a lot for how straightforwardly it resolved: during a lesson in formal logic in a philosophy class in college, the professor presented us with a syllogism she claimed was sound (the conclusion followed necessarily from the premises.) I raised my hand and pointed out that this wasn't the case. She brushed this off and said I was mistaken, but I insisted. Other students in the class started laughing at me because I was so insistent that I knew better than the professor, and I persisted for some time, but she was firm in her position, so I put it aside till the end of class, and I discussed it with her afterwards, and I walked her through the steps, and eventually she acknowledged that she'd been mistaken all along, that the syllogism was actually not sound.
By that point my life, this sort of thing was already unsurprising to me. I'd gotten used to the fact that sometimes, groups of people will just accept an idea without examining it carefully, and treat anyone who steps out of line and questions that idea as silly or foolish, even if that idea is straightforwardly wrong.
It's not that I disregard people's testimonies about their religions being true. I've spent a lot of time talking to people, taking in their arguments, their explanations of their positions, and their experiences of their beliefs and traditions. I've actually spent more time discussing people's religions with them than anyone else I've met in real life. I used to spend maybe an average of half an hour a day on this, for about five years or so. So I feel like I'm coming in with more evidence than most people, when I say that, even compared to most subjects where I've stepped apart from the majority, in cases where I've been definitively proven to be right, the quality of evidence for specific religions being true is really, really bad, and I feel extremely confident in dismissing it.
I think there are ways in which "demonic possession" might gesture at an approximate description of certain psychological experiences, but I do think that it's wrong in some very important key features. I don't believe that demons actually exist, or could ever be located or interacted with outside the context of human psychology. I don't believe that a "demonic possession" model gives you a proper etiology, whereby you could use it to correctly assess someone's risk factors. I don't believe that exorcism would be *totally* ineffective as a treatment, but I don't think its effectiveness is likely to rise above other interventions from different cultures which the recipients believe target the source of their maladies, whereas I believe that treatments grounded in a correct mechanistic understanding have the potential to greatly exceed that level.
I don't think that knowing that the correct explanation falls somewhere in the space of "something psychological" will necessarily improve on all these failings, if you don't actually have a mechanistic explanation, although it may improve on some of them. But ascribing a problem to demonic possession may impede people from developing that more useful mechanistic understanding, and can generate problems of its own. For instance, you say that your past self was afflicted in a way that your current self is not, so your current self should not be punished, but this doesn't necessarily follow from a demonic possession model of malady. In some cultural circles (I know people in Evangelical communities often experience this,) mental health issues are often attributed to demonic possession, and the people who so suffer are held blameworthy for having left themselves vulnerable to demonic possession, because a good Christian isn't supposed to be so vulnerable.
"So, I don't put the odds that *something* that could reasonably be described as a god exists at around 0%."
Oh good. Thanks for the long response. Yeah I'm not here to support any particular religion. (Though I think all of them have some 'truths' that they can pass on.) But only that there may be some mostly unknown force for good in the world. And I make no claims as to where or from what that arises. (It could be totally from within us or totally without us.) And that this possibility can give one pause.
So, I certainly don't think that religious people are mostly bad people (and that would certainly make the standards of "good person" hard to clear, when most people in the world are religious.) And I think that they can be forces for good in the world, by providing people with community structures and a sense of being part of something greater than themselves.
But, I don't credit any of them with being sources of insight about the underlying nature of reality, or morality, or anything of that sort. That's not to say that every novel idea every religion generates will be wrong, but I think that the underlying process that generates them is so unreliable that it simply can't be used as a source of guidance to generate true information. Like, if you gave a full class of students a huge multiple choice test, where instead of every question having four options, each one had a thousand, and there were hundreds of questions, and none of the students knew *any* of the answers, some of the students would get some questions right by sheer chance, but no student's test transcript would be a useful guide to truth, because all their answers are guesses.
I understand that this is a low level of credibility or respect to afford to religion by ordinary social standards, but I do honestly think this is what's warranted given the available evidence.
People regularly say or write false things by mistake, for fame/money/meaning and even on a random impulse. Many people are also suprisingly credulous.
Look at random cults that you are sure are not actually connected to anything divine. Is it hard to imagine based on what you know about people that with some luck and time those random cults could have become major religions?
This, one can do before even looking at the particulars of any religion.
As I'd mentioned before, I think some people's brains just work differently. I cannot *make* myself believe things, no matter how much I try; it's not a matter of "preference", but lack of capability. But many theists I've talked to are confused about this: they apparently can change their own beliefs at will, and do not understand why I would not choose to do the same.
That said though, presumably God could in fact change my mind; the fact that it remains unchanged indicates that if God does exist, then perhaps he prefers me to remain an atheist. Mysterious ways indeed...
The ur-example of that in fiction is from "Brideshead Revisited", where Rex Mottram wants to marry Julia Flyte but Julia knows her family won't accept him unless he converts to Catholicism. Rex is willing to go along with this because as far as he's concerned, it's just a hoop to jump through and he has no intention of, or interest in, actually converting, which is a severe trial to the priest who has to instruct him:
"So Rex was sent to Farm Street to Father Mowbray, a priest renowned for his triumphs with obdurate catechumens. After the third interview he came to tea with Lady Marchmain.
'Well, how do you find my future son-in-law?'
'He's the most difficult convert I have ever met.'
'Oh dear, I thought he was going to make it so easy.'
'That's exactly it. I can't get anywhere near him. He doesn't seem to have the least intellectual curiosity or natural piety.
'The first day I wanted to find out what sort of religious life he had till now, so I asked him what he meant by prayer. He said: "I don't mean anything. You tell me." I tried to, in a few words, and he said: "Right. So much for prayer; What's the next thing?" I gave him the catechism to take away. Yesterday I asked him whether Our Lord had more than one nature. He said: "Just as many as you say, Father."
'Then again I asked him: "Supposing the Pope looked up and saw a cloud and said 'It's going to rain', would that be bound to happen?" "Oh, yes, Father." "But supposing it didn't?" He thought a moment and said, "I suppose it would be sort of raining spiritually, only we were too sinful to see it."
'Lady Marchmain, he doesn't correspond to any degree of paganism known to the missionaries.'
'Julia,' said Lady Marchmain, when the priest had gone, 'are you sure that Rex isn't doing this thing purely with the idea of pleasing us?'
'I don't think it enters his head,' said Julia.
'He's really sincere in his conversion?'
'He's absolutely determined to become a Catholic, mummy,' and to herself she said: 'In her long history the Church must have had some pretty queer converts. I don't suppose all Clovis's army were exactly Catholic-minded. One more won't hurt.'
Next week the Jesuit came to tea again. It was the Easter holidays and Cordelia was there, too.
'Lady Marchmain,' he said. 'You should have chosen one of the younger fathers for this task. I shall be dead long before Rex is a Catholic.'
'Oh dear, I thought it was going so well.'
'It was, in a sense. He was exceptionally docile, and he accepted everything I told him, remembered bits of it, asked no questions. I wasn't happy about him. He seemed to have no sense of reality, but I knew he was coming under a steady Catholic influence, so I was willing to receive him. One has to take a chance sometimes with semiimbeciles, for instance. You never know quite how much they have understood. As long as you know there's someone to keep an eye on them, you do take the chance.'
'How I wish Rex could hear this!' said Cordelia.
'But yesterday I got a regular eye-opener. The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident what's been taught and what's been left out. But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into the depths of confusion you didn't know existed. Take yesterday. He seemed to be doing very well. He learned large bits of the catechism by heart, and the Lord's Prayer, and the Hail Mary. Then I asked him as usual if there was anything troubling him, and he looked at me in a crafty way and said, "Look, Father, I don't think you're being straight with me. I want to join your Church and I'm going to join your Church, but you're holding too much back." I asked what he meant, and he said: "I've had a long talk with a Catholic - a very pious well-educated one and I've learned a thing or two. For instance, that you have to sleep with your feet pointing East because that's the direction of heaven, and if you die in the night you can walk there. Now I'll sleep with my feet pointing any way that suits Julia, but d'you expect a grown man to believe about walking to heaven? And what about the Pope who made one of his horses a Cardinal? And what about the box you keep in the church porch, and if you put in a pound note with someone's name on it, they get sent to hell. I don't say there mayn't be a good reason for all this," he said, "but you ought to tell me about it and not let me find out for myself."'
'What can the poor man have meant?' said Lady Marchmain.
'You see he's a long way from the Church yet,' said Father Mowbray. 'But who can he have been talking to? Did he dream it all? Cordelia, what's the matter?'
'What a chump! Oh, mummy, what a glorious chump!'
'Cordelia, it was you.'
'Oh, mummy, who could have dreamed he'd swallow it? I told him such a lot besides. About the sacred monkeys in the Vatican - all kinds of things.'
'Well, you've very considerably increased my work,' said Father Mowbray."
> He thought a moment and said, "I suppose it would be sort of raining spiritually, only we were too sinful to see it."
To be fair, I've had theists tell me this in all sincerity; in fact, this is what many Creationists say about evolution and the age of the Earth. But usually the statement is presented in reverse, i.e. "I acknowledge that if one just looked at all available empirical data and applied the scientific method, one would conclude that the Earth is old; but of course we know better than that because we have faith, and the Bible, and our faith tells us that the Bible is true -- therefore, the evidence of our eyes must be false".
"Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars [...] and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking non-sense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men."
Ah, good old Last Thursdayism ! The Universe was created last Thursday, but it's made to appear old in all respects, so no one could ever tell. What can one say to that ? God sure loves his tricks, big and small ! It's a good thing we know that, unlike literally everything we see around us every second of every day, the Bible is not a trick, right ? ...Right ?
> You probably weren't around for similar discussions years ago on SlateStarCodex where a few people said that if they witnessed something like that, they would prefer to believe they had gone raving mad and were hopelessly insane and delusional and hallucinating, or that it was aliens trying to trick us, or something, anything other than yes, God exists.
I'd like to see that thread and what exactly was said. Because there's a HUGE difference between witnessing stuff no one else saw (which is what I suspect they were answering) and witnessing something everyone in the western hemisphere also collaborated.
Like say God wrote those flaming letters across the sky, transformed the black stone of Mecca into a cross, and sent genuine faith healers to various ICUs. What do you think the result would be? How many new members do you think the church would get? Do you think most people are *that* obstinate and this wouldn't actually change much? Because I think the church picks up at least a billion new (prospective) converts from that.
"What do you think the result would be? How many new members do you think the church would get? Do you think most people are *that* obstinate and this wouldn't actually change much?"
(1) A lot of conspiracy theories on the Internet and people claiming this is proof that aliens really exist or the government is mind-controlling us or it's the Russians/Chinese/denizens of the Hollow Earth/the simulation is breaking down
Personally I'd settle for small but repeatable miracles. If all Catholic priests suddenly developed the ability to hover up to 5cm in the air for up to 20 seconds after reciting "Ave Maria"; and anyone (including myself) could visit a Catholic church and witness this (and record in his cellphone); and other theists could not replicate this feat no matter how hard they tried -- then yeah, there's a good chance I'd convert to Catholicism. Yes, it could still be a prank by alien teenagers or mischievous fae or whatever, but presumably there would be other ways to investigate and reject such possibilities.
But a miracle where some people saw this one cool thing one time but there's no way to verify it since no one recorded anything and it never happened again and God moves in mysterious ways... yeah, that's not nearly as convincing.
That's honest doubt, and that's something to respect. I'm kinda old-fashioned in that if I am going to go for a religion, then I want all the chunky bits. I couldn't be (and have very little sympathy with) those who are all "well a reasonable rational faith does away with all that Bronze Age stuff" and "spiritual but not religious". You end up with watered-down social work and you don't need a religion to be a social worker.
To quote Chesterton again, from the short story collection "The Poet and the Lunatics" - better to worship the shark than reduce everything to things that can be cut up and studied:
"Mr. Amos Boon had been a missionary, and still dressed like one; at any rate, he dressed like nothing else. His sturdy, full-bearded figure carried a broad-brimmed hat combined with a frock-coat; which gave him an air at once outlandish and dowdy. Though he was no longer a missionary, he was still a traveller. His face was brown and his long beard was black; there was a furrow of thought in his brow and a rather strained look in his eyes, one of which sometimes looked a little larger than the other, giving a sinister touch to what was in some ways so commonplace. He had ceased to be a missionary through what he himself would have called the broadening of his mind. Some said there had been a broadening of his morals as well as of his mind; and that the South Sea Islands, where he had lived, had seen not a little of such ethical emancipation. But this was possibly a malicious misrepresentation of his very human curiosity and sympathy in the matter of the customs of the savages; which to the ordinary prejudice was indistinguishable from a white man going fantee. Anyhow, travelling about alone with nothing but a big Bible, he had learned to study it minutely, first for oracles and commandments, and afterwards for errors and contradictions; for the Bible-smasher is only the Bible-worshipper turned upside down. He pursued the not very arduous task of proving that David and Saul did not on all occasions merit the Divine favour; and always concluded by roundly declaring that he preferred the Philistines. Boon and his Philistines were already a byword of some levity among the young men who, at that moment, were arguing and joking around him.
..."The subject of flowers is hackneyed, but the flowers are not," the poet was insisting. "Tennyson was right about the flower in the crannied wall; but most people don't look at flowers in a wall, but only in a wall-paper. If you generalize them, they are dull, but if you simply see them they are always startling. If there's a special providence in a falling star, there's more in a rising star; and a live star at that."
"Well, I can't see it," said the man of science, good-humouredly; he was a red-haired, keen-faced youth in pince-nez, by the name of Wilkes. "I'm afraid we fellows grow out of the way of seeing it like that. You see, a flower is only a growth like any other, with organs and all that; and its inside isn't any prettier or uglier than an animal's. An insect is much the same pattern of rings and radiations. I'm interested in it as I am in an octopus or any sea-beast you would think a monster."
"But why should you put it that way round?" retorted the poet. "Why isn't it quite as logical the other way round? Why not say the octopus is as wonderful as the flower, instead of the flower as ordinary as the octopus? Why not say that crackens and cuttles and all the sea-monsters are themselves flowers; fearful and wonderful flowers in that terrible twilight garden of God. I do not doubt that God can be as fond of a shark as I am of a buttercup."
"As to God, my dear Gale," began the other quietly, and then he seemed to change his form of words. "Well, I am only a man...nay, only a scientific man, which you may think lower than a sea-beast. And the only interest I have in a shark is to cut him up; always on the preliminary supposition that I have prevented him from cutting me up."
"Have you ever met a shark?" asked Amos Boon, intervening suddenly.
"Not in society," replied the poet with a certain polite discomposure, looking round with something like a flush under his fair hair; he was a long, loose-limbed man named Gabriel Gale, whose pictures were more widely known than his poems.
"You've seen them in the tanks, I suppose," said Boon; "but I've seen them in the sea. I've seen them where they are lords of the sea, and worshipped by the people as great gods. I'd as soon worship those gods as any other."
Gale the poet was silent, for his mind always moved in a sort of sympathy with merely imaginative pictures; and he instantly saw, as in a vision, boiling purple seas and plunging monsters. But another young man standing near him, who had hitherto been rather primly silent, cut in quietly; a theological student, named Simon, the deposit of some epoch of faith in Sir Owen's stratified past. He was a slim man with sleek, dark hair and darting, mobile eyes, in spite of his compressed lips. Whether in caution or contempt, he had left the attack on medical materialism to the poet, who was always ready to plunge into an endless argument with anybody. Now he intervened merely to say:
"Do they only worship a shark? It seems rather a limited sort of religion."
"Religion!" repeated Amos Boon, rudely; "what do you people know about religion? You pass the plate round, and when Sir Owen puts a penny in it, you put up a shed where a curate can talk to a congregation of maiden-aunts. These people have got something like a religion. They sacrifice things to it...their beasts, their babies, their lives. I reckon you'd turn green with fear if you'd ever so much as caught a glimpse of Religion. Oh, it's not just a fish in the sea; rather it's the sea round a fish. The sea is the blue cloud he moves in, or the green veil or curtain hung about him, the skirts of which trail with thunder."
All faces were turned towards him, for there was something about him beyond his speech. Twilight was spreading over the garden, which lay near the edge of a chalk cliff above the shore, but the last light of sunset still lay on a part of the lawn, painting it yellow rather than green, and glowing almost like gold against the last line of the sea, which was a sombre indigo and violet, changing nearer land to a lurid, pale green. A long cloud of a jagged shape happened to be trailing across the sun; and the broad-hatted, hairy man from the South Seas suddenly pointed at it.
"I know where the shape of that cloud would be called the shadow of the shark," he cried, "and a thousand men would fall on their faces ready to fast or fight, or die. Don't you see the great black dorsal fin, like the peak of a moving mountain? And then you lads discuss him as if he were a stroke at golf; and one of you says he would cut him up like birthday cake; and the other says your Jewish Jehovah would condescend to pat him like a pet rabbit."
...Sir Owen glanced at him for a moment, and a silence followed, which was broken by a thud and a rattle of glasses as Gale brought his fist down on the table like a man who had thought of something suddenly.
"Dagon!" he cried, in a sort of ecstasy.
Most of the company seemed but little enlightened; perhaps they thought that saying "Dagon" was his poetical and professional fashion of saying "Damn". But the dark eyes of Simon brightened, and he nodded quickly.
"Why, of course you're right," he said. "That must be why Mr. Boon is so fond of the Philistines."
In answer to a general stare of inquiry, he said smoothly: "The Philistines were a people from Crete, probably of Hellenic origin, who settled on the coast of Palestine, carrying with them a worship which may very well have been that of Poseidon, but which their enemies, the Israelites, described as that of Dagon. The relevant matter here is that the carved or painted symbol of the god seems always to have been a fish."
The mention of the new matter seemed to reawaken the tendency of the talk to turn into a wrangle between the poet and the professional scientist.
"From my point of view," said the latter, "I must confess myself somewhat disappointed with your friend Mr. Boon. He represented himself as a rationalist like myself, and seemed to have made some scientific studies of folk-lore in the South Seas. But he seemed a little unbalanced; and surely he made a curious fuss about some sort of a fetish, considering it was only a fish."
"No, no, no!" cried Gale, almost with passion. "Better make a fetish of the fish. Better sacrifice yourself and everybody else on the horrible huge altar of the fish. Better do anything than utter the star-blasting blasphemy of saying it is only a fish. It's as bad as saying the other thing is only a flower."
> "I'm afraid we fellows grow out of the way of seeing it like that. You see, a flower is only a growth like any other, with organs and all that; ... Better do anything than utter the star-blasting blasphemy of saying it is only a fish. It's as bad as saying the other thing is only a flower."
Yes, I hear this attitude a lot from religious as well as poetically inclined people; but it always struck as a colossal, perhaps even tragic, failure of imagination; and not just imagination but perhaps even basic comprehension.
Understanding things makes them more wonderful, not less, because there's more wonder for you to experience. A rainbow is very pretty, and a shark is very scary, it is true. But what if I told you that there are colors of the rainbow beyound those that we humans can see ? Sharks cannot see them either, but some species of shrimp can; and they can not merely see more colors, but different kinds of colors, which we have no English words to describe. And by the way, rainbows in the sky are quite different from iridescence on bird's feathers or beetle shells; and our understanding of why that is ultimately leads to much stranger vistas of time and space, plus of course practical applications such as the ability to display colorful moving pictures on demand...
...But no, we shouldn't study things, now the mystery is all ruined, let's all pretend that rainbows are just pretty colors in the sky with no mechanisms behind them other than God's will, that sharks arrived in the oceans ex nihilo, something to be worshiped but never understood. It's so much more spiritual that way !
>> I couldn't be (and have very little sympathy with) those who are all "well a reasonable rational faith does away with all that Bronze Age stuff" and "spiritual but not religious". You end up with watered-down social work and you don't need a religion to be a social worker.
This begs the question.
(While you are free to keep the Bronze Age stuff, it doesn’t mean it’s doing anything for anybody.)
>> [Overly long and “clever” Chesterton quote.]
This begs the question while also wasting people’s time.
>Personally I'd settle for small but repeatable miracles. If all Catholic priests suddenly developed the ability to hover up to 5cm in the air for up to 20 seconds after reciting "Ave Maria"; and anyone (including myself) could visit a Catholic church and witness this (and record in his cellphone); and other theists could not replicate this feat no matter how hard they tried -- then yeah, there's a good chance I'd convert to Catholicism.
Same. This isn't the only thing that could persuade me to convert, but it would definitely be sufficient.
There's no shortage of things that could persuade me to convert to various religions, and while religious people often argue that skeptics are insistent on disbelieving, and that if whatever evidence the skeptics insist on were available, they'd just pivot to demanding something else, there has never been an occasion in my life where I've argued that some particular evidence would persuade me of *anything*, and that evidence became available, and I backpedaled and generated new reasons not to believe that thing. I've changed my mind about plenty of things in the past, and if I say piece of evidence would be sufficient to change my mind, I mean that it's *at least* sufficient. It may well be more than is necessary to change my mind.
But, the world we observe is just *so far* from the sort of world described by the Bible, or other religious texts, that I think most believers have lost sight of the fact that a world that *does* look like what the Bible describes is even conceivable, or that it could possibly make sense to hold against it the fact that the world just doesn't look like we'd expect it to if the Bible were true.
> they would prefer to believe they had gone raving mad and were hopelessly insane and delusional and hallucinating, or that it was aliens trying to trick us, or something, anything other than yes, God exists.
Well preferences aside, let's say the glowing letters persist long enough that hallucinations are implausible and I don't have any (other) reason to suspect a delusion. Then it does seem pretty likely we are in a world where *someone* is capable of creating flaming letters in the sky. It's no mean feat so good Bayesians probably should raise their expected odds of God existing as it eliminates a lot of the worlds where he doesn't. But it's probably far from literally requiring omnipotence. Aliens or time travelling humans or unknown technological advancements fit quite well too. And it seems hard to come up with priors for those, and any other odd thing we haven't even thought of (there are probably tens of thousands of gods in human traditions, but the space of possible gods seems infinite). And using the established religions to manipulate people is a pretty obvious choice so the content of the message is little evidence.
Speaking of infinite hypothesis space, our current heuristic is heavily punishing any hypothesis for lacking self-consistency or needing epicycles (something something Kolmogorov complexity). Yes, there's the Divine Plan (also the Ineffable Plan) and we can't know why He hid from us for millennia and then suddenly showed up in such a manner, it's not outright contradictory, but it does add compexity to a theory that was already pretty complex.
Would you stop being a Christian if you (along with billions others) saw flaming letters claiming that God doesn't exist?
I might do. If I were persuaded that God/god(s)/the preternatural does not and, more importantly, cannot exist, then I'd stop believing.
I can't make myself stop believing, though, and all the "but science tells us this rational explanation for all the material phenomena" arguments don't convince me. I'm perfectly open to the notion that I'm just nuts and in denial of reality, but that's how my brain works. I've tried not believing and it is simply not convincing to me.
Then I hit up against things like the simulation argument and while I can see that's by way of fun philosophical thought-experiments, taking it seriously makes me go the same way the atheists on here go about 'suppose Fatima real miracle?'
Inexplicably appearing flaming letters trying to convince you that nothing preternatural exists is a somewhat odd choice :-) No, I was thinking about a message that claims there is a god but it's completely different from the God of Christianity, here's what you need to do from now on: ...
> I've tried not believing and it is simply not convincing to me.
I was definitely closer to believing than otherwise at some point. I remember a major step was asking myself why assume Christianity was the right religion and all the other ones wrong. Christians were a plurality but far from the majority, why would I assume the "default" religion of my culture to be the correct one if almost everyone chooses the one of their respective culture? Either only one is correct but then it's probably not Christianity: it feels like the God has just abandoned most of humanity letting them have their incorrect religions. Plus if we take the number of followers to be meaningful then Christianity is only ~1 in 3 chance of being correct and if followers don't mean much then here's a list of 1000 religions most of which I've never heard of, now Christianity in particular is even less likely.
... Or all religions don't contradict each other all that much in what really matters, Christianity and Islam and Hinduism and Confucianism are all correct enough and all guide the people to the right choices. I was more or less content with this option for a while, but even agnosticism gradually stopped being convincing when there are explanations for why we are prone to be religious and how religions would evolve to have much in common. Why there's a pattern of miracles always seen by some isolated people or the groups of people on the brinks, same as evidence for Yetis and alien abductions. Bonus points for questionable mental health and/or extreme conditions. And as I noticed how I myself was trying to choose what seemed more comfortable/less scary, not what made the most sense.
Maybe I'm just one of those people not "wired" for religion and you are. Then again, the religion's position was rather weak in my family and my country, so I had more options to choose from without much effort or struggle than most people.
“You probably weren't around for similar discussions years ago on SlateStarCodex where a few people said that if they witnessed something like that, they would prefer to believe they had gone raving mad and were hopelessly insane and delusional and hallucinating, or that it was aliens trying to trick us, or something, anything other than yes, God exists.”
So what? Talking about miracles we never get doesn’t address the issues with the issues with the one we do see.
If there is any point to miracles, it’s to target the swayable or people who believe but have some doubts.
It seems obvious that bigger miracles would still convince more people than the “weak sauce” ones we actually seem.
In any case, your argument here has the same sort of issues as the credulous never allowing that miracles might have a scientific explanation or might just be fake (which often has happened to be the case).
The "so what?" is willingness to evaluate the phenomenon. The sceptical ask the believers to keep open minds and be willing to change their views and beliefs if the evidence is more on the side of natural rather than supernatural explanation, and that having fixed opinions that will not change in the face of updated information is bad.
However, if some of those same sceptics are loudly proclaiming how nothing would ever change their mind or their fixed opinions as to 'no supernature' and they would prefer to doubt the evidence of their senses, then that is dishonest.
>>> “The "so what?" is willingness to evaluate the phenomenon. The sceptical ask the believers to keep open minds and be willing to change their views and beliefs if the evidence is more on the side of natural rather than supernatural explanation, and that having fixed opinions that will not change in the face of updated information is bad.”
The “true believers” won’t really ever be “open minded”. It’s doesn’t seem they do much “evaluating”. And they really don’t need miracles to keep their faith. Again, miracles are for the swayable (as far as I can guess at any reason for them).
The “so what?” was an attempt to get you to realize that what you are criticizing about the group you disfavor (skeptics) is also applicable to the group you favor (both groups have a similar dogmatism).
>>> “ However, if some of those same sceptics are loudly proclaiming how nothing would ever change their mind or their fixed opinions as to 'no supernature' and they would prefer to doubt the evidence of their senses, then that is dishonest.”
This is strawmanning. You shouldn’t be asking me to address what unknown people supposedly say without knowing exactly what they say.
Lots of so-called miracles end up not withstanding fairly basic scrutiny. That might be saying something about miracles that haven’t been dispelled yet. And there are likely people who still will stubbornly believe in miracles which appear to be fake. But you think the only problem is skeptics.
The “true believers” won’t really ever be “open minded”.
Yes, and that goes as well for those who say "I would prefer to think I had gone mad rather than that God exists" in answer to the hypotheticals put by people asking "why isn't there an undeniable, large-scale miracle that everyone can see and nobody can dismiss? like giant letters in the sky visible to everyone on earth saying 'God exists'?"
I'm not asking you to believe in miracles. I'm asking that what is sauce for the goose be sauce for the gander.
>>> “ Yes, and that goes as well for those who say "I would prefer to think I had gone mad rather than that God exists" in answer to the hypotheticals put by people asking "why isn't there an undeniable, large-scale miracle that everyone can see and nobody can dismiss? like giant letters in the sky visible to everyone on earth saying 'God exists'?””
What we get are weak-sauce “miracles” that, at this point, everyone should be skeptical of. (Even if they appear to be hard to explain.) At least, the big sign-in-the-sky is an unambiguous message.
>>> “ I'm asking that what is sauce for the goose be sauce for the gander.”
This is actually your problem. (I said multiple times that both side have a similar problem.)
Anyway, pretty-much everything now explained by science was a “miracle “ (or something caused by god.) The trend for new things being actual miracles doesn’t look good.
>>> “ Yes, and that goes as well for those who say "I would prefer to think I had gone mad rather than that God exists" in answer to the hypotheticals put by people asking "why isn't there an undeniable, large-scale miracle that everyone can see and nobody can dismiss?”
It appears we know that some people actually go mad. So, this might be a more likely hypothesis.
We *don’t* ever get the “undeniable miracle” (it seems). There doesn’t seem to be any reason for this. That seems like the elephant in the room that you are ignoring but are also using as the linchpin of your argument.
Even with it being “impossible” (*) to ever convince skeptics, weak-sauce miracles aren’t even trying.
That verse is among the most obviously untrue things in the Bible. If the dead came back and warned me of infernal torment, that would have a far greater effect on me than “the Bible exists” does.
I think whether it was a divine miracle depends on whether one thinks G-d speaks through physics or through people collectively sharing a powerful moment together. If someone thinks a break in the laws of physics had to happen for it to be considered a miracle, there was no miracle. However, if someone thinks a sign from G-d is a timed moment that forces thousands of people to look at the sky together, and be “enlightened” by the same experience, even if it was just an illusion, then it would be a divine miracle.
> and that a typical Dhammakaya meditation practice is to visualize a Buddha with a crystal sphere in his belly; if true, this would be relevant to them seeing a vision of a monk with a crystal sun in his belly.
I still feel like the connection for the original is kind of vague, but here it fits very well.
In regards to Light/Fire Kasina meditation. There are different instructions for Fire/Light Kasina I came in contact with. One is what I will call the Ingram version with the afterimage. The other one you just start by visualizing the flame or the candle or anything you want. This is more difficult to start of with because you lack the "physical afterimage". The physical afterimage also disappears after a while so if you want to continue you have to transition to a purely "mental" image but for starting off the instruction is to just refresh the afterimage.
Visualizing Buddhas, Taras, ... is very typical in some groups (e.g. https://www.taramandala.org/). However, most people don't have detailed phenomenology and keep their practices somewhat secret.
It doesn't really seem that we have great first hand accounts of this miracle like we do Fatima, at least with the evidence presented in this post. And the language barrier is significant.
The fact that everyone was meditating also seems very significant. There seems to be a big difference between a huge group of people who are totally aligned in belief all meditating about the same thing seeing something apparently supernatural, and a large group of people that includes the sincerely devout, curious sightseers, and outright skeptics who all saw the same thing.
I recently had the opportunity to see the so-called "Miraculous Stair" at the Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe. There is a non-supernatural explanation for how a seeming physically impossible staircase was built (reclusive expert woodworker lived in the area; obscure engineering principles), but it also seems incredibly unlikely that all this stuff just happened in the normal course of events.
There are temple publications with a signed witness statements, a number of which I was able to confirm were/are real people. Also, I found at least a dozen or so posts on forums, Facebook, etc. talking about seeing it. Not to mention the video footage. Still not the 100+ testimonies of Fatima, but I think it’s enough to say that a lot of people saw pretty much the same thing.
Linked in my OP that Scott linked. Very similar to some of the stuff you see from Medjugorje. No footage of the “miracle” itself, but you can see the crowd and later there are a few interviews with emotional devotees describing what they saw.
Yeah, I'm not saying they aren't out there, but they definitely aren't as easy to find as the Fatima testimony that this blog linked to (honestly, even as a Catholic who has family members who are really into Fatima, I wasn't aware there were quite so many eyewitness statements)
I forget if it came up in the Fatima article, but there is an additional explanation besides (a) God, and (b) natural illusions, e.g. sunstaring. The third one is (c) demons. That word is provocative, but usually people who believe in God also believe there is Satan, or other gods, or demons-- that the supernatural is wide. The big division is natural/supernatural, but it is important to keep in mind that proving something is miraculous does not mean it is divine. That requires going on to addition work,e.g. Was it expected according to the Scriptures? Did it lead to good, or to evil? Did any church believe it was divine? Did somebody make big profits from it, and was he a good person?
Nah, asuras are boring stock villains, forever stuck in opposition with the equally boring devas. For real Buddhist demonology you have to dig deeper: Yakshas, bhutas, rakshasas, gandharvas, pisachas, nagas, vetalas, apsaras, grahas, and I probably forget a few.
Hmm, but I don't know about yakshas specifically. They're spirits, yes, but from what I can tell in temperament they are closest to humans. Some are tricksters, yes, but then so are some humans; as a group, they mostly go along to get along... though I could be mistaken.
What both places have in common is that if you look at map southwards you have a fragment of a river around 20-40km from the sight.
I wonder if it could be that sun reflects from the river, highlights the clouds at the exact place where the sunrays going directly to ovservers also pass the cloud and the two paths interfere somehow.
I thought this theory doesn't fit when I have learned the event in Bangkok was at 17:30 when the sun was in the west. But, then I've looked at the map again: there's a river on the west too :)
I'm working on a post about this, but I am wondering: could you clarify the reasoning that gets you from *crowd reported experiences analogous to the Miracle of the Sun in non-Catholic context* to *there is likely a naturalistic explanation for the Miracle of the Sun.*
My best attempt to reconstruct your thought process goes something like this:
(P1) A Buddhist crowd reported experiences analogous those reported at Fatima.
(P2) The experiences of the Buddhist crowd are not plausibly explained as a miracle.
(P3) If the experiences of the Buddhist crowd are not plausibly explained as a miracle, then that means there is likely a naturalistic explanation for their experiences.
(P4) If there is likely a naturalistic explanation for experiences analogous to those reported at Fatima, there is likely a naturalistic explanation for the experiences reported at Fatima.
(C) There is likely a naturalistic explanation for the experiences reported at Fatima.
Now, I think we need to appreciate how fraught and indirect this line of reasoning is.
-First, I think (P1) has to be weakened to "A Buddhist crowd reported experiences with features that are analogous to features that were reported at Fatima." Then, the rest of the argument needs to be weakened such that the conclusion is "there is likely a possible naturalistic explanation for the [analogous features] of the experiences reported at Fatima." I will reserve my discussion of the disanalogies for my post, I just want to focus on methodology here.
-Second, no motivation is provided for this claim. This would make sense if you had an independent reason to think that there is a naturalistic explanation for the Buddhist experiences. A religious pluralist could easily think that both of these were wonders by God. For exclusivists, it doesn't have vindicatory implications that contradict any religion, so it is not super implausible that there were inscrutable reasons, though they don't have *independent motivation* for regarding it as divine action. The burden is on the skeptic to *rule out* a miracle, since they are using it to motivate a debunking of an analogous case where the miraculous explanation seems to be strongly motivated. Furthermore, there seem to be good reasons to *doubt* naturalistic explanations in the case, though perhaps not decisive in this particular case, for reasons I will also reserve for my post.
Third, (P3) is totally unmotivated. Catholics are independently committed to believing that demons will perform *counterfeit miracles* to bring Catholic miracles into disrepute. Indeed, Catholics have traditionally believed that demons often *imitate*/*mock* genuine miracles. There are other factors that independently motivate a *preternatural explanation,* but skeptics refuse to consider this as an explanation for some reason. If you will entertain the Catholic explanation for the original miracle, why wouldn't you entertain other Catholic explanatory resources for the other miracles that are a better fit for the data than any independently motivated explanatory mechanism you have come up with.
Fourth, (P4) is unmotivated and seem implausible. If it turns out that the best explanation for the shared features was partly meterological in Buddhist case, then this would support the objectivity of these elements of Fatima. Then the coincidence with the advanced prediction by the seers, meterological conditions at Fatima, and the independent evidence for a self-luminous emitter that accounts for aspects of phenomenology that *aren't shared between reports by the crowds* presents a much harder case than the elements of Buddhist case on their own. There is a lot nuance here, so I don't expect what I mean to be entirely clear until you read my post.
Fifth, since my hiddenness model provides reason to think that God wants to give skeptics a pretext to reject Fatima even if they lack an adequate explanation, the evidential forcefulness of *lesser and different events* that are *analogous* is greatly diminished, since it is reasonable to suspect God of targeting the similarity in phenomenology in the context of an event that was actually implemented quite differently.
And keep in mind, the conjunction of all this would only get us to the possibility of a *partial naturalistic explanation* of the data that is hard to explain in the Fatima case. Other things will have to be said about the photogrammetry, the rapid drying, the six apparitions to the seers, the clouds of smoke, the miraculous healings after the event, etc...
So, all of this is to say, I think the significance of this 'horizontal strategy' for dealing with the evidence for the authenticity of the Miracle of the Sun is being greatly exaggerated by skeptics. It may provide you with some hope that you will be able to devise an explanation for the case, but it is far from sufficient by itself in the absence of explanatory mechanisms that are independently motivated, can accommodate the data, and that don't wind up positing an unconscionable coincidence to deal with one case among many similarly well-evidence miracle claims.
Looking forward to your post. On both sides of the miracle discourse, with good reason, there is a lot of “adopting a position as an exercise,” especially re: pluralistic supernatural views that neither the apologist nor skeptic in question actually holds.
I hope in your post you’ll indicate whether ultimately, in your heart of hearts, you think the Dhammakaya phenomenon was either demonic or fully natural (or something else). Even if you, as I would guess, allow for both possibilities in said post.
>> "No motivation is provided for this claim. This would make sense if you had an independent reason to think that there is a naturalistic explanation for the Buddhist experiences. A religious pluralist could easily think that both of these were wonders by God. For exclusivists, it doesn't have vindicatory implications that contradict any religion, so it is not super implausible that there were inscrutable reasons, though they don't have *independent motivation* for regarding it as divine action. The burden is on the skeptic to *rule out* a miracle, since they are using it to motivate a debunking of an analogous case where the miraculous explanation seems to be strongly motivated. Furthermore, there seem to be good reasons to *doubt* naturalistic explanations in the case, though perhaps not decisive in this particular case, for reasons I will also reserve for my post."
In principle, it's impossible to rule out divine intervention - all you can do is make it increasingly bizarre on its own terms. **In principle**, you can't prove that Penn and Teller sawing a woman in half in a Las Vegas stage show isn't a real miracle - sure, it would be bizarre for God to act through stage magicians, doing a thing which is also easily do-able with stage magic, in a context with no religious value, but you can't **prove** He didn't.
The best a skeptic can do, then, is force God's reasoning to be increasingly bizarre. If God performs a miracle to encourage believers in the true religion, that's pretty reasonable and non-bizarre on its own terms. If God then for inscrutable reasons performs the same miracle to prop up a false religion, that's quite bizarre! If God performs miracles for the true religion, but allows demons to perform identical miracles for false religions, this is at least adding another epicycle of unfalsifiability to the theory (for the same reason that it would be awkward if we somehow found photographic evidence of nothing unusual happening at Fatima, and you had to say that demons planted the photographs to confuse us). So I think the skeptics have done the only thing they can do here, which is make the miracle require so many bizarre supernatural epicycles and mysterious justifications and attempts by supernatural enemies to muddy the waters that eventually it collapses under its own weight and it's simpler to believe it's an unexplained natural phenomenon.
I do think this more even strongly decreases the weight of the miracle as evidence for Catholicism. Even if you think a supernatural explanation is still more plausible than a natural one, if sun miracles occur for many religions, then there's no reason to prefer the hypothesis "the Christian God, or Christian demons, sometimes helps out Buddhists for inscrutable reasons" compared to "Amitabha Buddha, or Buddhist demons, sometimes help out the Catholics for inscrutable reasons", or even "alien pranksters sometimes help out both Buddhists and Catholics for inscrutable reasons".
>then there's no reason to prefer the hypothesis "the Christian God, or Christian demons, sometimes helps out Buddhists for inscrutable reasons" compared to "Amitabha Buddha, or Buddhist demons, sometimes help out the Catholics for inscrutable reasons",
Surely the demons' reasons wouldn't be inscrutable? If Catholicism is true, and faking a sun miracle for a crowd of Buddhists would lead people away from Catholicism, that seems a pretty clear motive for a demon to fake a sun miracle. Possibly true in the reverse as well, although AFAIK Buddhism doesn't make claims to exclusivity like Catholicism does, so there'd be less benefit to be had from creating misleading evidence for non-Buddhist religions.
It's also kinda weird for Satan to do a big flashy miracle like this in a country that's already 99% Buddhist (and was even more so thirty years ago). It's not like there was some wave of Christian conversions sweeping the country that he had to declare code red and pull out all the stops. Seems like a misallocation of infernal resources. But maybe we can appeal to a form of skeptical theism (skeptical satanism?) where Satan may have sufficient reasons we don't know about to do whatever he does.
The reverse, I guess, would be Mara or some of his minions doing a Catholic sun miracle to keep people trapped in samsara
Consider this. A demon might like being worshipped, and so would do miracles to get worshippers. The presence of Christians would be irrelevant. This was a common early Christian belief about the Greek and Roman gods.
"Surely the demons' reasons wouldn't be inscrutable?"
Good point and correct as written, but I'll partly defend a more complicated version of this.
Whenever we posit miracles, we have to explain why God doesn't do *bigger* ones. If He's in the business of proving Himself, why stop at an easy-to-doubt appearance in Portugal? Why not rearrange the stars to spell "CATHOLICISM IS TRUE"? The explanation that iirc Ethan and other religious people give is that God is trying to strike a balance between faith and certainty where He promotes belief but doesn't compel it (I kind of parody this with https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-gods-only-have-power-because )
If demons are also in the business of doing miracles, that complicates the picture. Why should they be interested in this same tenuous balance between faith and certainty? Shouldn't they be finding the most compelling false religion (surely not a weird Buddhist cult in an already-Buddhist country) and deploying miracles as effectively as possible to turn people to them?
I think the believer would have to posit that demons' power is somehow limited by God (or the demons' own natural magical capacity), and that these limits just so happen to perfectly mirror the limits God voluntarily places on Himself for good religious reasons (or maybe God planned it this way on purpose?). But this adds another complexity penalty to the hypothesis.
I think about this often, about how divine hiddenness isn’t half as odd as coincident divine and demonic hiddenness. It would be weird but not impossible for divine and demonic interests to agree on this!
Fictional example, but in the Fate universe, both the Catholic-coded church and the other factions of the "moonlit world" (which tend to mostly consist of mages, vampires, and vampire-adjacent folks, all of which have arguably demonlike interest), all have strong mutual interests in preventing normies from finding out that said "moonlit world" is a thing.
Although that analogy requires us to throw omnipotence out the window entirely. All of these interests want the secrets to be kept because, to the extent that supernatural things become broadly understood, they lose their power entirely, in that universe.
For what it is worth, your last paragraph is (roughly—there is significant nuance, of course) what orthodox Christians posit. And something like a strategic equipoise between spirits aligned with God and those that are not is depicted fairly clearly in the Bible (see, e.g., the episode with Michael and the Prince of Persia in Daniel). Why God would permit this, let the reader consider.
Talk about demons is highly speculative. If demons are not cooperative, however, a demon might want to attract worship, even to compete with other demons in that. The demons are let loose by God-- but he doesn't make them help each other. Have you read Screwtape Letters? It is fiction, not serious, but it has that kind of model of demons. (It's WONDERFUL and short literature, too; can be enjoyed by non-Christians)
Scott makes a great point: If the sun moving around is the miracle, why didn't God do a clearer miracles such as "BELIEVE IN ME" letters in the sky? This is a huge theoretical objection to many miracles, such as Fatima. It really needs to be addressed.
This is one problem I, a believer have with some biblical miracles: they're not big enough. It is hard to believe that when I lose my axehead in a pond, God would make it float-- and nobody's watching. God could do such a miracle, sure-- but why?
>Scott makes a great point: If the sun moving around is the miracle, why didn't God do a clearer miracles such as "BELIEVE IN ME" letters in the sky?
Remember that the Fatima miracle didn't come out of nowhere: it was preceded by several apparitions of the Virgin Mary, who told people to be better Catholics and said that there would be a miracle at that time and date to prove that the apparitions were legitimate. I think that would count as clear by any reasonable definition of the term.
>Whenever we posit miracles, we have to explain why God doesn't do *bigger* ones. If He's in the business of proving Himself, why stop at an easy-to-doubt appearance in Portugal? Why not rearrange the stars to spell "CATHOLICISM IS TRUE"?
Maybe I'm too cynical, but I think that in the latter case, people would just arbitrarily raise their demands for proof. Heck, in this very comments section we've got people saying that, whilst a message in the stars would increase the probability of God, it could also be attributable to advanced aliens, or time-travelling humans, or some unknown but definitely not Catholic god, so obviously some even greater level of proof would be required before we could accept Catholicism.
And indeed, in a world where there was no reported miracle at Fatima and the whole thing were hypothetical, I don't think people would dismiss it as an "easy-to-doubt appearance in Portugal", I think they'd be treating it in exactly the same way you're treating rearranging the stars to spell "Catholicism is true". "If God's in the business of proving himself, why doesn't he predict a big miracle in advance, and then, in the exact place and time where he predicted it, cause the sun to act in ways inexplicable by astronomical science, and do this in front of a crowd of tens of thousands of people who run the gamut of belief from 'devout Catholic' to 'sceptic who openly admits he only came along to laugh at everyone else when the miracle inevitably fails to happen'?"
>I think the believer would have to posit that demons' power is somehow limited by God (or the demons' own natural magical capacity), and that these limits just so happen to perfectly mirror the limits God voluntarily places on Himself for good religious reasons (or maybe God planned it this way on purpose?). But this adds another complexity penalty to the hypothesis.
The miracle of the sun was just part of what happened at Fatima; the main point was the message conveyed by the apparition of the Virgin Mary, with the sun miracle acting as confirmation that the message was legit. AFAIK none of the Fatima parallels have the same combination of message + miracle, so that's one thing (or one combination of things, I guess) that demons apparently can't pull off but God can.
("But, Mr. X, if similar 'miracles' can happen as a result of optical illusions, doesn't that reduce the value of the Fatima miracle as a confirmation of the previous message?" Yes, I will freely admit that it does; but then, an apparition of the Virgin Mary predicting the exact time and place where an incredibly rare optical illusion would occur seems pretty miraculous by itself, even if not *quite* as miraculous as God directly moving the sun, or bending its light to create the illusion of it moving, so it would still be evidence for Catholicism.)
> but then, an apparition of the Virgin Mary predicting the exact time and place where an incredibly rare optical illusion would occur seems pretty miraculous by itself
A couple of random Portuguese peasant children predicting the exact time and place where an incredibly rare optical illusion would occur also seems pretty miraculous.
"Heck, in this very comments section we've got people saying that, whilst a message in the stars would increase the probability of God, it could also be attributable to advanced aliens, or time-travelling humans, or some unknown but definitely not Catholic god, so obviously some even greater level of proof would be required before we could accept Catholicism."
AFAICT this is simply correct of them.
The Catholicism hypothesis does not predict God reorganizing the stars tomorrow. No Catholic believes that this will happen tomorrow and no Catholic believes that if it fails to happen, that will pose any difficulty for Catholicism. I imagine that if you asked Pope Leo what the odds are that God rearranges the stars so they spell out "Catholicism is correct," he'll say they're less than one in a million if he doesn't just say "zero."
If you see something that a theory said was basically certain not to happen, that does the opposite of proving the theory correct.
If something reorganized the stars in the sky, that should radically increase your credence in all theories that posit a power that can reorganize the stars in the sky, but it should decrease your credence in the existence of any god that you predicted with nearly absolute certainty would, if they existed, never do that.
but you are failing to appreciate the dialectical context. you are the one saying "here is data that I dont know how to explain. it is reminiscent of other data that I dont know how to explain. therefore, there is likely an explanation that fits with my worldview of both cases." then you are putting the onus on the believer in miracles to give a plausible explanation of both cases in order to defeat this inference. but that's clearly bad reasoning.
regardless, I was only raising this as one way of illustrating how many conjuncts there are, not as the explanation I would opt for as a Catholic. there are plenty of people (e.g, Matthew Adelstein) that are religious pluralists that think God performs miracles in a way that accommodates their background worldview. I dont see why they have to do 'epicycles' to say that about this case. so, the main force is just in illustrating that it is a bad way of reasoning to a naturalistic explanation.
"skeptics have done the only thing they can do here"
- no, what they could do is provide a plausible *mechanistic explanation* of what happened that fits the data.
"if sun miracles occur for many religions, then there's no reason to prefer the hypothesis "the Christian God".
- but there is no vindicatory context for these, whereas there is for Catholicism, so even if these were miraculous that would be an obvious asymmetry.
the demons wouldn't be acting for inscrutable reasons. they would have a clear motive to do it this way. I have principled criteria to distinguish when activity is demonic/it isnt, but there is really strong evidence for demons that I am also planning on reviewing.
it seems like you arent trying very hard to have cognitive empathy for the Christian worldview.
Let's make it simple. You're doing a Bayesian comparison of two hypothesis:
Hypothesis 1: Fatima was the Catholic God
Hypothesis 2: Fatima was a natural psychological phenomenon
Hypothesis 1 doesn't naturally predict that you would get similar miracles in other religions. You can come up with reasons why it might permit it, but you wouldn't *expect* it to be true. Certainly nobody said anything like "Wow, Fatima seems very convincing, but it's not good evidence for Catholicism, because if Catholicism were true, there would be demons, and those demons would provide fake versions of Fatima for other religions, but we haven't seen anything like this, so that's a strike against this hypothesis."
Hypothesis 2 does naturally predict this. It *was* awkward for the naturalistic position that no other religion had anything similar, and in fact a common framing of the apologetics was "this proves Catholicism is true because no other religion has a miracle as good as this one", and in my original post I tried to decrease the force of this objection by pointing to non-orthodox-Catholic examples (the Reddit sungazers, the heretical Catholic in Necedah).
Since we've found evidence which is more naturally predicted by Hypothesis 2 than Hypothesis 1, we should increase our credence in Hypothesis 2.
And as I pointed out above, I'd previously mentioned "something like fire kasina meditation" as the most plausible naturalistic hypothesis, so having a sun miracle after people perform a kasina-like meditation is also something this hypothesis predicts better than the divine intervention one (though I'm kind of nervous making this argument because I don't know whether it's just a coincidence)
The conclusion 'this provides non-zero evidence for natural psychological mechanism' is extremely weak, so that is unhelpful. Obviously, the fact that I have peer-reviewed photogrammetric analyses, testimonies of rapid drying corroborated by photographic analysis, undesigned coincidences between testimony of distant witnesses, advanced prediction in context of credible apparitions, etc... all provide non-zero evidence against the psychological explanation. So, we are trying to understand how to *weigh* the evidence and that will partially depend on how *plausible* my accommodations of data that is bad for me are compared to your accommodations (well, to be fair, you dont really even try for the vast majority of the data) of data that is bad for you.
Furthermore, there are other hypotheses besides Hypothesis 1 and Hypothesis 2. You are trying to stay a naturalist - so your response needs to be viable against the whole field of non-natural explanations, not just mine.
But like I'm not even sure I concede that these cases are even non-zero evidence for you, because you dont have explanatory resources to deal with them. Like "demons replicate elements of notorious Catholic sun miracle *only after* it occurs to cast doubt" is one of many possibilities for me. Meanwhile, apparently your best bet is kasina-like meditation - I'll go over it in my post, but spoiler alert, I don't think it comes out looking remotely plausible.
In our discussions about your original Fatima post, didn’t you make the argument that controlling the sun in this way required too much power for demons, and we could know this is a genuine miracle because God allows some trickery, but not to this extent?
no, I didn't make an argument that it exceeded power of demons. and it doesn't have anything to do with controlling the Sun. in this Buddhist case, if it is demons, it seems like either they are manipulating the atmosphere in ways that are totally within bounds for demons, or they are giving people supernatural visions which is like one of the main things demons do.
TBF the fact that the Fatima miracle is widely known across the world, whereas the Buddhist miracle is so obscure it doesn't even have its own page on Thai Wikipedia, could be the result of God limiting the amount of trickery the demons can do (i.e., they can perform apparent miracles at one sketchy temple*, but their deception can't spread any further than that).
* From what I can tell, the Dhammakaya Temple is a rough Buddhist analogue to a Prosperity Gospel megachurch. Which also provides a reason for supposing that the Dhammakaya miracle is demonic whereas Fatima is legitimate: the message of Fatima was about repentance and loving God, which is an unlikely message for demons to be pushing, whereas it's much more plausible that they'd want to shepherd people into a greedy cult.
(1) Buddhism doesn't posit a God that performs miracles as a sign of approval, so therefore it doesn't convey the message that a God is approving Buddhism as true.
(2) Something paranormal and buddha-related is not sufficient for 'vindicatory context,' only 'religious context.' In my posts, I understand 'vindicatory context' based on either *explicit affirmations of a religion's doctrine in private revelation* or the *intent of the miracle-worker as manifested by the character of the sign.*
There could be paranormal Buddhist phenomena that were evidence for Buddhism, but they wouldn't be *vindicatory miracles* (or if they were, then it would have to be a deceptive miracle by a God that wanted people to be Buddhist or something) because vindicatory miracles are, by definition, extraordinary signs performed by God to authenticate revelation.
>(P2) The experiences of the Buddhist crowd are not plausibly explained as a miracle.
This formulation of your premise hides an important ambiguity. Informally, "X is not plausibly explained as a miracle" could mean "P(X|miracle) is low" (i.e., miracles would never produce X), or it could mean "P(X|¬miracle) is NOT low" (i.e., we can predict X modestly well even with more mundane resources). The skeptic only needs the latter. If we can get Fatima-like collective experiences in other contexts without miracles with modestly high probability, then the Fatima-like collective experience in Fatima itself is not going to be too remarkable.
Of course, I know you think there are important evidentiary differences between Fatima and these other miraculous sightings. I don't find them very persuasive, as we've discussed extensively elsewhere. Nevertheless, collecting stories like Dhammakaya are not intended to address these additional sources of evidence that you've adduced; they're challenging a different portion of your argument.
As to why skeptics, or even non-Buddhists, should be unimpressed by Dhammakaya even if they don't have a precise mechanistic explanation for the mass psychological event, it's a little difficult to articulate the reason precisely. We don't have anything like an axiomatic theory of human psychology that numerically predicts what we should or shouldn't see masses of people report to have experienced with this or that probability. But if the base rate of groups claiming to have shared experiences of the form Y in a large enough number of contexts, and these don't tend to have any good independent forensic corroboration even though there's no obvious reason why they wouldn't, then it seems pretty reasonable to imagine that Y is the sort of thing that people naturally can hallucinate, misremember, lie about, subconsciously deceive themselves about, whatever.
As an analogy, take the Mandela effect - the original one, that is, about tons of people remembering Nelson Mandela having died, and many even reporting detailed memories of having watched his somber state funeral on TV. It's hard to explain this specific case in a totally satisfying way: why do they all converge on Nelson Mandela's fake death/funeral and not others'? Why aren't fake funeral memories uniformly distributed across all deceased international figures? And which real event(s) are these people actually getting confused about? None seem to fit too cleanly relative to what people describe remembering. But it just seems obvious that this is a naturalistic quirk of human psychology. If a religion claimed that there were parallel universes that were merged together by their deity so that different people truthfully remember different histories, and as evidence they produce their own proprietary Mandela effect where half their adherents vaguely remember their prophet being alive in 1994 and half of them vaguely remember the prophet being dead in a nationally televised funeral in 1994, it would just obviously be a good counterpoint to bring up Nelson Mandela. If the adherents then suggested that Nelson Mandela also died in one of the merged universes and not in the other, maybe this could or would count as a valid ad hoc accommodation, but the force of their original case would be deflated.
Why is this not reproducible on demand? Why can we not isolate the relevant factors to reproduce the phenomenon at will?
Perhaps the weather conditions that permit it are very rare? But it seems like they are not really very rare.
Perhaps it only works on people with certain background beliefs? Catholicism, now maybe Buddhism. Seems unlikely.
Perhaps it has to do with some sort of mass psychology or mass psychosis? You (most people) don't 'see' it unless other people are already visibly reacting to it. That is, in the absence of people around you reifying that it is real, you dismiss it (probably this is subconscious) as a visual or orientation anomaly and this activates mental processes that tamp down the bad data. This interpretation seems pretty likely to me. So, a runaway perceptual spiral. Normally it gets tamped down but with social permission it gets amplified instead.
But still why can't we reproduce it? Just pay twenty people to stand in a field when the weather conditions are auspicious and have fifteen of them convincingly playact that they see the sun dancing and see if the remaining five start seeing it for real.
Or is twenty not enough? Does the number have to be in the thousands for it to work?
Perhaps there needs to be some background work to make a miracle seem plausible in the first place? Like do people who just happen upon the scene also start hallucinating once they see the people gawking amazed at the sun? Or is it only those who share the religion or spiritual tradition of those already present who tend to see it? Or maybe they see something weird but in the absence of a spiritual tradition they are limited to some subset of the visuals. Like maybe they see the sun spinning and changing colors but they don't see crosses or Jesus or Buddha.
I'm sure we've all heard about the psychological experiments where people voice agreement with clear bullshit just because the rest of the group is acting like it's obviously true? Or the known examples of mass psychogenic illness in history?
Anything weird that happens to an excited group of people should start with mass psychology as the 1st hypothesis.
It might be that we could reproduce it, if we knew what circumstances elicited it in the first place. But practically speaking, if you tried to get funding to run an experiment where you gathered a bunch of people to try to observe the phenomenon in different conditions, to see what generated it, you would not get funding, because an IRB would not let you run an experiment that involved a whole bunch of people looking directly up at the sun.
We don't know how reproducible this effect is, because nobody has actually put in the work to try to research that.
"sun miracles are neither true divine intervention nor vague hypnotic suggestion, but some particular illusory/psychological phenomenon which necessarily manifests as the sun spinning and changing color"
I'm confused. If we remove all the religious dimension, isn't this just persistence of vision? How is this a psychological phenomenon rather than a perceptual one?
"the survey tightens the link" No, the surveys references thoughts and discourse between some researchers. If those thoughts happened, those thoughts tightens the link.
"those thoughts tighten the link" No, the researchers were observing some real-world phenomenon, people's behavior, outcomes, showing up as patterns in survey data. If that phenomenon occurred, then the observed phenomenon tightens the link.
There would be nothing odd about saying 'John Smith's 1987 essay tightens the link' if Scott had read about the survey in such an essay rather than in a Claude post, so I don't think saying 'Claude tightens the link' is giving Claude undue credit for coming up with the evidence by itself.
this seems uselessly pedantic.. you could prove claude wrong and vindicate the point you are trying to make; otherwise.. what's the point? This language (i.e. "google says" or "the bible says") has been in the lexicon for ages.
"Google says" is inaccurate, and whatever Google linked to should be cited instead. "The Bible says" is useless unless you're studying the contents of the Bible.
The researchers noted down their findings and presumably the method leading to those findings in said report. They did all the work, and all the information leading to thouse fibdings can be found in the report. The source that should be credited therefore is the report. Claude simply sited said report. Siting Claude is like siting wikipedia or other secondary sources - not good practice.
Yeah, I and a few others pushed back on this the first couple times Scott did it, making the exact point that he ought to cite the sources used by whatever LLM he was citing, but either that point wasn't clear, or he didn't/doesn't agree with it.
Reminds me of "The Human Light Show," a chapter in Michael Crichton's interesting autobiography "Travels." He reports experiencing strange visual phenomena when meditating with a particular woman who was known for glowing in different colors (when meditating).
I think especially for those of us who grew up in a religion where these types of eye-witness miracles were given as proofs of the religion, the correct way to reason out of them wasn't to try and figure out the specific mechanism by which people were confused, but to realize that Catholics, Hindus, Buddhist, Protestants, Mormons, Muslims, Spiritualist, UFOs, etc. are all basically mutually exclusive but each have their own eye-witness miracles that don't have ONE obvious rebuttal where we can say, it wasn't a miracle it was definitely X. The best we can do is say x, y, or z, and a bunch of other things are all plausible alternative logical explanations. If you're predisposed to believe in that world view and don't realize that every other world view has similar miracles they use, "it's a legit miracle" seems more plausible than all the alternative explanations. But because so many mutually exclusive belief systems can cite eye-witness unexplained phenomena, our intuition that it is strong evidence is wrong and it's actually quite weak evidence. So you're more or less okay ignoring it for any of x, y, or z.
But I can see as a psychologist interested in mental phenomena it would be nice if we could figure out the exact mental failure that is happening to convince the original eye-witnesses. Although it wouldn't surprise me if there's many different mental failings (or even outright lying in some cases); so maybe there's a specific one in Fatima that is interesting if we figure out what it is.
I nevertheless suspect divine intervention considering me quickly finding a kosher car park for car and trailer a few steps from my city destination this week.
Reminds me of an episode in one of Carlos Castaneda’s books. CC thought he had a Christian metaphysical experience of seeing a giant Jesus. His guru Don Juan laughed so hard it angered CC. Did it talk? Move? Do anything? Nope. It was inert. DJ eventually explained that it wasn’t Jesus. Jesus is an assumption we make. A label. In fact the image of a pure perfect creature was a kind of primal image we all have access to, of our own pure original “self” before accumulating all our life experience.
Now here is the crazy part. A few years after reading that I read a small news article that said one of those famous mega church preachers in the USA had the same experience and took it as a sign that parishioners should donate to his university. Ha ha ha.
Apologies, just that Castaneda was such a fabulist I barely believe him when he said his name is Carlos. Any alleged visions he claims to have seen (and then got the Read Native Magic Wisdom from Don Juan about such) are to be taken with a sackful of salt, be that alleged visions of Jesus or of other entities.
Agreed with your diagnosis. I’d call Casteneda’s genre fiction, magical realism, or some kind of fantasy. (I still liked it). But it amazed me that something he described happened to Oral Roberts about 10 years later! And it related to the OP.
I often heard about Wad Dhammakaya (วัดพระธรรมกาย) when I lived in BKK. It was widely regarded as a shady organization that was innovating by implementing commercial style marketing and flock-management practices to build significant financial resources. As a result, it was both successful/popular and also reviled.
Perhaps interesting: I never heard about this miraculous vision. I think there are two reasons:
(a) the sources are not considered trustworthy with these claims forming part of the bigger, suspect marketing message
(b) the base level of superstition is already so high that this event is not really that interesting.
To explain (b) a bit more: almost every house, neighborhood, and business has a collection of small shrines to local spirits, others to a version of Buddha, and most also have at least one to a past king (this writing is clunky, I just want to be clear that there are multiple shrines, not one catch-all.) Random personal events are explained as interventions from supernatural forces. Why get excited about something a bunch of other people are claiming to experience if you directly felt the effects of intervention during your morning commute? Or your job hunt? Or your marriage search? etc etc.
Separately, one reason that translation models aren't super helpful is because (1) Thai isn't super well supported to start and (2) the words in the religious register of Thai are rare and unusual, so the vocab for this event will be poorly represented in training sets. Also, Thai newspapers are notorious for slang/short hand that makes it very hard to follow without good context on the article.
For completeness, could you please provide Claude's sources for (a) scholars classifying Dhammakaya as a form of āloka kasina, and (b) the UK survey of kasina practitioners?
Also, minor proofreading oddity:
> Fandom So from an outside scholarly perspective
The word 'fandom' seems to have snuck into the beginning of this sentence, where it has no business being.
It seems that the survey comes from Meditation: A Therapeutic Tool For Managing Stress, an unpublished 1998 M.Sc. Nursing Studies thesis by Kruawan Sookcharoen (King’s College, London). It's not available online (at least as far as my Claude can tell), and the few sources that mention it never cite anything from it other than the 3-15% meditation statistic. This survey also seems to be Claude's source for scholars classifying Dhammakaya as a form of āloka kasina.
It's worth noting that this seems pretty weak, though I don't think it makes much difference to your overall conclusions.
Incidentally, it's pretty easy to prompt Claude to provide in-text citations for specific facts in addition to its overall list of websites used. I'd recommend doing this to make it easier to follow Claude's reasoning and understand its use of sources.
Just here to say that as a kid, on long car trips, I stared at the sun in the sky for really long periods of time. (No one told me it was bad, and I don’t think my parents were paying attention, and I guess it didn’t hurt my eyes enough?)
I distinctly remember the sun becoming like a disk and “spinning” (or something) and becoming weird colors…it was pretty cool to stare at for awhile, which is why I did it in car trips for so long.
So I’m inclined to think it’s a visual thing that happens even if you’re not primed to think it will.
Fascinating, thanks. Did this happen regularly, or just one time? Do you remember what time of day it was (ie did it only happen at sunrise or sunset, or could it have been other times too?)
Could you explain what it means for a white disk to look like it’s spinning? Everyone who sees it describes it like that, so it must mean something intuitive to people who witness it, but I still can’t picture it. Thanks!
Imagine a quarter spinning on a table (flat side more parallel to the table vs the other way), but the quarter is a white sun disc with some kind of color and dimension? I’m not sure the best way to describe, plus this is my memory from like 30 years ago. 😆 hope that helps.
Dhammakaya is the strongest anti-miracle argument. Independent replication, uncontaminated context, different religion entirely. Same phenomenon every time, parsimony wins.
I like these miracles. Those are high-quality miracles. Compare those with the worst miracle in history.
The miracle was allegedly performed in Egypt by a clean-shaved Muslim Sheikh (“Elder”) called Jamal Oddin, fond of visiting cemeteries. He was confronted during a funeral by a religious judge (a qadi) called Ibn Omaid. After an exchange of insults, the qadi referred to Oddin’s regrettable lack of facial hair, and Oddin responded immediately, according to the traveler Ibn Battuta:
“The Sheikh said, mark me: he then rubbed a little alcohol on his eye-brows, and lifting: up his head, presented a great black beard, which very much astonished the judge and those with him, so that the judge descended from his mule. The Sheikh applied the alcohol the second time, and, lifting up his head, exhibited a beautiful white beard. He then applied the alcohol the third time; and, when he lifted up his head, his face was beardless as before. The judge then kissed his hand, became his disciple and, building a handsome tomb for him, became his companion for the rest of his life.”
As Ibn Battuta adds, presumably in earnest, after a while the Sheikh died and was buried; and when the judge died, he was buried, as it had been expressed in his will, in the door-way of the miracle man’s tomb, so that everyone who should visit the tomb of the Sheikh would have to pass over his grave.
This is so frickin exciting. I was one-shotted by Fatima at age 11 and I didn't get how people can ignore this. Took me a lot of years until I encountered EA and truly allowed myself to think freely. It's such a powerful testimony to the rationalist spirit that a bunch of nerds can just sit for a while with a puzzle that everyone else finds too uncomfortable to think about, that was lying about for a literal hundred years, and solve it.
I mean, speaking as a person who doesn't believe that either event was genuinely supernatural, I don't think we can describe the event as "solved." We don't have an actual mechanism, we just have a strong basis for believing that there's some kind of optical or psychological phenomenon underlying the observations that's not unique to Fatima, that there's at least one other mass religious sighting claiming something similar as a miracle for an incompatible religion, and that taking either one as a miracle proves too much.
Even in a world where we didn't have the Dhammakaya Temple event as evidence to draw on, I would say "in a world where Catholicism is literally true, we really would not expect this one weird visual event in Fatima to be the best-attested supernatural event to testify to the truth of Catholicism in particular, the world does not on the whole look like we'd expect it to if Catholicism were actually true, this probably wasn't an actual miracle, whatever caused it." And I'd say I'm in basically the same situation now, just with more evidence that this wasn't a unique occurrence only associated with the event at Fatima. We still don't understand why either event actually happened.
One thing that’s funny about the demonic explanation of the Buddhist sun miracle is that if they did it in order to mock/cast doubt on the Fatima sun miracle, their goals won’t have been achieved until now, when Sophia, Arthur, and you uploaded these Substacks, since no one had spotted the parallel; if the demons had preter-natural foreknowledge—or were, more weakly, meticulous superforecasters—then given that you have the largest audience of the three, it could well be that their primary intended goal was you uploading this blog post.
What do we do when faced with two undeniable miracles, one that vindicates say Catholicism and one that vindicates Sunni Islam? what are we supposed to do then? If you choose wrong you go to hell possibly for eternity, it's terrifying.
In a comment to the last post on this topic, I said the following: "Science depends on replication - if a phenomenon cannot be observed repeatedly under different conditions, then it's useless to try to model it. This remains true even if the phenomenon is real in the material world. Something which cannot be reproduced cannot be included in our models, so we might as well not worry about it. Of course, if this phenomenon *can* be reproduced, which is the point of recording evidence of similar events elsewhere in the world, then we may have something."
The Sun shines on everyone alike: atheists, Catholics, or Buddhists.
So it would be perfectly in-character to show Buddhist miracles to Buddhists, Catholic miracles to Catholics, and nuclear fusion to atheists, which makes each group believe that they have seen the truth.
I still don't understand the point of pretending any of this is interesting. No sane person here believes any of these phenomena are actually supernatural occurrences, and the remainder - which specific combination of psychology, biology and physics caused them - is simply not that interesting.
Via meta-atheism I have arrived at the position that on some level, nobody, not even deeply religious people, *really* believe their religion - it's all just pretending/coping in some way. Despite that (and - who knows - because of that) religion still *works* in a functional sense, i.e. it appeases people's fear of death, makes them worship the great leader/country/in-group, and all. In light of that, I get the sense that this series of sun miracle posts is coming at a very similar religious attitude to mainstream religion, but with another layer of meta on top of it. Instead of pretending one really believes, one pretends that one doesn't really believe, which masks the pretense that one *does* really believe.
Before you say that sounds far-fetched, consider how similar this case is to those mathematical/ontological arguments for the existence of god. Only someone who takes as a prior that god exists would care to expend any mental effort at all on such things, and so by working on arguments for god's existence one is reinforcing the pretense that one really believes, thereby strengthening the functioning of religion in ones life. One meta-level higher, we have here: only someone who *pretends to take as a prior that god exists* would *pretend that expending mental effort on proving that miracles really exist is worthwhile*, thereby strengthening the function of religion in ones life.
Just something to keep in mind when the question "is rationality a cult" happens to catch to our attention once in a while. These are just my current thoughts on the matter that I'm still not super sure about, if anyone has better insights on the phenomenon "Scott pretends to be interested in proving miracles" that would be most welcome.
edit: I guess more succinctly my point is: if religion is self-deception, then self-deception about self-deception is also religion.
Would anything convince you that people truly do believe? They are not like you. The religious truly do believe, the mathematicians are actually trying to find justification and not just doing this out of some pragmatic 4D chess, and I'm increasingly convinced Scott truly believes as well. Unfortunately for him, it conflicts with his (equally arbitrary) principles in regards to truth, which leads him on a desperate and hopeless hunt for concrete evidence of the divine. But the initial motivation is still just his unsubstantiated prior towards the existence of a benevolent god.
Wow. As a Buddhist, I was highly skeptical of the Fátima miracle. Now that I see that it was merely a variant of a Buddhist miracle, I am convinced that a Bodhisattva manifested in Fátima a hundred years ago, whom the people took to be the Virgin Mary. Going forward, I know to be less skeptical of any reports of such divine miracles.
Why shouldn't this miracle also be attributed to the Catholic god? Causing Luang Pu Sodh to appear in the sky seems a much less inexplicable divine decision than, you know, creating a world filled with pointless suffering.
Reminds me of Imam Khomeini (AS) in the moon on 27 November, 1978, during the Islamic Revolution in Iran. In the next two months, the regime of the Shah collapsed.
"A rumour spread like a fire through the bush that a pious old lady in the holy city of Qom had found a hair from the Prophet’s beard in the pages of her Qur’an. The same evening an apparition had informed the saintly lady that the faithful would be able to see the face of Imam Khomeini in the full moon on 27 November. No one bothered to ask how the old lady knew that the hair belonged to the Prophet or whether any such old lady existed in the first place. Within a single day almost everyone had heard the rumour and millions of people gathered on the rooftops on the promised day and waited for the full moon, shouting ‘Allah Akbar’. It was also rumoured that only miscreants and bastards would fail to see Khomeini’s face in the moon. Tehran and other major cities experienced a festive moment that sharply contrasted with the rest of that bleak, bitterly cold and bloody autumn. Tears of joy were shed and huge quantities of sweets and fruits were consumed as millions of people jumped for joy, shouting ‘I’ve seen the Imam in the moon.’ The event was celebrated in thousands of mosques with mullahs reminding the faithful that a sure sign of the coming of the Mahdi was that the sun would rise in the West. Khomeini, representing the sun, was now in France and his face was shining in the moon like a sun. People were ready to swear on the Qur’an that they had seen Khomeini’s face in the moon. Even the Communist Party shared in the collective hallucination. Its paper Navid wrote: ‘Our toiling masses, fighting against world-devouring Imperialism headed by the blood-sucking United States, have seen the face of their beloved Imam and leader, Khomeini the Breaker of Idols, in the moon. A few pipsqueaks cannot deny what a whole nation has seen with its own eyes.’ "
- Page 241-2, The spirit of Allah : Khomeini and the Islamic revolution, by Amir Taheri
(The author was a contemporary opponent of the Islamic Revolution, and interpreting from the text, not a believijg Muslim - so his description of the Mass Hysteria is presumably accurate.)
Wasn't the decisive aspect in Fatima's believability that it had been prophesied by a group of children from a vision of the Virgin Mary that they supposedly experienced weeks in advance? The crowd that gathered there had come to argue or witness whether or not something would happen - and the near-universal consensus was that something did indeed happen. Without this previous, specifically divinely inspired prediction, the miracle would have far less cachet with Christians since the testimonies specifically seeing Christian symbols during the event are far slimmer than those simply recounting the sun distorting or changing colours. The Christian apologetic arguments build on the timeline of events and on the critical fact that people skeptical of the prophecy, who arrived fully primed to see nothing, abundantly testified to having seen extremely similar things to those who arrived expecting the prophecy to hold true.
This supposed miracle in Bangkok, on the other hand, involves a crowd composed entirely of religious practitioners, all - we must assume - sharing more or less the same general belief system about the nature of divinity, all practicing the same meditation technique which specifically can include strongly visualising a luminous monk, all very much not primed to see the Sun distort/change colours/otherwise divert from its normal state since that phenomenon apparently bears no tradition or meaning in the context of their religion. Very interestingly, this vision seems to have cascaded out from a single person, who first drew attention to it by specifically crying out what they were seeing when looking at the Sun.
These are quite stark differences - the only thing the two events really share are quite similar (but not really identical) eyewitness reports about the Sun deviating from its normal state for a little while.
The Bangkok Sun Miracle is nonetheless a very compelling addition to the list of such events generally, and plays very nicely with the theory that these events are mainly cases of hitherto unnamed optical effects experienced when observing the sun mixed with some kind of suggestion based on crowd psyche - thought I don't think it will move Fatima believers much, for the reasons I just listed.
Another thought came to me regarding the Buddhist Sun Miracle:
When the crowd was meditating, were their closed eyes facing the Sun?
It seems to me from personal experience that facing the Sun even with closed eyes still allows light to pass through the eyelids and that doing so becomes strenuous after prolonged exposure. The field of sight goes from black to cadmium red and one can feel one's eyes/eyelids heating up. After a little while, the heat and light becomes unpleasant and one feels compelled to look away. Perhaps these meditating practitioners were already in a state highly conducive to seeing the Sun morph due to having indirectly been staring at it for a long time, albeit with closed eyes. Add to that the psychological and physical strain of focused meditation, and it seems plausible that they were gently inducing a kind of trance state upon themselves - imagine staring at the beaming Sun with closed eyes while focusing all your energy on feeling and thinking as little as possible, meaning resisting the physical urge to look away and shield the eyes from sunlight - PLUS resisting the very awareness of that urge as much as possible.
If I recall correctly, a big component of the timeline of events at Fatima was that the crowd had been observing the Sun behind a veil of rainy clouds - perhaps a similar optical process as staring at the Sun with closed eyes, since both gazes include a sort of filter between the Sun and the naked eye. In your extensive write-up about Fatima, I believe you pointed out that people who specifically experimented with observing the Sun for long periods with the naked eye did not report identical visual effects as those present for the supposed miracles - perhaps because they were looking at the Sun on a clear day and not in rainy or cloudy conditions?
The aspect that I keep coming back to and that feels the most crucial to me, however, is the fact that this mass vision originated from one specific person, who literally described exactly what he was seeing instead of just shouting "the Sun is doing something weird". It's also very interesting to note that despite this being a group meditation in which everyone has their eyes closed, this person opened his eyes, since he otherwise wouldn't have noticed the Sun changing. If we want to take a skeptical approach, it becomes almost comically easy to break down what happened:
1. Crowd of cultish Buddhists gather for group meditation, mildly exposed to the Sun behind closed eyes
2. One such Buddhist was using the meditation technique that focused on visualising a luminous monk
3. Due to the strain of the sunlight on his closed eyes or a lapse in meditative focus, he felt compelled to open them for a brief instance, at which point the strong visualised image of the luminous monk overlayed with the optical effect of prolonged exposure to the Sun in "filtered" conditions
4. Being in a soft trance state and a faithful believer of a religion that already accepts visions and apparitions as possible, he immediately took this to mean that it was a vision of divine portent and shared what he was seeing with the rest of the crowd
5. The crowd of meditating Buddhists, who all had been exposed to the Sun by filtered means due their closed eyes, were violently snapped out of their meditative focus and dragged back into the physical realm by being told to specifically look directly at the Sun with the expectation that it would not look normal.
6. The other Buddhists who had also been using the technique of visualising a luminous monk experienced the same visual overlay effect, while those who were not using that technique did not see the any monk figure in the Sun, but merely report visual distortions.
7. Ergo, the apparition of the Monk is pure suggestion stemming from one person, mixed with a number of practitioners already being primed to see that image, while the distortions/colour shifts of the Sun are the result of simply experiencing sunlight for prolonged exposure in a veiled state (closed eyes in Bangkok, rainy clouds in Fatima) all while being in a heightened/atypical emotional state that perhaps intensifies or overwhelms the brains capacity to process visual information the way it would in a more casual context.
This seems like a solid causality to me - and strengthens the skeptical approach to these events. What still throws me off in the case of Fatima is that the event was prophesied in some form and that we have testimonies from skeptics.
Fatima case closed, IMO
Closed as an argument for the Catholic faith in particular, you mean? Because there's obv still lots we don't know about this phenomenon.
Even so, it seems the fire meditation aspect is important both in the Buddhist case and the meditative experiences Scott discusses previously. I'm not sure to what degree the Fatima witnesses can be said to have done a similar "meditation".
Also, the aspect of the sun seemingly falling towards the Earth does not seem to be paralleled here.
So, I don't think Fatima proponents are completely KO here.
No one I found described it that way, but several described it “zooming” in and out which I think is probably the same effect.
I see, thanks for clarifying :) and for the work!
Do you actually think it’s plausible that God (the Catholic God) moved the sun around in the sky in 1917 to prove he exists? Can any adult pretend to believe in this without deep embarrassment?
Me personally? No. But I'm also not a Christian, many of whom do believe in all kinds of miracles, with a corresponding prior. And generally speaking, something being very strange or seemingly absurd can still be true, as we've discovered again and again. I don't think you need to be embarrassed of coming to strange conclusions, unless your epistemology is ridiculous, as well.
Also, the miracle could be a God-induced mass hallucination (whyever he would do any of this). Even if it was the physical sun moving, clearly he prevented it from having any global physical effects. So I guess it doesn't really matter whether the sun was moving or just appeared to be to many people, either one can be claimed a great miracle.
Oh, leave us not be embarrassed, as we are all so terribly, terribly, Adult here!
The older I get, the less I care about being adult and cool (not that I ever was) or about other people's opinions of me.
Honestly, when you're not keeping up with the Joneses, that is so much more relaxing and liberating. And that includes "but the Joneses would *never* believe the likes of this!"
What is that Lewis quote again?
“When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
Honey, I believe in transubstantiation. A mere spinning sun is nothing to that, if you ask me about "beliefs you should be embarrassed to hold as an adult".
According to the Council of Chalcedon, Jesus is 100% human *and* 100% divine.
Is it really surprising they have the same attitude towards mathematics as they do to physics and biology?
A serious question from a (non-Catholic) Christian:
What exactly *is* transubstantiation? Like what do you believe physically happens? The blood is one thing, but what exactly does the bread become? Like pieces of miscellaneous flesh that genetically are pieces of Jesus' human body, but that don't correspond to an actual body part? What do you, specifically, believe to be happening during communion?
For my part, it's hard for me to gather that Jesus is saying that the bread and wine become literal human flesh and blood, but because God (and Jesus) are Spirit, I do believe that, spiritually, the bread and wine are Jesus' flesh and blood, in a similar way that the Church is the body of Christ in the world. Just not His individual, human body.
You seem to be quite knowledgeable about Catholic things, so I'm curious what you personally believe transubstantiation to be.
This is indeed a deep question; there's the various Protestant views of the Eucharist/Lord's Supper/Holy Communion which arose at the time of the Reformation (but some of which certainly had been percolating for a long time before), the Catholic view as it became defined, and I think the Orthodox view but I don't know enough about the fine points of their theology to comment. All I know there is that Catholics can, if necessary, receive the Orthodox sacrament but from the Orthodox point of view they are not in communion with us and would not practice open communion since they feel the theologies are too divergent.
Short answer (since this is something I do need to get deep into, but haven't the exact time right now): yes, I do believe His flesh is real food and His blood is real drink (see John 6) and so I have a very, very high view of the Eucharist (and rather deplore the modern Catholic emphasis on it as a celebration/shared meal than the older view of it as the sacrifice of the altar):
"52 The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” 53 So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. 54 Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. 55 For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. 56 Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. 57 As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever feeds on me, he also will live because of me. 58 This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like the bread the fathers ate, and died. Whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.” 59 Jesus said these things in the synagogue, as he taught at Capernaum."
Now, as to *how* this happens, yeah that's where all the arguing starts. But it's not merely spiritual or under the form of or only if you're a believer. But neither is it "chopping up" the glorified human body of Christ or lumps of His flesh or Luther's mockery of splitting up the body that is in Heaven. What we've got are best-guess philosophical statements necessary to define the doctrine, but in the end it is indeed a Mystery, the mystery of faith. Setting aside Eucharistic miracles, you are not going to take a communion host or the wine after both have been consecrated, stick them into a mass spectrometer or other fancy scientific process of your choice, and find the bread is now human flesh and the wine is now human blood. That is not how it works, and the basic easy sceptical approach of "foolish believers, it's just a cracker!" (thank you PZ Myers and don't think I've forgotten that stunt you pulled yet) is not going to disenchant those who truly believe it into "oh my gosh, all this time I was fooled!"
https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/catechism/index.cfm?recnum=4178
"1376 The Council of Trent summarizes the Catholic faith by declaring: "Because Christ our Redeemer said that it was truly his body that he was offering under the species of bread, it has always been the conviction of the Church of God, and this holy Council now declares again, that by the consecration of the bread and wine there takes place a change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood. This change the holy Catholic Church has fittingly and properly called transubstantiation."
1377 The Eucharistic presence of Christ begins at the moment of the consecration and endures as long as the Eucharistic species subsist. Christ is present whole and entire in each of the species and whole and entire in each of their parts, in such a way that the breaking of the bread does not divide Christ."
I do need to take time to think about this and go into it, to give you a proper answer as well as I can, because as C.S. Lewis so sensibly and wisely said in "The Screwtape Letters":
"The real fun is working up hatred between those who say "mass" and those who say "holy communion" when neither party could possibly state the difference between, say, Hooker's doctrine and Thomas Aquinas', in any form which would hold water for five minutes."
I appreciate your response!
I also have a very high view of the Eucharist (is it technically not the Eucharist if I'm not Catholic? Like would it just be considered a false imitation? I really don't know much about Catholicism, nor do I know what Luther had to say about it) seeing how it is something Jesus commanded, and people died when they took it in a dishonoring way.
I think it is a little bit of an error to say that the Eucharist isn't "merely" spiritual, because spiritual things are superior to physical. The triune God Himself is Spirit, and wasn't phsyical until he humbled himself and became human. Even other sacraments, such as marriage, are physical images of spiritual truths. It seems that God created the physical world so intricately that it can represent spiritual truths in countless ways.
As for John 6, I still just don't get from what Jesus said that the Eucharist is physically, literally the human flesh and blood of Jesus. Earlier in the chapter:
31 Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written: ‘He gave them bread out of heaven to eat.’” 32 Jesus then said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, it is not Moses who has given you the bread out of heaven, but it is My Father who gives you the true bread out of heaven. 33 For the bread of God is that which comes down out of heaven and gives life to the world.” 34 Then they said to Him, “Lord, always give us this bread.”
35 Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; the one who comes to Me will not be hungry, and the one who believes in Me will never be thirsty. 36 But I said to you that you have indeed seen Me, and yet you do not believe.
In regard to verse 36, I'd like to point to 1 Corinthians 10:
1 For I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that our fathers were all under the cloud and they all passed through the sea; 2 and they all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea; 3 and they all ate the same spiritual food, 4 and all drank the same spiritual drink, for they were drinking from a spiritual rock which followed them; and the rock was Christ. 5 Nevertheless, with most of them God was not pleased; for their dead bodies were spread out in the wilderness.
In the same way as the Jews Jesus was addressing, the Israelites in the had Christ *truly* with them, but they did not believe and died in the wilderness. But that spiritual rock that they drank from was, actually, Christ, just not His human flesh and blood. Anyway, taking these two passages together, it seems to me like the true food and drink are spiritual, not physical.
Earlier in John, Jesus says that His food is to do the will of the One who sent Him, and then later in chapter 6 in this interaction we've both referenced he says "For this is the will of My Father, that everyone who sees the Son and believes in Him will have eternal life, and I Myself will raise him up on the last day." It is God's will for everyone to see and believe in Jesus, and this is what gives life, which Jesus repeatedly says that He is the bread of life, and whoever eats of it will not see death. Finally, at the end of this John 6 passage, Jesus tells his disciples:
"It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh provides no benefit; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit, and are life."
All of this together makes it seem clear to me that the true bread and drink that Jesus is talking about is purely spiritual, and that is why it can be called "true". In that case, maybe none of these passages have anything to do with communion, but then there still seems like there isn't any scripture support that communion is actually human flesh and blood. I can only conclude that it is a sacred physical representation of spiritual truth, just as mostly every kind of ritual God commanded man to do is.
But I didn't mean by my question to start a debate and I know you didn't intend to from your reply. I just wanted to give as thoughtful an answer as you gave instead of just a "nice 😃👍" I do appreciate you taking the time to engage me on this.
Ohhh, why some of us love Deiseach. thx.
So there's no materially observable difference, just esoteric residue usable to identify affected organisms later on? Sort of like how carbon-12 and carbon-14 are effectively indistinguishable in terms of chemical properties.
One analogy I use for the process: if there's a callus of dead skin on your toe, you would consider that part of your body. But if something causes part of that skin to flake off, then it is no longer part of your body, even though its chemical composition is unchanged. Thus, the status of something being part of your body isn't simply a matter of material composition, but has a metaphysical element (and it can't be reduced to a matter of contact or chemical joining either - if I glued someone's hand to a chair, most people would not consider the chair part of their body).
Obviously, it's still a big step to go from there to believing that someone (Jesus) can metaphysically make bread and wine part of Himself, while the physical entities still appear distinct. As a Catholic, I consider this part of the mystery of the Eucharist, and a result of a God who perfectly loves Creation, and thus cannot offer us anything less than the entirety of Himself.
Oh thank you, I wanted to respond, but mine would have been from a point of less conviction. (I'm a crazy old man, who puts ufos at >80%.)
I also wanted to add, that with ufo>80%, esp > 90% and all that entails, I'm way more likely to just believe in other peoples miracles. It becomes the 'easiest' explanation. Maybe it's all easier to understand if all the gods are real. And maybe it's true, at least at some level.
as you can see, they can pretend all day long.
but they really do pretend. nobody in this comment section actually earnestly believes this.
I missed the news of Vance saying that! That's hilarious, thanks!
It reminds me of the time Tucker Carlson got attacked by a demon, which left claw marks on him without waking any of the four dogs in his bed.
Truly, there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.
Sincere comment or joke? USA Today says it's a "quip", other sources treat it as serious.
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2026/03/28/jd-vance-ufo-aliens-demons/89361033007/
I'd have to listen to the podcast to find out what exactly he said and how he said it, and I come out in lumps when I have to listen to podcasts. I do wonder if Vance was pulling legs over the recent ruffle around UAPs.
If Vance is tying it to his faith, let me note that the Catholic Church has no official position on aliens and UFOs, so if individuals consider these may be demonic phenomena, they can do so, but it's not necessary or required to believe that aliens exist, don't exist, or are demons if you're a Catholic:
https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/aliens-and-the-catholic-church
If you think I don't believe what I say I believe, how can you see inside my brain to know what I think more than I do?
Hmm do I need to believe it? What about if I put it at >10%. It's not belief, but it's maybe.
Speaking as a Christian, I certainly do not.
Not even closed as an argument for the Catholic faith, since if it's a miracle and Catholics are right, it was a miracle that God did for a bunch of pagans. Tons of testimony of that happening in the bible.
That's fair, though I guess the Buddhists could claim the same. However, IIUC these miracles happen more often in Catholic contexts, which would favor the Catholic interpretation.
Why did he manifest a Buddhist saint/guru then, as opposed to someone like Jesus or Elijah or even Aquinas ?
I dunno man it's ineffable or something. I'm not allowed to speculate because that's for the Church Hierarchy and reading the Bible is for heretics but He has His reasons.
Can't argue with that logic ! :-)
To test your faith. Like with fossils.
Someone should do a similar deep dive on Ethan Muse's recent post about a totally different miracle (actually, a group of miracles) related to St. Pio of Pietrelcina. He reportedly had stigmata that oozed large amounts of blood and emanated a pleasant odor. He could also allegedly raise his body temperature to very high levels that should have killed him. Muse has a long post about all this. https://motivacredibilitatis.substack.com/p/st-pio-of-pietrelcina
I thought https://thetowerofbabble.substack.com/p/when-is-a-miracle-of-god-not-a-miracle was pretty good. It's a bit unfocused and more interested in the personalities than in an exact deconstruction of what's going on, but if you CTRL+F "carbolic acid" you get to a discussion of claims that Padre Pio ordered various chemicals that could be used to fake wounds.
Yeah, that's an old one that has been knocking around for a long time. I'm agnostic on Padre Pio; a lot of people have deep devotion to him, but there's a substantial minority which have been sceptical (up to accusing him of fakery) as well all along.
An anecdote, which has fascinated me, and which may be relevant given our friend who likes to discuss UAPs, is the one about American pilots allegedly seeing visions of Padre Pio during the Second World War. We've got an (alleged) American general of our own testifying to this! Hold on to your hats, chaps! Veracity of this not established and I'm certainly not going to make any claims here about monks zooming airplanes 😁 (One of the things I do like about being Catholic, as well as it being so terribly, terribly non-adult and embarrassing a la Jeremy's critique, is that we go big or go home on stuff like this):
https://italiantribune.com/the-story-of-the-flying-monk-a-myth-a-legend-or-reality/
"THE TESTIMONY OF USAF COMMANDING GENERAL NATHAN F. TWINING
Stationed at the base was General Nathan F. Twining and upon hearing these bizarre reports of a flying monk, he decided to lead the bombing squad himself to see what was going on.
He couldn’t believe that there was a monk who was flying in the air and that the stories the pilots were telling about their bomb bay doors refusing to open or their bombs falling harmlessly to the ground and not exploding were true, let alone the even crazier reports that planes were being turned around in midair by the flying monk.
General Twining happened to be in Bari at the time he kept hearing these incredible stories. He didn’t believe the pilots and he thought that they were seeing things. He decided to launch another bombing raid, so he got into one of the bombers and they all took off for San Giovanni Rotondo to hit their target. He reported that as they neared the monastery in San Giovanni Rotondo, a monk appeared in the clouds right in front of his plane and that he was flying at the same speed that he was. He reported that the monk had his hands extended and immediately, all the bombers bomb bay doors were opened, the bombs fell harmlessly into the open fields below and their planes turned around by themselves. They aborted the mission and returned to Bari where he filed his own incredible eyewitness account."
https://catholicconnect.care/st-padre-pio-the-flying-saints-and-the-american-comrades/
"This extraordinary story about Padre Pio is told by Fr. Damaso di Sant’Elia, superior of the Pianisi convent, in Italy. The report appears formally in “Positio”, the official document that exposes the defense of the canonization of the famous Capuchin friar, who was awarded the stigmata of the Passion of Christ.
“Several pilots of British and American aviation, of various nationalities and different religions, who, during the Second World War, after September 8, 1943, were in the area of Bari to carry out missions in Italian territory, were witnesses of a unusual fact. In carrying out their duties, some airmen passed through the Gargano region, near San Giovanni Rotondo, and saw a ‘monk’ in the sky who was forbidden to drop bombs on the spot.
In Foggia and Apúlia almost all there were bombings on several occasions, but, incredibly, in the area of San Giovanni Rotondo (where Padre Pio lived) a bomb never fell. Direct witness of this fact was the general of the Italian air force, Bernardo Rossini, who, at the time, was part of the Air Unit Command together with the allied forces.
General Rossini told me that, among the military, there was talk of a ‘monk’ who appeared in the sky and made the planes withdraw. Many laughed in disbelief at these stories, but, due to the repeated occurrence of the episodes, and always with different pilots, the general decided to intervene personally: he took command of a squadron of bombers to destroy a German ammunition depot that was right in San Giovanni Rotondo.
We were all extremely curious to know the result of the operation. Therefore, when the flight returned, we immediately went to find the general, who, astonished, said that, as soon as he arrived at the site, both he and his pilots saw the ‘monk’ figure in the sky with their hands raised; the bombs dropped by themselves and fell in a forest; and the planes came around without any pilot intervention.
Everyone wondered who was that ‘ghost’ that the planes obeyed. Upon hearing that in San Giovanni Rotondo there was a friar with stigmas, considered holy by the community, the general thought that perhaps he was the ‘monk’ seen in heaven and decided to check it out as soon as possible. When the war was over, this was the first thing he did. Accompanied by some pilots, he went to the Capuchin convent and, crossing the threshold of the sacristy, found himself facing several friars, among whom he immediately recognized the one who had stopped his planes.
Padre Pio came over and, placing his hand on his shoulder, said: ‘So it was you who wanted to kill us all?’. The general knelt before Padre Pio, who, as usual, had spoken to him in the Benevento dialect. The general, however, was certain that the ‘monk’ had spoken to him in English. The two became friends and the general, who was a Protestant, converted to Catholicism ”.
Source: Positio III / 1, p. 689-690"
Julie over at Happy Catholic has some posts about Padre Pio, the story I like is this one:
https://happycatholic.blogspot.com/search?q=padre+pio
"Deacon Greg Kandra has, in years past, featured a 2009 homily he gave focusing on Padre Pio and tells this story which reflects the saint's fine sense of humor and irony.
One of my favorite stories about him happened during the early 1960s.
Italy was in crisis. The Red Brigade was sparking violence in Rome, and it was considered dangerous to travel around the country. For protection, people began carrying pictures of Padre Pio.
During this time, Padre Pio had to leave his village to visit Rome, and one of the other friars asked him, “Aren’t you worried about the Red Brigade?”
“No,” he said. “I have a picture of Padre Pio.”
I asked Claude about the Twining story:
"The 'testimony' attributed to Twining is much more dubious. When you trace the actual source, the story undergoes a significant transformation. The testimony that appears in the official Positio (the canonization document for Padre Pio) comes not from Twining but from General Bernardo Rosini of the Italian Air Force. Rosini described an unnamed "commanding general" who led a bombing squadron and encountered the apparition. In Rosini's account, this unnamed American commander is never identified as Twining.
The Italian Tribune article and many popular retellings have grafted Twining's name onto this unnamed "commanding general" — but I could find no primary source, military report, memoir, or official document in which Twining himself gave this testimony. As one researcher noted, 'this article says Twining also converted to Catholicism, but I can't find anything to confirm that,' and the same blogger observed that "allegedly there are Army Air Force reports about this, but nobody seems to quote one or show pictures of them, online."
A skeptical analysis also raised a logical timeline problem: the Italian Co-belligerent Air Force was only formed in October 1943 after the Italian Armistice in September, while the last air raid on Foggia occurred on September 17–18, raising questions about how an Italian general could have been fighting alongside the Allies before the armistice."
Yeah, like I'm gonna believe a Talkie Toaster over a bona fide saint 🤣
This is one of the "nobody says you have to believe it's true (thank God)" kind of stories that pop up all over the place in the likes of the Golden Legend.
Weirdly, while doing research into the Dhammakaya Sun Miracle, I found Buddhist analogues of this, too. There are stories in Thailand about Buddhist monks and nuns appearing in the sky to thwart Allied bombing raids during WWII
Levitating saints are part of the tradition; the one everyone knows about (or they used to in my day) is St. Joseph of Cupertino because he's the guy you pray to for help with your exams, due to him being so hopelessly stupid he kept failing when applying to join a religious congregation until he finally (whether it was the bishop taking pity on him or what) got an incredibly easy question that even he could answer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_of_Cupertino
"His struggles in being ordained to the priesthood required two providential coincidences involving his exams. These incidents have earned him the title of the patron of students, exam takers and those with learning difficulties or disabilities, while his levitation has earned him the patronage of pilots and those traveling by air.
...Feeling drawn to religious life, in 1620 he applied to the Conventual Franciscan friars, but was rejected due to his lack of education. He then applied to the Capuchin friars in Martino, near Taranto, by whom he was accepted in 1620 as a lay brother, but he was dismissed as his continued ecstasies made him unfit for the duties required of him.
After Joseph returned to the scorn of his family, he pleaded with the Conventual friars near Cupertino to be allowed to serve in their stables. After several years of working there, he had so impressed the friars with the devotion and simplicity of his life that he was admitted to their Order, destined to become a priest, in 1625. However, he struggled greatly with the required academic studies. He could not comment on any scripture passage except one: "Beatus venter qui Te portavit" (Blessed be the womb that bore Thee), Luke 11:27. In his exam for ordination to the diaconate, the Bishop giving the exam opened the Gospels at random and requested that Joseph expand upon this[,the] only verse that he knew. He was able to expand upon it well and was ordained to the diaconate. Then when he was going to be tested to be ordained a priest, the Bishop questioned several of Joseph's fellow candidates, and when they replied excellently, the Bishop did not question the rest, including Joseph, assuming all the candidates were equally prepared. This allowed Joseph to be ordained a priest on 28 March 1628. He was then sent to the convent of Santa Maria della Grotella, just outside Cupertino, where he spent the next 15 years."
Hah, I love it. Ufo's are reported all over battle fields. (for whatever that's worth*.)
*Dan Carlin has a list of gruesome battles from the past he wants to see, maybe the aliens have footage?
I wasn’t particularly impressed by this post. Stan omits testimony that corroborates St. Pio’s explanation of the veratridine and doesn’t meaningfully engage with Ethan’s arguments about the infeasibility of creating and maintaining the wounds through chemical burns, or the implausibility of him doing so given what we know about his character. I recommend reading Ethan’s original post if you haven’t—I’m not Catholic, but it’s compelling and I think deserving of a better response.
What's the testimony that corroborates St. Pio's explanation of the veratridine?
Pio’s explanation of the veratridine is that he used it to play a sneeze-inducing prank on his brothers, since Father Ignazio had done the same to him. Father Ignazio, when questioned, corroborates that this occurred.
Here is the relevant testimony:
"Q. Whether, specifically, he has ever put veratridine in it. A. No, I have the veratridine. In another convent we had a pharmacy for the Community, which was very numerous: There was no pharmacy in town. A pharmacist gave me one gram of it, and I still have some. One evening, joking with the Brothers, I made them try the effects it produces when it is drawn close to the nose. Padre Pio, too, took some, and he had to go back to his cell because he couldn’t stop sneezing."
Re: “one gram of it, and I still have some”, how much did Pio request on the first and second instances we know he did so?
He asked for four grams. And I think he only asked for veratridine once. The first time he asked for carbolic acid, supposedly for a different purpose.
Stan also didn’t address most of the alleged padre pio miracles.
If you can make a plausible case that at least some of this person's alleged miracles were produced through fraudulent means, that goes a long way toward casting doubt on the rest, without needing to account for every single instance individually.
I agree, but I’d be interested in something more comprehensive. I feel like I have a total explanation of Fatima after Scott’s post not just something casting slight doubt on the miracle.
Even though I haven’t read those articles yet, it might be worth mentioning that in southern Italy, Padre Pio of Pietrelcina is still one of the most revered and beloved saints. It’s almost impossible to count how many statues of him you see. he’s everywhere.
I am a little unclear on one point: do the Buddhists believe that āloka kasina creates visions of the Sun in the mind/spirit of the practitioner, or in reality ? That is to say, if the meditating Buddhist glances up at the Sun and beholds all those swirling colors and the floating figure of Luang Pu Sodh; and a regular guy happened to be passing by on his way to work; would the Buddhist expect that guy to also see Luang Pu Sodh up in the sky ?
I don't know what they believe, but it seems that nobody else in Bangkok saw anything odd about the sun that day, which matches all the Catholic miracles besides the first (Ethan claims there were distant witnesses to the first; the later ones included gatherings in big cities where nobody else in the city saw anything).
This makes sense, thanks -- so it seems like the Fatima Miracle and the Bangkok Event are indeed almost identical (plus or minus some theology).
I spent over a decade in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, and I don't think there's a single answer as different people obviously believe different things, but Buddhism is strongly biased towards the first-person experience, so creating visions in people's minds would probably be the go-to belief.
Then again, the absolute distinction between a mind inside and a world outside is considered suspect in much of Buddhism, so this gets more nuanced.
The story/legend of Milarepa (11th-century Tibetan spiritual figure) has lots of miracles in it IIRC. At one time he supposedly made himself fit within a goat horn, without his body getting any smaller or the horn getting any bigger. This is looks to me like it's meant more as a miracle in conceptual space than in pure physicality.
> Then again, the absolute distinction between a mind inside and a world outside is considered suspect in much of Buddhism, so this gets more nuanced.
That's a very good point, thanks, I should've remembered that. If the entire world is an illusion and so is the self, then the boundaries between miracles and reality to indeed become quite blurred.
I am confused that people still struggle with translations. Aren't machine translation a solved problem? Or is my outlook too rosy because the two languages I speak are extremely common?
In Czech and Slovak, the difference between "extortion" and "blackmail" does not exist, both use the same word "vydírání".
The Russian word for blackmail (шантаж - pronounced shan-taj) is actually French in origin (chantage), and the Russian word вымогательство (usually translated as extortion) is often used to refer to blackmail as well, so perhaps that's the word Zelensky used (in Russian/Ukrainian) or meant to use (in English)?
My understanding is that Ukrainian is used widely in Lviv and other western Ukrainian cities, as well as rural Ukraine, especially west of Kyiv, but the city elites in Kyiv and most central/eastern Ukrainian cities indeed mostly speak Russian (or at least spoke until the war).
Same in Hungarian
I guessed that would.be the case.
I took the person to mean not that “we now have the technology to perfectly render every meaning perfectly clear in every language” but rather “we now have the technology so that anyone can get the basic sense of anything written in any language”.
The trick is that sometimes "getting the basic sense of something" can be actively misleading as to what it means. It might be in some sense 'accurate to the basic sense' to translate "I'm going to punch your lights out" as "I'm going to break your lamps with my fist," but a person could get a very confused idea about what the phrase means.
Idioms aren't the only problem, just one of the most obvious ones (the fact that, as noted above, some languages distinguish between related concepts like blackmail and extortion while others do not is another good example.
I don't think this example makes the point you think it does.
I find it fascinating how can you turn any topic (now literally including the Buddhist Sun miracle) into debating Ukraine.
I suspect that this entire debate about electricity is mostly a political stunt for both sides. The part of electricity that Ukraine received from Slovakia was relatively small, and it is sold on a common market anyway, so Ukraine can simply buy more from Poland, probably for the same price. The electrons do not come with "made in Slovakia" tags.
Mostly formulating search queries and finding leads to follow up on is what I’m having issues with.
yeah that makes sense.. I wonder whether LLMs could also be helpful in formulating idiomatic search queries in another language?
Seems like an LLM could even do the searches in Thai, assuming that the newspaper allows robots to browse old pages. (But it’s possible they haven’t digitized newspaper articles from 1998 - I don’t know if the press in Thailand is still mostly the same companies that were operating 30 years ago or if there’s been a lot of churn over the past few decades).
Are the two languages you speak in the same family or structurally similar?
While the situation has improved significantly in the last few years, Japanese ->English machine translation can still get very confused because the Japanese language omits details (often pronouns) that are required to make a grammatically correct sentence in English. So in a sentence with multiple people doing verbs, it can be near impossible to translate without context and an accurate world model. (There are other issues like cultural terms or set phrases that don't translate well, concepts that are distinct in one language but come under a single word in the other, and sentences that trail off getting mangled because the word order is different and therefore the missing word at the end would be in the *middle* of the English sentence).
I'm guessing Thai is far enough from English and Buddhist religious concepts have enough specialized terminology that a human translator would have to rephrase, give a longer explanation or add some footnotes. But LLM-powered translation generally isn't able to step back and make that kind of editorial decision, it just kind of picks the "closest" word, and that can end up with the resulting passage being... if not wrong on the level of individual words, confusing or misleading in the impression it gives compared to the original.
That's very interesting. Can you give an example from Japanese where one of the two (three?) best LLMs at high effort setting still can't get it done?
LLMs surely aren’t doing the translation word by word! The whole point of the attention mechanism is that they can get some of the long range connections and context!
I’ve observed that when Google Translate tries to translate Japanese to English, it doesn’t do a word for word translation, but it silently omits stuff that it doesn’t know what to do with. In some cases, a word for word translation would be better than what Google Translate does because it would be confusing rather than misleading.
I haven’t tried using chatbots to translate Japanese, but here is a Deepseek translation from Latin to English:
Input:
Ut te quaeram mente pura,
sit haec mea pri-ma cura.
Output:
With a pure mind to seek you,
may this be my first care.
This is pretty close, but while Deepseek reorders the words in the first line, the order it chooses is wrong. It should be something like:
To seek you with a pure mind,
may this be my first care.
I’m not sure whether the second line is comprehensible unless you know what it is trying to say; could you tell that “this” refers to “seeking you with a pure heart?”
Prompt:
Can you translate this from Latin into English?
Ut te quaeram mente pura,
sit haec mea pri-ma cura.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 says:
Here's the translation:
**"That I may seek you with a pure mind, let this be my first care."**
This is a line from the *Jesu dulcis memoria*, a medieval Latin hymn. It expresses a devotional longing — the speaker's primary concern being to seek (God/Jesus) with an undivided, sincere heart.
ChatGPT Extended Thinking says:
“Yes, of course. A natural translation is:
**“That I may seek you with a pure mind, let this be my first care.”**
More literally:
* **Ut te quaeram** = “that I may seek you”
* **mente pura** = “with a pure mind”
* **sit haec mea prima cura** = “let this be my first concern/care”
The split **pri-ma** is just a line break in **prima**.
Gemini 3 says:
Gemini said
Here is the translation of your Latin text:
"That I may seek you with a pure mind, / let this be my first concern." (You can also read it as: "To seek you with a pure heart, / may this be my primary care.")
Word-by-Word Breakdown
Ut te quaeram: "That I may seek you" (or "To seek you")
mente pura: "with a pure mind" (or "with a pure heart")
sit haec: "let this be" (or "may this be")
mea prima cura: "my first care" (or "my first concern"). Note: The hyphen in "pri-ma" is just a syllable break, which is very common when Latin text is printed under musical notes in a choir score.
A Bit of Context
These lines are drawn from the Oratio Rhythmica, a famous medieval Latin poem (often attributed to the 13th-century monk Arnulf of Leuven) that meditates on the body of Christ. If you encountered this couplet recently, there is a very good chance it was from sheet music! It was famously set to music by the Baroque composer Dieterich Buxtehude in his 1680 choral masterpiece, Membra Jesu Nostri (specifically in the second cantata, Ad Genua, which translates to "To the Knees").
Would you like me to translate the surrounding lines of this stanza for you, or help you with any other Latin from this text?
That's interesting that Claude and Gemini both confidently identify the source, but name different sources! (I don't know if this might be a text that is shared between those two sources, or if both might be wrong, or what.)
Yes, they can get *some* of the context, which is why the situation has gone from "near useless" to "okay with a grain of salt", but to give an example, about a year ago a Japanese artist I follow on X posted about being flashed by a pervert. Because, in Japanese, you can easily construct a complete sentence without saying "he" or "she", there was no pronoun, but any human who read it would immediately understand from context this was a man flashing his bits. Grok got confused by the lack of pronouns, and (as it often does in these situations) just picked semi-randomly, using "she" 2/3 times.
People have noticed that tweets about celebrities, fictional characters and also Pokemon often have the names substituted at random. Like it knows 'this is a Pokemon name' but not a 1 to 1 correspondence with the English name, so it just throws a random pokemon in there based on whatever its weights are (even though fansites document the localized names so it should be in the dataset somewhere). This happens to human names reasonably often too. Most wordplay gets totally mangled, because there's no mechanism for Grok or Google Translate to step out of the immediate translation and put a footnote like a human translator might do. In the same way, it can hallucinate about or simply silently omit specialized terminology that doesn't have an easy English equivalent.
If you're using the chat interface, you can somewhat get around this by asking it to *explain* certain passages rather than translate, but that requires you to know where the problematic sections are in the first place. If you just ask it to 'translate this', it will go top to bottom with the usual failure modes just like if you pasted into Google Translate or DeepL.
A few months ago I complained about many online translators failing in situations where the same English word is used for two different meanings. For example "state" can mean either "country" or "configuration". Both Google Translate and DeepL treated these words as synonyms, to the degree that they used it interchangeably e.g. when translating from Russian to Slovak, despite that these are different words in both languages, so there is a simple 1:1 relation.
Generally, Google Translate sucks at translating from non-English to non-English, because the result is as if it translated through English (even if most likely this is not what actually happens; but the results seem similar for some reason). Like even where the translation from Russian to Slovak consists in 90% of transcribing Cyrillic into Latin, and the remaining 10% is changing some vowels, Google Translate somehow manages to rearrange the words randomly, and flip a coin for each word's grammatical gender.
In practice, if I want to read an article in Russian (but also in Swedish, etc.), translating it to English works *much* better than translating it to Slovak.
That said, LLMs are much better at translating, probably because they understand the context. Claude can translate from Russian to Slovak almost perfectly -- and the few remaining imperfections are because it generally has some small problems with Slovak, not with translating per se. (That is, when it makes a mistake, it is typically using a word from some other Slavic language, not choosing a word that would be a synonym in English.)
Perhaps Luang Pu Sodh Candasaro was secrety Catholic?
A rock-ribbed Protestant of yore would believe there was little to no difference between the two, they both have monks and nuns and relics and saints and all kinds of heathen nonsense!
Wait, so being a heathen gives you superpowers ? That's not a very good recruiting speech for the Protestants !
Priestcraft and those sneaky Jesuits, Bugmaster!
Those pesky Jesuits ! *shakes thurible*
Those fearful jesuits.
It is just a silly animation happening after a git merge by Uriel imho.
Thanks for getting the word out, Scott.
While I’ve unfortunately still not been able to find any OG newspaper accounts (except for a very brief mention in the NYT, which does include ONE eyewitness) or anyone willing to chat, I HAVE collected about 40-50ish testimonies atp, mostly from temple publications but probably about a dozen from forum posts and Facebook. I definitely intend a follow-up post at some point, but I think I’ll hold off snd see what others can find out.
Also, a friend of mine may have found ANOTHER Buddhist sun miracle in Sri Lanka. No first person accounts yet, but the brief description (I’ll post link when I get home) is VERY suggestive. Rainbow rays of light, sun “looking like the moon,” colors reflecting on the crowd, etc.
Overall the biggest difference is many more people in Thailand seem to have seen “holy figures” in the sun than saw the same in Portugal, but besides that I’d say the visual effect is basically identical,
Pasting this in here for anyone interested after reading this comment: https://substack.com/@ottotherenunciant/note/c-233361009
A couple excerpts from testimonies and a video that is very Medjugorje-esque
I visited the Dhammakaya temple a couple years ago. “Culty” is an apt description. Its sheer scale is quite impressive though. The grounds are said to be big enough to accommodate one million meditators.
This is the first time I’ve heard of that fatima miracle happening there.
I visited in January after attending a Dhammakaya meditation retreat in Pai. It was an object of fascination (and meditation distraction) to consider what exactly I was inside of. My conclusions:
On the cult spectrum, it’s pretty harmless, especially to the westerners they’re trying to attract. The retreat staff was clearly there for CSAT scores, not as an obvious exploitation funnel. They did a great job. At the end of the retreat we were invited to join weekly zoom meditation sessions, that’s about it.
For Thais, Dhammakaya looked more like Texas Megachurch than “cult”. Buddhism is (and always has been) “dying out” due to its fundamental disgust with materiality. Thailand is a Buddhist country in name only, Thais go to temple to light incense for ancestors and pray for good luck. You have to search hard to find a meditator, even in the temples.
Dhammakaya has an appealing prosperity gospel wrapping a meditation revival.
Rather than *cult*, the label I left with was *bulletproof money laundering scheme*. Thai Buddhist political influence survived into modernity and is well insulated.
The other forest retreats I attended were all prototypically austere, enforcing Theravada lay precepts, old school chanting and alms bowls and silence, and purely donation-funded. The Dhammakaya retreat was closer to spa weekend. Private air conditioned private bungalows on a manicured compound. Quite lovely!
Pretty good retreat container, less so the content. Genuine Buddhist Monks (TM) with iPads and PowerPoints. Ten “Great Master” quotes per Buddha quote. I felt bad for uninitiated retreatants getting their introduction to the dhamma there.
3/5, would recommend.
Thank you that was an informative response. I used to attend vipassana retreats at Wat Kow Tham on Ko Phangam. Very austere and very very effective.
My wife of 30 years is from Bangkok. What you said about most Thais not really practicing Buddhist meditation is spot on. They are “Buddhist” like most Americans are “Christian”.
I was skeptical of the 'divine miracle' explanation even before this.
It would be a little strange for the omnipotent creator of the universe to suspend the laws of physics to create an honest-to-goodness miracle, only to produce... a strange optical effect, basically identical to a fairly common optical effect you get from staring at the Sun. If you're going to break the laws of physics in order to convince people, why not write I AM THE LORD YOUR GOD in fiery letters a thousand miles high across the stratosphere? Approximately a billion people would see it, and there would be no possible way to write it off as anything other than a divine miracle.
But no, instead we have a group of people who would fit into a single subway car, talking about an optical effect they saw when looking at the Sun, eerily similar to the exact kind of optical effect people often get when looking at bright lights.
As weird as it was, and your efforts to investigate it were fascinating, but it still doesn't pass the smell test.
One thing I find interesting about this is that the Old Testament is absolutely full of miracles which would be far more compelling evidence of the existence of a particular god with specific intentions than anything we normally hear about in the present day, if they could be properly authenticated as actually happening, and yet they simply don't fall within the sphere of what most believers think we should expect miracles to ever be like.
To a lot of people, "miracles" are essentially synonymous with apparently purposeful, surprising coincidences. Sometimes, a personalized voice which speaks inside a person's head and offers uplifting or useful messages. Occasionally, some hard to explain but unobserved event, like "I was alone in the pool, and should have drowned, but when I woke up, I was lying by the side of the pool."
Where are all the cases of the ground opening up and swallowing people into the underworld? Or people being smote by heavenly fire? Or religious leaders bringing people back from the dead? It's not as if God ever makes any statement in the Bible that he's going to stop doing that sort of thing.
For the "heavenly fire" bit, I thinking of stuff like Elijah calling down heavenly fire to light the offering to Yahweh, after it's been soaked with water, while the offering to Baal is stacked with dry kindling. If that kind of thing happened for real, and was well documented, it would be pretty strong evidence in favor of "Yahweh is real, stronger than Baal."
"Earthquakes and landslides" is a very different matter from "Every single person who was protesting that we don't need a priestly class, and Israelites should just be able to commune with God directly, has the earth open up underneath them and gets dropped into the underworld." That would also be super compelling evidence, if it were reliably attested to as something that actually happened. Imagine how differently the Protestant/Catholic split would have gone, if God had stepped in to provide that kind of unambiguous feedback!
I don't believe distilled alcohol had been discovered yet, let alone barrels and barrels of it being accessible to pour over the offering. The highest concentrations of alcohol you can get by fermentation, rather than distillation, are not flammable.
I think that by far the simplest explanation of the story, like so many others in the Bible, is that it was made up. Which also explains why, at the time it was written, there were still Baal-worshipers around, rather than the authors of the Bible being able to write "and because of all these obvious miracles, the followers of Baal all started worshiping Yahweh instead."
Yeah I don’t think there’s any interesting question about divine miracles here. The interesting question is about what the visual effect is, and what it takes to trigger it, since it seems to have a few similarities to basic features of looking at bright lights, but also a lot of very specific and distinctive effects.
"Approximately a billion people would see it, and there would be no possible way to write it off as anything other than a divine miracle."
You probably weren't around for similar discussions years ago on SlateStarCodex where a few people said that if they witnessed something like that, they would prefer to believe they had gone raving mad and were hopelessly insane and delusional and hallucinating, or that it was aliens trying to trick us, or something, anything other than yes, God exists.
Any explanation so long as they could hold on to rational materialism and science/scientism.
"30 And he said, ‘No, father Abraham, but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.’ 31 He said to him, ‘If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.’”
I'm probably not sitting at the extremes, but I'm pretty far towards the end of being absolutely convinced that nothing like the God of the Bible exists in any form, and that purported evidence for such is imaginary, and if I observed something like flaming letters in the sky proclaiming to be a message from God almighty, I'd probably chalk it up to delusion on my end. But if a billion people at the same time all saw the same thing, and documented and discussed this with each other to the point that I couldn't chalk it up to delusion without supposing that I was imagining an ongoing parallel coherent societal framework, I'd conclude it had probably genuinely happened.
If I *only* observed that as the one grand-scale, well-authenticated miracle which testified specifically to the reality of the God of the Bible, I'd be pretty confused, and not be sure what to think, because this is a highly artificial situation which we probably shouldn't expect to arise in a real world, either one where the God of the Bible does or doesn't exist. But if I lived in a world where well authenticated miracles occurred on a regular basis, testifying specifically to the reality of the God of the Bible and not other deities, I'd absolutely believe in the God of the Bible. The Bible itself depicts just such a world, and I think too many religious people allow themselves to reconcile themselves to the idea that *of course* the world we observe in real life doesn't look like the one depicted in the Bible, and we shouldn't expect it to, even granting that the religion is true. But I don't think that's a particularly reasonable thing to grant in the first place. The Bible *could* simply depict a world like we actually observe, and make a much better case for itself.
Yeah, that was always a major disconnect for me. In the holy books -- Buddhist as well as Christian -- you see holy men walking around casting miracles left and right. And I'm talking big miracles here: mass healing, turning staves into snakes and people into animals, levitation at will, etc. The texts themselves also say, "if you follow these practices and believe, you too can perform such miracles". Yet when I look at the real world, I see none of that; and the events that are claimed as miracles are always closer to "burnt piece of toast looks kind of like Jesus maybe" as opposed to "look, I can hover above the parking lot while juggling fireballs".
"But if a billion people at the same time all saw the same thing, and documented and discussed this with each other to the point that I couldn't chalk it up to delusion without supposing that I was imagining an ongoing parallel coherent societal framework, I'd conclude it had probably genuinely happened."
Oh, I think those who are inclined to be sceptical would write off a mere billion - "if it's real, why didn't *everyone* on earth see it, huh?"
We have the multiple witnesses at Fatima being dismissed as crowd hysteria and contagion, after all. "So what if a hundred people said they saw it? why wasn't it five hundred people? why wasn't it everyone in Portugal? in Europe? in the Western hemisphere, huh?"
Skeptics would not use crowd contagion for a continent spanning thing. You can explain one pre-primed crowd with crowd contagion, you can't explain 200,000 independent crowds of many different types across multiple countries witnessing the same event.
Crowd contagion affects one place and one group; it makes "10000 people in this crowd saw this" stories less convincing (and the exact crowd size less important) because it makes the individual observations less independent than they may appear. Like if an angel flew over a city, it'd be more credible if 50 independent groups of 100 reported it than a singular megachurch of 50000 in one spot reported it.
Do you think the event at the Dhammakaya Temple was a genuine Buddhist miracle then?
An omnipotent God very easily *could* provide miracles to everyone on earth. If there were one miracle witnessed by a billion people, I definitely wouldn't write it off as delusion or mass hysteria, but I'd also be confused, because this still isn't what we'd probably expect a world with an omnipotent God which wanted the whole world population to believe in and worship him to look like. We absolutely *could* live in a world where decisive evidence favoring a specific religion is available to everyone in the world, but the one we live in doesn't look like that. So people dismiss things like the sightings at Fatima as mass hysteria, or optical illusions or something, for the same reason that people (likely including you?) dismiss the Dhammakaya Temple sightings as optical illusions or mass hysteria or something. The world as a whole is just so far from what we'd expect it to look like if the religion were objectively true and a reliable generator of real miracles that it leads us to conclude "Whatever the specific explanation for this phenomenon is, it's almost certainly not that."
If you think that your religion is true, and these are testimonies of real miracles, then this is liable to look like unjustified skepticism. But when you have a strong predictive model of the world, grounded in good evidence, this kind of behavior is exactly how it cashes out. Do you remember years back when a team of physicists ran an experiment and put out a statement that, as far as they could tell, their results showed faster than light signalling? And the consensus of pretty much the whole world community of physicists was "We haven't worked out what the specific error was that generated that result, but we're sure there wasn't actually any faster than light signalling going on here." And then after a few weeks, they figured out what the error was that had led to that result, with no faster-than-light signalling involved. Because they weren't engaged in irrational skepticism, they were engaged in totally rational skepticism motivated by the fact that the evidence against faster-than-light signaling was substantial enough that it was more likely that there was some fault in the experiment than that the whole edifice of evidence was mistaken.
> why didn't *everyone* on earth see it, huh?"
Good idea...we could use a break.
>>> Oh, I think those who are inclined to be sceptical would write off a mere billion - "if it's real, why didn't *everyone* on earth see it, huh?"
It would be a much, much stronger case with a “mere billion”. It shouldn’t be hard to do a billion (or everyone on earth).
But we don’t get any of that.
What we get is weak sauce. It’s not anything like a real attempt.
What you are asking for is skeptics to be overly credulous (That is, not be skeptical at all).
As someone who considers himself to be a firm agnostic. God is true ~50%. I've always been able to understand those with higher belief. (Let's just say their life experience gives them ~100% God is true) But I've never been able to understand the atheist*. How can you put it at 0%? Sure you can call it anecdotal testimony, but you've got large swaths of humanity telling you God does exist. How can you disregard all of that? Is it not at least at 10%?
*I was a member of the local UU church for many years and have had several discussions with atheists.
So, I don't put the odds that *something* that could reasonably be described as a god exists at around 0%. But, I think that a lot of members of monotheist religions, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, etc. accept some basic arguments for the existence of some sort of God, and conclude "Naturally, it follows from that that my religion is true." But I think that the likelihood of those religions being true is overwhelmingly lower than the likelihood of some sort of god existing.
As far as how I'm willing to give so little weight to the evidence of their belief, I start by acknowledging that people have believed lots of things throughout history that we almost universally accept as wrong now. And on top of that, there's no religion in the world today that *most* people in the world don't think is wrong, if we consider the particulars and not just the very broadest strokes. But also, personally, I'm much more comfortable than most people putting aside groupthink and recognizing when the people around me think something that doesn't make sense.
There's one example that sticks in my memory a lot for how straightforwardly it resolved: during a lesson in formal logic in a philosophy class in college, the professor presented us with a syllogism she claimed was sound (the conclusion followed necessarily from the premises.) I raised my hand and pointed out that this wasn't the case. She brushed this off and said I was mistaken, but I insisted. Other students in the class started laughing at me because I was so insistent that I knew better than the professor, and I persisted for some time, but she was firm in her position, so I put it aside till the end of class, and I discussed it with her afterwards, and I walked her through the steps, and eventually she acknowledged that she'd been mistaken all along, that the syllogism was actually not sound.
By that point my life, this sort of thing was already unsurprising to me. I'd gotten used to the fact that sometimes, groups of people will just accept an idea without examining it carefully, and treat anyone who steps out of line and questions that idea as silly or foolish, even if that idea is straightforwardly wrong.
It's not that I disregard people's testimonies about their religions being true. I've spent a lot of time talking to people, taking in their arguments, their explanations of their positions, and their experiences of their beliefs and traditions. I've actually spent more time discussing people's religions with them than anyone else I've met in real life. I used to spend maybe an average of half an hour a day on this, for about five years or so. So I feel like I'm coming in with more evidence than most people, when I say that, even compared to most subjects where I've stepped apart from the majority, in cases where I've been definitively proven to be right, the quality of evidence for specific religions being true is really, really bad, and I feel extremely confident in dismissing it.
I think there are ways in which "demonic possession" might gesture at an approximate description of certain psychological experiences, but I do think that it's wrong in some very important key features. I don't believe that demons actually exist, or could ever be located or interacted with outside the context of human psychology. I don't believe that a "demonic possession" model gives you a proper etiology, whereby you could use it to correctly assess someone's risk factors. I don't believe that exorcism would be *totally* ineffective as a treatment, but I don't think its effectiveness is likely to rise above other interventions from different cultures which the recipients believe target the source of their maladies, whereas I believe that treatments grounded in a correct mechanistic understanding have the potential to greatly exceed that level.
I don't think that knowing that the correct explanation falls somewhere in the space of "something psychological" will necessarily improve on all these failings, if you don't actually have a mechanistic explanation, although it may improve on some of them. But ascribing a problem to demonic possession may impede people from developing that more useful mechanistic understanding, and can generate problems of its own. For instance, you say that your past self was afflicted in a way that your current self is not, so your current self should not be punished, but this doesn't necessarily follow from a demonic possession model of malady. In some cultural circles (I know people in Evangelical communities often experience this,) mental health issues are often attributed to demonic possession, and the people who so suffer are held blameworthy for having left themselves vulnerable to demonic possession, because a good Christian isn't supposed to be so vulnerable.
"So, I don't put the odds that *something* that could reasonably be described as a god exists at around 0%."
Oh good. Thanks for the long response. Yeah I'm not here to support any particular religion. (Though I think all of them have some 'truths' that they can pass on.) But only that there may be some mostly unknown force for good in the world. And I make no claims as to where or from what that arises. (It could be totally from within us or totally without us.) And that this possibility can give one pause.
So, I certainly don't think that religious people are mostly bad people (and that would certainly make the standards of "good person" hard to clear, when most people in the world are religious.) And I think that they can be forces for good in the world, by providing people with community structures and a sense of being part of something greater than themselves.
But, I don't credit any of them with being sources of insight about the underlying nature of reality, or morality, or anything of that sort. That's not to say that every novel idea every religion generates will be wrong, but I think that the underlying process that generates them is so unreliable that it simply can't be used as a source of guidance to generate true information. Like, if you gave a full class of students a huge multiple choice test, where instead of every question having four options, each one had a thousand, and there were hundreds of questions, and none of the students knew *any* of the answers, some of the students would get some questions right by sheer chance, but no student's test transcript would be a useful guide to truth, because all their answers are guesses.
I understand that this is a low level of credibility or respect to afford to religion by ordinary social standards, but I do honestly think this is what's warranted given the available evidence.
People regularly say or write false things by mistake, for fame/money/meaning and even on a random impulse. Many people are also suprisingly credulous.
Look at random cults that you are sure are not actually connected to anything divine. Is it hard to imagine based on what you know about people that with some luck and time those random cults could have become major religions?
This, one can do before even looking at the particulars of any religion.
As I'd mentioned before, I think some people's brains just work differently. I cannot *make* myself believe things, no matter how much I try; it's not a matter of "preference", but lack of capability. But many theists I've talked to are confused about this: they apparently can change their own beliefs at will, and do not understand why I would not choose to do the same.
That said though, presumably God could in fact change my mind; the fact that it remains unchanged indicates that if God does exist, then perhaps he prefers me to remain an atheist. Mysterious ways indeed...
> Can you believe in the inherent stability of a chair?
I either do believe in it or I don't. I can't *make* myself believe that the char is stable even if it wobbles precariously as I sit in it.
Yeah, for Catholic conversion, you have to be convinced. You can't just go "Well I can't accept X, Y and Z, but sure, I'm willing to be baptised":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Christian_Initiation_of_Adults
The ur-example of that in fiction is from "Brideshead Revisited", where Rex Mottram wants to marry Julia Flyte but Julia knows her family won't accept him unless he converts to Catholicism. Rex is willing to go along with this because as far as he's concerned, it's just a hoop to jump through and he has no intention of, or interest in, actually converting, which is a severe trial to the priest who has to instruct him:
"So Rex was sent to Farm Street to Father Mowbray, a priest renowned for his triumphs with obdurate catechumens. After the third interview he came to tea with Lady Marchmain.
'Well, how do you find my future son-in-law?'
'He's the most difficult convert I have ever met.'
'Oh dear, I thought he was going to make it so easy.'
'That's exactly it. I can't get anywhere near him. He doesn't seem to have the least intellectual curiosity or natural piety.
'The first day I wanted to find out what sort of religious life he had till now, so I asked him what he meant by prayer. He said: "I don't mean anything. You tell me." I tried to, in a few words, and he said: "Right. So much for prayer; What's the next thing?" I gave him the catechism to take away. Yesterday I asked him whether Our Lord had more than one nature. He said: "Just as many as you say, Father."
'Then again I asked him: "Supposing the Pope looked up and saw a cloud and said 'It's going to rain', would that be bound to happen?" "Oh, yes, Father." "But supposing it didn't?" He thought a moment and said, "I suppose it would be sort of raining spiritually, only we were too sinful to see it."
'Lady Marchmain, he doesn't correspond to any degree of paganism known to the missionaries.'
'Julia,' said Lady Marchmain, when the priest had gone, 'are you sure that Rex isn't doing this thing purely with the idea of pleasing us?'
'I don't think it enters his head,' said Julia.
'He's really sincere in his conversion?'
'He's absolutely determined to become a Catholic, mummy,' and to herself she said: 'In her long history the Church must have had some pretty queer converts. I don't suppose all Clovis's army were exactly Catholic-minded. One more won't hurt.'
Next week the Jesuit came to tea again. It was the Easter holidays and Cordelia was there, too.
'Lady Marchmain,' he said. 'You should have chosen one of the younger fathers for this task. I shall be dead long before Rex is a Catholic.'
'Oh dear, I thought it was going so well.'
'It was, in a sense. He was exceptionally docile, and he accepted everything I told him, remembered bits of it, asked no questions. I wasn't happy about him. He seemed to have no sense of reality, but I knew he was coming under a steady Catholic influence, so I was willing to receive him. One has to take a chance sometimes with semiimbeciles, for instance. You never know quite how much they have understood. As long as you know there's someone to keep an eye on them, you do take the chance.'
'How I wish Rex could hear this!' said Cordelia.
'But yesterday I got a regular eye-opener. The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident what's been taught and what's been left out. But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into the depths of confusion you didn't know existed. Take yesterday. He seemed to be doing very well. He learned large bits of the catechism by heart, and the Lord's Prayer, and the Hail Mary. Then I asked him as usual if there was anything troubling him, and he looked at me in a crafty way and said, "Look, Father, I don't think you're being straight with me. I want to join your Church and I'm going to join your Church, but you're holding too much back." I asked what he meant, and he said: "I've had a long talk with a Catholic - a very pious well-educated one and I've learned a thing or two. For instance, that you have to sleep with your feet pointing East because that's the direction of heaven, and if you die in the night you can walk there. Now I'll sleep with my feet pointing any way that suits Julia, but d'you expect a grown man to believe about walking to heaven? And what about the Pope who made one of his horses a Cardinal? And what about the box you keep in the church porch, and if you put in a pound note with someone's name on it, they get sent to hell. I don't say there mayn't be a good reason for all this," he said, "but you ought to tell me about it and not let me find out for myself."'
'What can the poor man have meant?' said Lady Marchmain.
'You see he's a long way from the Church yet,' said Father Mowbray. 'But who can he have been talking to? Did he dream it all? Cordelia, what's the matter?'
'What a chump! Oh, mummy, what a glorious chump!'
'Cordelia, it was you.'
'Oh, mummy, who could have dreamed he'd swallow it? I told him such a lot besides. About the sacred monkeys in the Vatican - all kinds of things.'
'Well, you've very considerably increased my work,' said Father Mowbray."
> He thought a moment and said, "I suppose it would be sort of raining spiritually, only we were too sinful to see it."
To be fair, I've had theists tell me this in all sincerity; in fact, this is what many Creationists say about evolution and the age of the Earth. But usually the statement is presented in reverse, i.e. "I acknowledge that if one just looked at all available empirical data and applied the scientific method, one would conclude that the Earth is old; but of course we know better than that because we have faith, and the Bible, and our faith tells us that the Bible is true -- therefore, the evidence of our eyes must be false".
This is also an old argument, and goes back at least as far as St. Augustine 😁
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Genesi_ad_litteram
"Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars [...] and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking non-sense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men."
Ah, good old Last Thursdayism ! The Universe was created last Thursday, but it's made to appear old in all respects, so no one could ever tell. What can one say to that ? God sure loves his tricks, big and small ! It's a good thing we know that, unlike literally everything we see around us every second of every day, the Bible is not a trick, right ? ...Right ?
> You probably weren't around for similar discussions years ago on SlateStarCodex where a few people said that if they witnessed something like that, they would prefer to believe they had gone raving mad and were hopelessly insane and delusional and hallucinating, or that it was aliens trying to trick us, or something, anything other than yes, God exists.
I'd like to see that thread and what exactly was said. Because there's a HUGE difference between witnessing stuff no one else saw (which is what I suspect they were answering) and witnessing something everyone in the western hemisphere also collaborated.
Like say God wrote those flaming letters across the sky, transformed the black stone of Mecca into a cross, and sent genuine faith healers to various ICUs. What do you think the result would be? How many new members do you think the church would get? Do you think most people are *that* obstinate and this wouldn't actually change much? Because I think the church picks up at least a billion new (prospective) converts from that.
"What do you think the result would be? How many new members do you think the church would get? Do you think most people are *that* obstinate and this wouldn't actually change much?"
(1) A lot of conspiracy theories on the Internet and people claiming this is proof that aliens really exist or the government is mind-controlling us or it's the Russians/Chinese/denizens of the Hollow Earth/the simulation is breaking down
(2) Not as many as you'd expect
(3) Yes and yes
Personally I'd settle for small but repeatable miracles. If all Catholic priests suddenly developed the ability to hover up to 5cm in the air for up to 20 seconds after reciting "Ave Maria"; and anyone (including myself) could visit a Catholic church and witness this (and record in his cellphone); and other theists could not replicate this feat no matter how hard they tried -- then yeah, there's a good chance I'd convert to Catholicism. Yes, it could still be a prank by alien teenagers or mischievous fae or whatever, but presumably there would be other ways to investigate and reject such possibilities.
But a miracle where some people saw this one cool thing one time but there's no way to verify it since no one recorded anything and it never happened again and God moves in mysterious ways... yeah, that's not nearly as convincing.
That's honest doubt, and that's something to respect. I'm kinda old-fashioned in that if I am going to go for a religion, then I want all the chunky bits. I couldn't be (and have very little sympathy with) those who are all "well a reasonable rational faith does away with all that Bronze Age stuff" and "spiritual but not religious". You end up with watered-down social work and you don't need a religion to be a social worker.
To quote Chesterton again, from the short story collection "The Poet and the Lunatics" - better to worship the shark than reduce everything to things that can be cut up and studied:
https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks09/0900711h.html#ch3
"Mr. Amos Boon had been a missionary, and still dressed like one; at any rate, he dressed like nothing else. His sturdy, full-bearded figure carried a broad-brimmed hat combined with a frock-coat; which gave him an air at once outlandish and dowdy. Though he was no longer a missionary, he was still a traveller. His face was brown and his long beard was black; there was a furrow of thought in his brow and a rather strained look in his eyes, one of which sometimes looked a little larger than the other, giving a sinister touch to what was in some ways so commonplace. He had ceased to be a missionary through what he himself would have called the broadening of his mind. Some said there had been a broadening of his morals as well as of his mind; and that the South Sea Islands, where he had lived, had seen not a little of such ethical emancipation. But this was possibly a malicious misrepresentation of his very human curiosity and sympathy in the matter of the customs of the savages; which to the ordinary prejudice was indistinguishable from a white man going fantee. Anyhow, travelling about alone with nothing but a big Bible, he had learned to study it minutely, first for oracles and commandments, and afterwards for errors and contradictions; for the Bible-smasher is only the Bible-worshipper turned upside down. He pursued the not very arduous task of proving that David and Saul did not on all occasions merit the Divine favour; and always concluded by roundly declaring that he preferred the Philistines. Boon and his Philistines were already a byword of some levity among the young men who, at that moment, were arguing and joking around him.
..."The subject of flowers is hackneyed, but the flowers are not," the poet was insisting. "Tennyson was right about the flower in the crannied wall; but most people don't look at flowers in a wall, but only in a wall-paper. If you generalize them, they are dull, but if you simply see them they are always startling. If there's a special providence in a falling star, there's more in a rising star; and a live star at that."
"Well, I can't see it," said the man of science, good-humouredly; he was a red-haired, keen-faced youth in pince-nez, by the name of Wilkes. "I'm afraid we fellows grow out of the way of seeing it like that. You see, a flower is only a growth like any other, with organs and all that; and its inside isn't any prettier or uglier than an animal's. An insect is much the same pattern of rings and radiations. I'm interested in it as I am in an octopus or any sea-beast you would think a monster."
"But why should you put it that way round?" retorted the poet. "Why isn't it quite as logical the other way round? Why not say the octopus is as wonderful as the flower, instead of the flower as ordinary as the octopus? Why not say that crackens and cuttles and all the sea-monsters are themselves flowers; fearful and wonderful flowers in that terrible twilight garden of God. I do not doubt that God can be as fond of a shark as I am of a buttercup."
"As to God, my dear Gale," began the other quietly, and then he seemed to change his form of words. "Well, I am only a man...nay, only a scientific man, which you may think lower than a sea-beast. And the only interest I have in a shark is to cut him up; always on the preliminary supposition that I have prevented him from cutting me up."
"Have you ever met a shark?" asked Amos Boon, intervening suddenly.
"Not in society," replied the poet with a certain polite discomposure, looking round with something like a flush under his fair hair; he was a long, loose-limbed man named Gabriel Gale, whose pictures were more widely known than his poems.
"You've seen them in the tanks, I suppose," said Boon; "but I've seen them in the sea. I've seen them where they are lords of the sea, and worshipped by the people as great gods. I'd as soon worship those gods as any other."
Gale the poet was silent, for his mind always moved in a sort of sympathy with merely imaginative pictures; and he instantly saw, as in a vision, boiling purple seas and plunging monsters. But another young man standing near him, who had hitherto been rather primly silent, cut in quietly; a theological student, named Simon, the deposit of some epoch of faith in Sir Owen's stratified past. He was a slim man with sleek, dark hair and darting, mobile eyes, in spite of his compressed lips. Whether in caution or contempt, he had left the attack on medical materialism to the poet, who was always ready to plunge into an endless argument with anybody. Now he intervened merely to say:
"Do they only worship a shark? It seems rather a limited sort of religion."
"Religion!" repeated Amos Boon, rudely; "what do you people know about religion? You pass the plate round, and when Sir Owen puts a penny in it, you put up a shed where a curate can talk to a congregation of maiden-aunts. These people have got something like a religion. They sacrifice things to it...their beasts, their babies, their lives. I reckon you'd turn green with fear if you'd ever so much as caught a glimpse of Religion. Oh, it's not just a fish in the sea; rather it's the sea round a fish. The sea is the blue cloud he moves in, or the green veil or curtain hung about him, the skirts of which trail with thunder."
All faces were turned towards him, for there was something about him beyond his speech. Twilight was spreading over the garden, which lay near the edge of a chalk cliff above the shore, but the last light of sunset still lay on a part of the lawn, painting it yellow rather than green, and glowing almost like gold against the last line of the sea, which was a sombre indigo and violet, changing nearer land to a lurid, pale green. A long cloud of a jagged shape happened to be trailing across the sun; and the broad-hatted, hairy man from the South Seas suddenly pointed at it.
"I know where the shape of that cloud would be called the shadow of the shark," he cried, "and a thousand men would fall on their faces ready to fast or fight, or die. Don't you see the great black dorsal fin, like the peak of a moving mountain? And then you lads discuss him as if he were a stroke at golf; and one of you says he would cut him up like birthday cake; and the other says your Jewish Jehovah would condescend to pat him like a pet rabbit."
...Sir Owen glanced at him for a moment, and a silence followed, which was broken by a thud and a rattle of glasses as Gale brought his fist down on the table like a man who had thought of something suddenly.
"Dagon!" he cried, in a sort of ecstasy.
Most of the company seemed but little enlightened; perhaps they thought that saying "Dagon" was his poetical and professional fashion of saying "Damn". But the dark eyes of Simon brightened, and he nodded quickly.
"Why, of course you're right," he said. "That must be why Mr. Boon is so fond of the Philistines."
In answer to a general stare of inquiry, he said smoothly: "The Philistines were a people from Crete, probably of Hellenic origin, who settled on the coast of Palestine, carrying with them a worship which may very well have been that of Poseidon, but which their enemies, the Israelites, described as that of Dagon. The relevant matter here is that the carved or painted symbol of the god seems always to have been a fish."
The mention of the new matter seemed to reawaken the tendency of the talk to turn into a wrangle between the poet and the professional scientist.
"From my point of view," said the latter, "I must confess myself somewhat disappointed with your friend Mr. Boon. He represented himself as a rationalist like myself, and seemed to have made some scientific studies of folk-lore in the South Seas. But he seemed a little unbalanced; and surely he made a curious fuss about some sort of a fetish, considering it was only a fish."
"No, no, no!" cried Gale, almost with passion. "Better make a fetish of the fish. Better sacrifice yourself and everybody else on the horrible huge altar of the fish. Better do anything than utter the star-blasting blasphemy of saying it is only a fish. It's as bad as saying the other thing is only a flower."
> "I'm afraid we fellows grow out of the way of seeing it like that. You see, a flower is only a growth like any other, with organs and all that; ... Better do anything than utter the star-blasting blasphemy of saying it is only a fish. It's as bad as saying the other thing is only a flower."
Yes, I hear this attitude a lot from religious as well as poetically inclined people; but it always struck as a colossal, perhaps even tragic, failure of imagination; and not just imagination but perhaps even basic comprehension.
Understanding things makes them more wonderful, not less, because there's more wonder for you to experience. A rainbow is very pretty, and a shark is very scary, it is true. But what if I told you that there are colors of the rainbow beyound those that we humans can see ? Sharks cannot see them either, but some species of shrimp can; and they can not merely see more colors, but different kinds of colors, which we have no English words to describe. And by the way, rainbows in the sky are quite different from iridescence on bird's feathers or beetle shells; and our understanding of why that is ultimately leads to much stranger vistas of time and space, plus of course practical applications such as the ability to display colorful moving pictures on demand...
...But no, we shouldn't study things, now the mystery is all ruined, let's all pretend that rainbows are just pretty colors in the sky with no mechanisms behind them other than God's will, that sharks arrived in the oceans ex nihilo, something to be worshiped but never understood. It's so much more spiritual that way !
>> I couldn't be (and have very little sympathy with) those who are all "well a reasonable rational faith does away with all that Bronze Age stuff" and "spiritual but not religious". You end up with watered-down social work and you don't need a religion to be a social worker.
This begs the question.
(While you are free to keep the Bronze Age stuff, it doesn’t mean it’s doing anything for anybody.)
>> [Overly long and “clever” Chesterton quote.]
This begs the question while also wasting people’s time.
>Personally I'd settle for small but repeatable miracles. If all Catholic priests suddenly developed the ability to hover up to 5cm in the air for up to 20 seconds after reciting "Ave Maria"; and anyone (including myself) could visit a Catholic church and witness this (and record in his cellphone); and other theists could not replicate this feat no matter how hard they tried -- then yeah, there's a good chance I'd convert to Catholicism.
Same. This isn't the only thing that could persuade me to convert, but it would definitely be sufficient.
There's no shortage of things that could persuade me to convert to various religions, and while religious people often argue that skeptics are insistent on disbelieving, and that if whatever evidence the skeptics insist on were available, they'd just pivot to demanding something else, there has never been an occasion in my life where I've argued that some particular evidence would persuade me of *anything*, and that evidence became available, and I backpedaled and generated new reasons not to believe that thing. I've changed my mind about plenty of things in the past, and if I say piece of evidence would be sufficient to change my mind, I mean that it's *at least* sufficient. It may well be more than is necessary to change my mind.
But, the world we observe is just *so far* from the sort of world described by the Bible, or other religious texts, that I think most believers have lost sight of the fact that a world that *does* look like what the Bible describes is even conceivable, or that it could possibly make sense to hold against it the fact that the world just doesn't look like we'd expect it to if the Bible were true.
> they would prefer to believe they had gone raving mad and were hopelessly insane and delusional and hallucinating, or that it was aliens trying to trick us, or something, anything other than yes, God exists.
Well preferences aside, let's say the glowing letters persist long enough that hallucinations are implausible and I don't have any (other) reason to suspect a delusion. Then it does seem pretty likely we are in a world where *someone* is capable of creating flaming letters in the sky. It's no mean feat so good Bayesians probably should raise their expected odds of God existing as it eliminates a lot of the worlds where he doesn't. But it's probably far from literally requiring omnipotence. Aliens or time travelling humans or unknown technological advancements fit quite well too. And it seems hard to come up with priors for those, and any other odd thing we haven't even thought of (there are probably tens of thousands of gods in human traditions, but the space of possible gods seems infinite). And using the established religions to manipulate people is a pretty obvious choice so the content of the message is little evidence.
Speaking of infinite hypothesis space, our current heuristic is heavily punishing any hypothesis for lacking self-consistency or needing epicycles (something something Kolmogorov complexity). Yes, there's the Divine Plan (also the Ineffable Plan) and we can't know why He hid from us for millennia and then suddenly showed up in such a manner, it's not outright contradictory, but it does add compexity to a theory that was already pretty complex.
Would you stop being a Christian if you (along with billions others) saw flaming letters claiming that God doesn't exist?
>> Would you stop being a Christian if you (along with billions others) saw flaming letters claiming that God doesn't exist?
Why have miracles at all?
I might do. If I were persuaded that God/god(s)/the preternatural does not and, more importantly, cannot exist, then I'd stop believing.
I can't make myself stop believing, though, and all the "but science tells us this rational explanation for all the material phenomena" arguments don't convince me. I'm perfectly open to the notion that I'm just nuts and in denial of reality, but that's how my brain works. I've tried not believing and it is simply not convincing to me.
Then I hit up against things like the simulation argument and while I can see that's by way of fun philosophical thought-experiments, taking it seriously makes me go the same way the atheists on here go about 'suppose Fatima real miracle?'
Inexplicably appearing flaming letters trying to convince you that nothing preternatural exists is a somewhat odd choice :-) No, I was thinking about a message that claims there is a god but it's completely different from the God of Christianity, here's what you need to do from now on: ...
> I've tried not believing and it is simply not convincing to me.
I was definitely closer to believing than otherwise at some point. I remember a major step was asking myself why assume Christianity was the right religion and all the other ones wrong. Christians were a plurality but far from the majority, why would I assume the "default" religion of my culture to be the correct one if almost everyone chooses the one of their respective culture? Either only one is correct but then it's probably not Christianity: it feels like the God has just abandoned most of humanity letting them have their incorrect religions. Plus if we take the number of followers to be meaningful then Christianity is only ~1 in 3 chance of being correct and if followers don't mean much then here's a list of 1000 religions most of which I've never heard of, now Christianity in particular is even less likely.
... Or all religions don't contradict each other all that much in what really matters, Christianity and Islam and Hinduism and Confucianism are all correct enough and all guide the people to the right choices. I was more or less content with this option for a while, but even agnosticism gradually stopped being convincing when there are explanations for why we are prone to be religious and how religions would evolve to have much in common. Why there's a pattern of miracles always seen by some isolated people or the groups of people on the brinks, same as evidence for Yetis and alien abductions. Bonus points for questionable mental health and/or extreme conditions. And as I noticed how I myself was trying to choose what seemed more comfortable/less scary, not what made the most sense.
Maybe I'm just one of those people not "wired" for religion and you are. Then again, the religion's position was rather weak in my family and my country, so I had more options to choose from without much effort or struggle than most people.
>Would you stop being a Christian if you (along with billions others) saw flaming letters claiming that God doesn't exist?
Would you settle for a message in a watermelon? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8-8WJxA-cI
Thanks!
“You probably weren't around for similar discussions years ago on SlateStarCodex where a few people said that if they witnessed something like that, they would prefer to believe they had gone raving mad and were hopelessly insane and delusional and hallucinating, or that it was aliens trying to trick us, or something, anything other than yes, God exists.”
So what? Talking about miracles we never get doesn’t address the issues with the issues with the one we do see.
If there is any point to miracles, it’s to target the swayable or people who believe but have some doubts.
It seems obvious that bigger miracles would still convince more people than the “weak sauce” ones we actually seem.
In any case, your argument here has the same sort of issues as the credulous never allowing that miracles might have a scientific explanation or might just be fake (which often has happened to be the case).
The "so what?" is willingness to evaluate the phenomenon. The sceptical ask the believers to keep open minds and be willing to change their views and beliefs if the evidence is more on the side of natural rather than supernatural explanation, and that having fixed opinions that will not change in the face of updated information is bad.
However, if some of those same sceptics are loudly proclaiming how nothing would ever change their mind or their fixed opinions as to 'no supernature' and they would prefer to doubt the evidence of their senses, then that is dishonest.
>>> “The "so what?" is willingness to evaluate the phenomenon. The sceptical ask the believers to keep open minds and be willing to change their views and beliefs if the evidence is more on the side of natural rather than supernatural explanation, and that having fixed opinions that will not change in the face of updated information is bad.”
The “true believers” won’t really ever be “open minded”. It’s doesn’t seem they do much “evaluating”. And they really don’t need miracles to keep their faith. Again, miracles are for the swayable (as far as I can guess at any reason for them).
The “so what?” was an attempt to get you to realize that what you are criticizing about the group you disfavor (skeptics) is also applicable to the group you favor (both groups have a similar dogmatism).
>>> “ However, if some of those same sceptics are loudly proclaiming how nothing would ever change their mind or their fixed opinions as to 'no supernature' and they would prefer to doubt the evidence of their senses, then that is dishonest.”
This is strawmanning. You shouldn’t be asking me to address what unknown people supposedly say without knowing exactly what they say.
Lots of so-called miracles end up not withstanding fairly basic scrutiny. That might be saying something about miracles that haven’t been dispelled yet. And there are likely people who still will stubbornly believe in miracles which appear to be fake. But you think the only problem is skeptics.
The “true believers” won’t really ever be “open minded”.
Yes, and that goes as well for those who say "I would prefer to think I had gone mad rather than that God exists" in answer to the hypotheticals put by people asking "why isn't there an undeniable, large-scale miracle that everyone can see and nobody can dismiss? like giant letters in the sky visible to everyone on earth saying 'God exists'?"
I'm not asking you to believe in miracles. I'm asking that what is sauce for the goose be sauce for the gander.
>>> “ Yes, and that goes as well for those who say "I would prefer to think I had gone mad rather than that God exists" in answer to the hypotheticals put by people asking "why isn't there an undeniable, large-scale miracle that everyone can see and nobody can dismiss? like giant letters in the sky visible to everyone on earth saying 'God exists'?””
What we get are weak-sauce “miracles” that, at this point, everyone should be skeptical of. (Even if they appear to be hard to explain.) At least, the big sign-in-the-sky is an unambiguous message.
>>> “ I'm asking that what is sauce for the goose be sauce for the gander.”
This is actually your problem. (I said multiple times that both side have a similar problem.)
Anyway, pretty-much everything now explained by science was a “miracle “ (or something caused by god.) The trend for new things being actual miracles doesn’t look good.
>>> “ Yes, and that goes as well for those who say "I would prefer to think I had gone mad rather than that God exists" in answer to the hypotheticals put by people asking "why isn't there an undeniable, large-scale miracle that everyone can see and nobody can dismiss?”
It appears we know that some people actually go mad. So, this might be a more likely hypothesis.
We *don’t* ever get the “undeniable miracle” (it seems). There doesn’t seem to be any reason for this. That seems like the elephant in the room that you are ignoring but are also using as the linchpin of your argument.
Even with it being “impossible” (*) to ever convince skeptics, weak-sauce miracles aren’t even trying.
————-
* how come god has a problem convincing skeptics?
That verse is among the most obviously untrue things in the Bible. If the dead came back and warned me of infernal torment, that would have a far greater effect on me than “the Bible exists” does.
I think whether it was a divine miracle depends on whether one thinks G-d speaks through physics or through people collectively sharing a powerful moment together. If someone thinks a break in the laws of physics had to happen for it to be considered a miracle, there was no miracle. However, if someone thinks a sign from G-d is a timed moment that forces thousands of people to look at the sky together, and be “enlightened” by the same experience, even if it was just an illusion, then it would be a divine miracle.
Isn’t it just that these people are lying? To themselves, and to us?
Or is it just not as fun to just go with the obvious ?
> and that a typical Dhammakaya meditation practice is to visualize a Buddha with a crystal sphere in his belly; if true, this would be relevant to them seeing a vision of a monk with a crystal sun in his belly.
I still feel like the connection for the original is kind of vague, but here it fits very well.
In regards to Light/Fire Kasina meditation. There are different instructions for Fire/Light Kasina I came in contact with. One is what I will call the Ingram version with the afterimage. The other one you just start by visualizing the flame or the candle or anything you want. This is more difficult to start of with because you lack the "physical afterimage". The physical afterimage also disappears after a while so if you want to continue you have to transition to a purely "mental" image but for starting off the instruction is to just refresh the afterimage.
Visualizing Buddhas, Taras, ... is very typical in some groups (e.g. https://www.taramandala.org/). However, most people don't have detailed phenomenology and keep their practices somewhat secret.
It doesn't really seem that we have great first hand accounts of this miracle like we do Fatima, at least with the evidence presented in this post. And the language barrier is significant.
The fact that everyone was meditating also seems very significant. There seems to be a big difference between a huge group of people who are totally aligned in belief all meditating about the same thing seeing something apparently supernatural, and a large group of people that includes the sincerely devout, curious sightseers, and outright skeptics who all saw the same thing.
I recently had the opportunity to see the so-called "Miraculous Stair" at the Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe. There is a non-supernatural explanation for how a seeming physically impossible staircase was built (reclusive expert woodworker lived in the area; obscure engineering principles), but it also seems incredibly unlikely that all this stuff just happened in the normal course of events.
There are temple publications with a signed witness statements, a number of which I was able to confirm were/are real people. Also, I found at least a dozen or so posts on forums, Facebook, etc. talking about seeing it. Not to mention the video footage. Still not the 100+ testimonies of Fatima, but I think it’s enough to say that a lot of people saw pretty much the same thing.
What’s the video footage?!
Linked in my OP that Scott linked. Very similar to some of the stuff you see from Medjugorje. No footage of the “miracle” itself, but you can see the crowd and later there are a few interviews with emotional devotees describing what they saw.
Yeah, I'm not saying they aren't out there, but they definitely aren't as easy to find as the Fatima testimony that this blog linked to (honestly, even as a Catholic who has family members who are really into Fatima, I wasn't aware there were quite so many eyewitness statements)
I forget if it came up in the Fatima article, but there is an additional explanation besides (a) God, and (b) natural illusions, e.g. sunstaring. The third one is (c) demons. That word is provocative, but usually people who believe in God also believe there is Satan, or other gods, or demons-- that the supernatural is wide. The big division is natural/supernatural, but it is important to keep in mind that proving something is miraculous does not mean it is divine. That requires going on to addition work,e.g. Was it expected according to the Scriptures? Did it lead to good, or to evil? Did any church believe it was divine? Did somebody make big profits from it, and was he a good person?
Demons, or even just spirits in general, with diverse motivations!
https://substack.com/@sophiaintheshell/note/c-233210297
But are they Catholic demons, or Buddhist ones?
Yakshas most likely. It's always the yakshas. They were also behind Fatima.
What, not the Asura ?
Nah, asuras are boring stock villains, forever stuck in opposition with the equally boring devas. For real Buddhist demonology you have to dig deeper: Yakshas, bhutas, rakshasas, gandharvas, pisachas, nagas, vetalas, apsaras, grahas, and I probably forget a few.
Hmm, but I don't know about yakshas specifically. They're spirits, yes, but from what I can tell in temperament they are closest to humans. Some are tricksters, yes, but then so are some humans; as a group, they mostly go along to get along... though I could be mistaken.
Demons are in vogue.
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/jd-vance-says-hes-obsessed-with-ufos-calls-aliens-demons-ufo-files-11277281
What both places have in common is that if you look at map southwards you have a fragment of a river around 20-40km from the sight.
I wonder if it could be that sun reflects from the river, highlights the clouds at the exact place where the sunrays going directly to ovservers also pass the cloud and the two paths interfere somehow.
Excellent observation!
You should tell Arthur T about this, this might be important.
I thought this theory doesn't fit when I have learned the event in Bangkok was at 17:30 when the sun was in the west. But, then I've looked at the map again: there's a river on the west too :)
I'm working on a post about this, but I am wondering: could you clarify the reasoning that gets you from *crowd reported experiences analogous to the Miracle of the Sun in non-Catholic context* to *there is likely a naturalistic explanation for the Miracle of the Sun.*
My best attempt to reconstruct your thought process goes something like this:
(P1) A Buddhist crowd reported experiences analogous those reported at Fatima.
(P2) The experiences of the Buddhist crowd are not plausibly explained as a miracle.
(P3) If the experiences of the Buddhist crowd are not plausibly explained as a miracle, then that means there is likely a naturalistic explanation for their experiences.
(P4) If there is likely a naturalistic explanation for experiences analogous to those reported at Fatima, there is likely a naturalistic explanation for the experiences reported at Fatima.
(C) There is likely a naturalistic explanation for the experiences reported at Fatima.
Now, I think we need to appreciate how fraught and indirect this line of reasoning is.
-First, I think (P1) has to be weakened to "A Buddhist crowd reported experiences with features that are analogous to features that were reported at Fatima." Then, the rest of the argument needs to be weakened such that the conclusion is "there is likely a possible naturalistic explanation for the [analogous features] of the experiences reported at Fatima." I will reserve my discussion of the disanalogies for my post, I just want to focus on methodology here.
-Second, no motivation is provided for this claim. This would make sense if you had an independent reason to think that there is a naturalistic explanation for the Buddhist experiences. A religious pluralist could easily think that both of these were wonders by God. For exclusivists, it doesn't have vindicatory implications that contradict any religion, so it is not super implausible that there were inscrutable reasons, though they don't have *independent motivation* for regarding it as divine action. The burden is on the skeptic to *rule out* a miracle, since they are using it to motivate a debunking of an analogous case where the miraculous explanation seems to be strongly motivated. Furthermore, there seem to be good reasons to *doubt* naturalistic explanations in the case, though perhaps not decisive in this particular case, for reasons I will also reserve for my post.
Third, (P3) is totally unmotivated. Catholics are independently committed to believing that demons will perform *counterfeit miracles* to bring Catholic miracles into disrepute. Indeed, Catholics have traditionally believed that demons often *imitate*/*mock* genuine miracles. There are other factors that independently motivate a *preternatural explanation,* but skeptics refuse to consider this as an explanation for some reason. If you will entertain the Catholic explanation for the original miracle, why wouldn't you entertain other Catholic explanatory resources for the other miracles that are a better fit for the data than any independently motivated explanatory mechanism you have come up with.
Fourth, (P4) is unmotivated and seem implausible. If it turns out that the best explanation for the shared features was partly meterological in Buddhist case, then this would support the objectivity of these elements of Fatima. Then the coincidence with the advanced prediction by the seers, meterological conditions at Fatima, and the independent evidence for a self-luminous emitter that accounts for aspects of phenomenology that *aren't shared between reports by the crowds* presents a much harder case than the elements of Buddhist case on their own. There is a lot nuance here, so I don't expect what I mean to be entirely clear until you read my post.
Fifth, since my hiddenness model provides reason to think that God wants to give skeptics a pretext to reject Fatima even if they lack an adequate explanation, the evidential forcefulness of *lesser and different events* that are *analogous* is greatly diminished, since it is reasonable to suspect God of targeting the similarity in phenomenology in the context of an event that was actually implemented quite differently.
And keep in mind, the conjunction of all this would only get us to the possibility of a *partial naturalistic explanation* of the data that is hard to explain in the Fatima case. Other things will have to be said about the photogrammetry, the rapid drying, the six apparitions to the seers, the clouds of smoke, the miraculous healings after the event, etc...
So, all of this is to say, I think the significance of this 'horizontal strategy' for dealing with the evidence for the authenticity of the Miracle of the Sun is being greatly exaggerated by skeptics. It may provide you with some hope that you will be able to devise an explanation for the case, but it is far from sufficient by itself in the absence of explanatory mechanisms that are independently motivated, can accommodate the data, and that don't wind up positing an unconscionable coincidence to deal with one case among many similarly well-evidence miracle claims.
Looking forward to your post. On both sides of the miracle discourse, with good reason, there is a lot of “adopting a position as an exercise,” especially re: pluralistic supernatural views that neither the apologist nor skeptic in question actually holds.
I hope in your post you’ll indicate whether ultimately, in your heart of hearts, you think the Dhammakaya phenomenon was either demonic or fully natural (or something else). Even if you, as I would guess, allow for both possibilities in said post.
>> "No motivation is provided for this claim. This would make sense if you had an independent reason to think that there is a naturalistic explanation for the Buddhist experiences. A religious pluralist could easily think that both of these were wonders by God. For exclusivists, it doesn't have vindicatory implications that contradict any religion, so it is not super implausible that there were inscrutable reasons, though they don't have *independent motivation* for regarding it as divine action. The burden is on the skeptic to *rule out* a miracle, since they are using it to motivate a debunking of an analogous case where the miraculous explanation seems to be strongly motivated. Furthermore, there seem to be good reasons to *doubt* naturalistic explanations in the case, though perhaps not decisive in this particular case, for reasons I will also reserve for my post."
In principle, it's impossible to rule out divine intervention - all you can do is make it increasingly bizarre on its own terms. **In principle**, you can't prove that Penn and Teller sawing a woman in half in a Las Vegas stage show isn't a real miracle - sure, it would be bizarre for God to act through stage magicians, doing a thing which is also easily do-able with stage magic, in a context with no religious value, but you can't **prove** He didn't.
The best a skeptic can do, then, is force God's reasoning to be increasingly bizarre. If God performs a miracle to encourage believers in the true religion, that's pretty reasonable and non-bizarre on its own terms. If God then for inscrutable reasons performs the same miracle to prop up a false religion, that's quite bizarre! If God performs miracles for the true religion, but allows demons to perform identical miracles for false religions, this is at least adding another epicycle of unfalsifiability to the theory (for the same reason that it would be awkward if we somehow found photographic evidence of nothing unusual happening at Fatima, and you had to say that demons planted the photographs to confuse us). So I think the skeptics have done the only thing they can do here, which is make the miracle require so many bizarre supernatural epicycles and mysterious justifications and attempts by supernatural enemies to muddy the waters that eventually it collapses under its own weight and it's simpler to believe it's an unexplained natural phenomenon.
I do think this more even strongly decreases the weight of the miracle as evidence for Catholicism. Even if you think a supernatural explanation is still more plausible than a natural one, if sun miracles occur for many religions, then there's no reason to prefer the hypothesis "the Christian God, or Christian demons, sometimes helps out Buddhists for inscrutable reasons" compared to "Amitabha Buddha, or Buddhist demons, sometimes help out the Catholics for inscrutable reasons", or even "alien pranksters sometimes help out both Buddhists and Catholics for inscrutable reasons".
>then there's no reason to prefer the hypothesis "the Christian God, or Christian demons, sometimes helps out Buddhists for inscrutable reasons" compared to "Amitabha Buddha, or Buddhist demons, sometimes help out the Catholics for inscrutable reasons",
Surely the demons' reasons wouldn't be inscrutable? If Catholicism is true, and faking a sun miracle for a crowd of Buddhists would lead people away from Catholicism, that seems a pretty clear motive for a demon to fake a sun miracle. Possibly true in the reverse as well, although AFAIK Buddhism doesn't make claims to exclusivity like Catholicism does, so there'd be less benefit to be had from creating misleading evidence for non-Buddhist religions.
It's also kinda weird for Satan to do a big flashy miracle like this in a country that's already 99% Buddhist (and was even more so thirty years ago). It's not like there was some wave of Christian conversions sweeping the country that he had to declare code red and pull out all the stops. Seems like a misallocation of infernal resources. But maybe we can appeal to a form of skeptical theism (skeptical satanism?) where Satan may have sufficient reasons we don't know about to do whatever he does.
The reverse, I guess, would be Mara or some of his minions doing a Catholic sun miracle to keep people trapped in samsara
Consider this. A demon might like being worshipped, and so would do miracles to get worshippers. The presence of Christians would be irrelevant. This was a common early Christian belief about the Greek and Roman gods.
Do Buddhists even "worship" anyone or anything?
So, as a non-Christian, why should I believe that the Buddhist miracle is the demon and the Catholic one is true, rather than the other way around?
"Surely the demons' reasons wouldn't be inscrutable?"
Good point and correct as written, but I'll partly defend a more complicated version of this.
Whenever we posit miracles, we have to explain why God doesn't do *bigger* ones. If He's in the business of proving Himself, why stop at an easy-to-doubt appearance in Portugal? Why not rearrange the stars to spell "CATHOLICISM IS TRUE"? The explanation that iirc Ethan and other religious people give is that God is trying to strike a balance between faith and certainty where He promotes belief but doesn't compel it (I kind of parody this with https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-gods-only-have-power-because )
If demons are also in the business of doing miracles, that complicates the picture. Why should they be interested in this same tenuous balance between faith and certainty? Shouldn't they be finding the most compelling false religion (surely not a weird Buddhist cult in an already-Buddhist country) and deploying miracles as effectively as possible to turn people to them?
I think the believer would have to posit that demons' power is somehow limited by God (or the demons' own natural magical capacity), and that these limits just so happen to perfectly mirror the limits God voluntarily places on Himself for good religious reasons (or maybe God planned it this way on purpose?). But this adds another complexity penalty to the hypothesis.
I think about this often, about how divine hiddenness isn’t half as odd as coincident divine and demonic hiddenness. It would be weird but not impossible for divine and demonic interests to agree on this!
Fictional example, but in the Fate universe, both the Catholic-coded church and the other factions of the "moonlit world" (which tend to mostly consist of mages, vampires, and vampire-adjacent folks, all of which have arguably demonlike interest), all have strong mutual interests in preventing normies from finding out that said "moonlit world" is a thing.
Although that analogy requires us to throw omnipotence out the window entirely. All of these interests want the secrets to be kept because, to the extent that supernatural things become broadly understood, they lose their power entirely, in that universe.
For what it is worth, your last paragraph is (roughly—there is significant nuance, of course) what orthodox Christians posit. And something like a strategic equipoise between spirits aligned with God and those that are not is depicted fairly clearly in the Bible (see, e.g., the episode with Michael and the Prince of Persia in Daniel). Why God would permit this, let the reader consider.
Maybe the demons did this with the express intention that I find out about it thirty years later and use it to argue against Fatima on substack.
Maybe I’M a demon.
Talk about demons is highly speculative. If demons are not cooperative, however, a demon might want to attract worship, even to compete with other demons in that. The demons are let loose by God-- but he doesn't make them help each other. Have you read Screwtape Letters? It is fiction, not serious, but it has that kind of model of demons. (It's WONDERFUL and short literature, too; can be enjoyed by non-Christians)
Scott makes a great point: If the sun moving around is the miracle, why didn't God do a clearer miracles such as "BELIEVE IN ME" letters in the sky? This is a huge theoretical objection to many miracles, such as Fatima. It really needs to be addressed.
This is one problem I, a believer have with some biblical miracles: they're not big enough. It is hard to believe that when I lose my axehead in a pond, God would make it float-- and nobody's watching. God could do such a miracle, sure-- but why?
>Scott makes a great point: If the sun moving around is the miracle, why didn't God do a clearer miracles such as "BELIEVE IN ME" letters in the sky?
Remember that the Fatima miracle didn't come out of nowhere: it was preceded by several apparitions of the Virgin Mary, who told people to be better Catholics and said that there would be a miracle at that time and date to prove that the apparitions were legitimate. I think that would count as clear by any reasonable definition of the term.
>Whenever we posit miracles, we have to explain why God doesn't do *bigger* ones. If He's in the business of proving Himself, why stop at an easy-to-doubt appearance in Portugal? Why not rearrange the stars to spell "CATHOLICISM IS TRUE"?
Maybe I'm too cynical, but I think that in the latter case, people would just arbitrarily raise their demands for proof. Heck, in this very comments section we've got people saying that, whilst a message in the stars would increase the probability of God, it could also be attributable to advanced aliens, or time-travelling humans, or some unknown but definitely not Catholic god, so obviously some even greater level of proof would be required before we could accept Catholicism.
And indeed, in a world where there was no reported miracle at Fatima and the whole thing were hypothetical, I don't think people would dismiss it as an "easy-to-doubt appearance in Portugal", I think they'd be treating it in exactly the same way you're treating rearranging the stars to spell "Catholicism is true". "If God's in the business of proving himself, why doesn't he predict a big miracle in advance, and then, in the exact place and time where he predicted it, cause the sun to act in ways inexplicable by astronomical science, and do this in front of a crowd of tens of thousands of people who run the gamut of belief from 'devout Catholic' to 'sceptic who openly admits he only came along to laugh at everyone else when the miracle inevitably fails to happen'?"
>I think the believer would have to posit that demons' power is somehow limited by God (or the demons' own natural magical capacity), and that these limits just so happen to perfectly mirror the limits God voluntarily places on Himself for good religious reasons (or maybe God planned it this way on purpose?). But this adds another complexity penalty to the hypothesis.
The miracle of the sun was just part of what happened at Fatima; the main point was the message conveyed by the apparition of the Virgin Mary, with the sun miracle acting as confirmation that the message was legit. AFAIK none of the Fatima parallels have the same combination of message + miracle, so that's one thing (or one combination of things, I guess) that demons apparently can't pull off but God can.
("But, Mr. X, if similar 'miracles' can happen as a result of optical illusions, doesn't that reduce the value of the Fatima miracle as a confirmation of the previous message?" Yes, I will freely admit that it does; but then, an apparition of the Virgin Mary predicting the exact time and place where an incredibly rare optical illusion would occur seems pretty miraculous by itself, even if not *quite* as miraculous as God directly moving the sun, or bending its light to create the illusion of it moving, so it would still be evidence for Catholicism.)
> but then, an apparition of the Virgin Mary predicting the exact time and place where an incredibly rare optical illusion would occur seems pretty miraculous by itself
If this even happened.
A couple of random Portuguese peasant children predicting the exact time and place where an incredibly rare optical illusion would occur also seems pretty miraculous.
"Heck, in this very comments section we've got people saying that, whilst a message in the stars would increase the probability of God, it could also be attributable to advanced aliens, or time-travelling humans, or some unknown but definitely not Catholic god, so obviously some even greater level of proof would be required before we could accept Catholicism."
AFAICT this is simply correct of them.
The Catholicism hypothesis does not predict God reorganizing the stars tomorrow. No Catholic believes that this will happen tomorrow and no Catholic believes that if it fails to happen, that will pose any difficulty for Catholicism. I imagine that if you asked Pope Leo what the odds are that God rearranges the stars so they spell out "Catholicism is correct," he'll say they're less than one in a million if he doesn't just say "zero."
If you see something that a theory said was basically certain not to happen, that does the opposite of proving the theory correct.
If something reorganized the stars in the sky, that should radically increase your credence in all theories that posit a power that can reorganize the stars in the sky, but it should decrease your credence in the existence of any god that you predicted with nearly absolute certainty would, if they existed, never do that.
but you are failing to appreciate the dialectical context. you are the one saying "here is data that I dont know how to explain. it is reminiscent of other data that I dont know how to explain. therefore, there is likely an explanation that fits with my worldview of both cases." then you are putting the onus on the believer in miracles to give a plausible explanation of both cases in order to defeat this inference. but that's clearly bad reasoning.
regardless, I was only raising this as one way of illustrating how many conjuncts there are, not as the explanation I would opt for as a Catholic. there are plenty of people (e.g, Matthew Adelstein) that are religious pluralists that think God performs miracles in a way that accommodates their background worldview. I dont see why they have to do 'epicycles' to say that about this case. so, the main force is just in illustrating that it is a bad way of reasoning to a naturalistic explanation.
"skeptics have done the only thing they can do here"
- no, what they could do is provide a plausible *mechanistic explanation* of what happened that fits the data.
"if sun miracles occur for many religions, then there's no reason to prefer the hypothesis "the Christian God".
- but there is no vindicatory context for these, whereas there is for Catholicism, so even if these were miraculous that would be an obvious asymmetry.
the demons wouldn't be acting for inscrutable reasons. they would have a clear motive to do it this way. I have principled criteria to distinguish when activity is demonic/it isnt, but there is really strong evidence for demons that I am also planning on reviewing.
it seems like you arent trying very hard to have cognitive empathy for the Christian worldview.
Let's make it simple. You're doing a Bayesian comparison of two hypothesis:
Hypothesis 1: Fatima was the Catholic God
Hypothesis 2: Fatima was a natural psychological phenomenon
Hypothesis 1 doesn't naturally predict that you would get similar miracles in other religions. You can come up with reasons why it might permit it, but you wouldn't *expect* it to be true. Certainly nobody said anything like "Wow, Fatima seems very convincing, but it's not good evidence for Catholicism, because if Catholicism were true, there would be demons, and those demons would provide fake versions of Fatima for other religions, but we haven't seen anything like this, so that's a strike against this hypothesis."
Hypothesis 2 does naturally predict this. It *was* awkward for the naturalistic position that no other religion had anything similar, and in fact a common framing of the apologetics was "this proves Catholicism is true because no other religion has a miracle as good as this one", and in my original post I tried to decrease the force of this objection by pointing to non-orthodox-Catholic examples (the Reddit sungazers, the heretical Catholic in Necedah).
Since we've found evidence which is more naturally predicted by Hypothesis 2 than Hypothesis 1, we should increase our credence in Hypothesis 2.
And as I pointed out above, I'd previously mentioned "something like fire kasina meditation" as the most plausible naturalistic hypothesis, so having a sun miracle after people perform a kasina-like meditation is also something this hypothesis predicts better than the divine intervention one (though I'm kind of nervous making this argument because I don't know whether it's just a coincidence)
The conclusion 'this provides non-zero evidence for natural psychological mechanism' is extremely weak, so that is unhelpful. Obviously, the fact that I have peer-reviewed photogrammetric analyses, testimonies of rapid drying corroborated by photographic analysis, undesigned coincidences between testimony of distant witnesses, advanced prediction in context of credible apparitions, etc... all provide non-zero evidence against the psychological explanation. So, we are trying to understand how to *weigh* the evidence and that will partially depend on how *plausible* my accommodations of data that is bad for me are compared to your accommodations (well, to be fair, you dont really even try for the vast majority of the data) of data that is bad for you.
Furthermore, there are other hypotheses besides Hypothesis 1 and Hypothesis 2. You are trying to stay a naturalist - so your response needs to be viable against the whole field of non-natural explanations, not just mine.
But like I'm not even sure I concede that these cases are even non-zero evidence for you, because you dont have explanatory resources to deal with them. Like "demons replicate elements of notorious Catholic sun miracle *only after* it occurs to cast doubt" is one of many possibilities for me. Meanwhile, apparently your best bet is kasina-like meditation - I'll go over it in my post, but spoiler alert, I don't think it comes out looking remotely plausible.
In our discussions about your original Fatima post, didn’t you make the argument that controlling the sun in this way required too much power for demons, and we could know this is a genuine miracle because God allows some trickery, but not to this extent?
no, I didn't make an argument that it exceeded power of demons. and it doesn't have anything to do with controlling the Sun. in this Buddhist case, if it is demons, it seems like either they are manipulating the atmosphere in ways that are totally within bounds for demons, or they are giving people supernatural visions which is like one of the main things demons do.
TBF the fact that the Fatima miracle is widely known across the world, whereas the Buddhist miracle is so obscure it doesn't even have its own page on Thai Wikipedia, could be the result of God limiting the amount of trickery the demons can do (i.e., they can perform apparent miracles at one sketchy temple*, but their deception can't spread any further than that).
* From what I can tell, the Dhammakaya Temple is a rough Buddhist analogue to a Prosperity Gospel megachurch. Which also provides a reason for supposing that the Dhammakaya miracle is demonic whereas Fatima is legitimate: the message of Fatima was about repentance and loving God, which is an unlikely message for demons to be pushing, whereas it's much more plausible that they'd want to shepherd people into a greedy cult.
A Buddhist monk floating in the sky (some people also saw Dharma wheels, or Buddha himself) seems vindicatory of Buddhism to me.
It's not for several reasons:
(1) Buddhism doesn't posit a God that performs miracles as a sign of approval, so therefore it doesn't convey the message that a God is approving Buddhism as true.
(2) Something paranormal and buddha-related is not sufficient for 'vindicatory context,' only 'religious context.' In my posts, I understand 'vindicatory context' based on either *explicit affirmations of a religion's doctrine in private revelation* or the *intent of the miracle-worker as manifested by the character of the sign.*
Does this mean it would be impossible even *in principle* for there to be a vindicatory Buddhist miracle?
There could be paranormal Buddhist phenomena that were evidence for Buddhism, but they wouldn't be *vindicatory miracles* (or if they were, then it would have to be a deceptive miracle by a God that wanted people to be Buddhist or something) because vindicatory miracles are, by definition, extraordinary signs performed by God to authenticate revelation.
great summary
>(P2) The experiences of the Buddhist crowd are not plausibly explained as a miracle.
This formulation of your premise hides an important ambiguity. Informally, "X is not plausibly explained as a miracle" could mean "P(X|miracle) is low" (i.e., miracles would never produce X), or it could mean "P(X|¬miracle) is NOT low" (i.e., we can predict X modestly well even with more mundane resources). The skeptic only needs the latter. If we can get Fatima-like collective experiences in other contexts without miracles with modestly high probability, then the Fatima-like collective experience in Fatima itself is not going to be too remarkable.
Of course, I know you think there are important evidentiary differences between Fatima and these other miraculous sightings. I don't find them very persuasive, as we've discussed extensively elsewhere. Nevertheless, collecting stories like Dhammakaya are not intended to address these additional sources of evidence that you've adduced; they're challenging a different portion of your argument.
As to why skeptics, or even non-Buddhists, should be unimpressed by Dhammakaya even if they don't have a precise mechanistic explanation for the mass psychological event, it's a little difficult to articulate the reason precisely. We don't have anything like an axiomatic theory of human psychology that numerically predicts what we should or shouldn't see masses of people report to have experienced with this or that probability. But if the base rate of groups claiming to have shared experiences of the form Y in a large enough number of contexts, and these don't tend to have any good independent forensic corroboration even though there's no obvious reason why they wouldn't, then it seems pretty reasonable to imagine that Y is the sort of thing that people naturally can hallucinate, misremember, lie about, subconsciously deceive themselves about, whatever.
As an analogy, take the Mandela effect - the original one, that is, about tons of people remembering Nelson Mandela having died, and many even reporting detailed memories of having watched his somber state funeral on TV. It's hard to explain this specific case in a totally satisfying way: why do they all converge on Nelson Mandela's fake death/funeral and not others'? Why aren't fake funeral memories uniformly distributed across all deceased international figures? And which real event(s) are these people actually getting confused about? None seem to fit too cleanly relative to what people describe remembering. But it just seems obvious that this is a naturalistic quirk of human psychology. If a religion claimed that there were parallel universes that were merged together by their deity so that different people truthfully remember different histories, and as evidence they produce their own proprietary Mandela effect where half their adherents vaguely remember their prophet being alive in 1994 and half of them vaguely remember the prophet being dead in a nationally televised funeral in 1994, it would just obviously be a good counterpoint to bring up Nelson Mandela. If the adherents then suggested that Nelson Mandela also died in one of the merged universes and not in the other, maybe this could or would count as a valid ad hoc accommodation, but the force of their original case would be deflated.
Why is this not reproducible on demand? Why can we not isolate the relevant factors to reproduce the phenomenon at will?
Perhaps the weather conditions that permit it are very rare? But it seems like they are not really very rare.
Perhaps it only works on people with certain background beliefs? Catholicism, now maybe Buddhism. Seems unlikely.
Perhaps it has to do with some sort of mass psychology or mass psychosis? You (most people) don't 'see' it unless other people are already visibly reacting to it. That is, in the absence of people around you reifying that it is real, you dismiss it (probably this is subconscious) as a visual or orientation anomaly and this activates mental processes that tamp down the bad data. This interpretation seems pretty likely to me. So, a runaway perceptual spiral. Normally it gets tamped down but with social permission it gets amplified instead.
But still why can't we reproduce it? Just pay twenty people to stand in a field when the weather conditions are auspicious and have fifteen of them convincingly playact that they see the sun dancing and see if the remaining five start seeing it for real.
Or is twenty not enough? Does the number have to be in the thousands for it to work?
Perhaps there needs to be some background work to make a miracle seem plausible in the first place? Like do people who just happen upon the scene also start hallucinating once they see the people gawking amazed at the sun? Or is it only those who share the religion or spiritual tradition of those already present who tend to see it? Or maybe they see something weird but in the absence of a spiritual tradition they are limited to some subset of the visuals. Like maybe they see the sun spinning and changing colors but they don't see crosses or Jesus or Buddha.
I'm sure we've all heard about the psychological experiments where people voice agreement with clear bullshit just because the rest of the group is acting like it's obviously true? Or the known examples of mass psychogenic illness in history?
Anything weird that happens to an excited group of people should start with mass psychology as the 1st hypothesis.
It might be that we could reproduce it, if we knew what circumstances elicited it in the first place. But practically speaking, if you tried to get funding to run an experiment where you gathered a bunch of people to try to observe the phenomenon in different conditions, to see what generated it, you would not get funding, because an IRB would not let you run an experiment that involved a whole bunch of people looking directly up at the sun.
We don't know how reproducible this effect is, because nobody has actually put in the work to try to research that.
"sun miracles are neither true divine intervention nor vague hypnotic suggestion, but some particular illusory/psychological phenomenon which necessarily manifests as the sun spinning and changing color"
I'm confused. If we remove all the religious dimension, isn't this just persistence of vision? How is this a psychological phenomenon rather than a perceptual one?
The people who saw it were aware of the existence of afterimages and said this was totally different from that.
"Claude tightens the link further" No, Claude cites a UK survey. If the survey exists, then the survey tightens the link.
"the survey tightens the link" No, the surveys references thoughts and discourse between some researchers. If those thoughts happened, those thoughts tightens the link.
"those thoughts tighten the link" No, the researchers were observing some real-world phenomenon, people's behavior, outcomes, showing up as patterns in survey data. If that phenomenon occurred, then the observed phenomenon tightens the link.
In any event, Claude is not thinking or generating real world phenomena, and should not be credited.
There would be nothing odd about saying 'John Smith's 1987 essay tightens the link' if Scott had read about the survey in such an essay rather than in a Claude post, so I don't think saying 'Claude tightens the link' is giving Claude undue credit for coming up with the evidence by itself.
I think it would be odd. The essay would just be a way to get the information from the survey, just like if it had been found via Google or Claude.
It's all just information consolidation. The researchers just processed information, as did claude.
Damn, didn't think anthropic's ASI was able to make metaphysical data centers that ran claude without producing real world phenomena.
this seems uselessly pedantic.. you could prove claude wrong and vindicate the point you are trying to make; otherwise.. what's the point? This language (i.e. "google says" or "the bible says") has been in the lexicon for ages.
"Google says" is inaccurate, and whatever Google linked to should be cited instead. "The Bible says" is useless unless you're studying the contents of the Bible.
The researchers noted down their findings and presumably the method leading to those findings in said report. They did all the work, and all the information leading to thouse fibdings can be found in the report. The source that should be credited therefore is the report. Claude simply sited said report. Siting Claude is like siting wikipedia or other secondary sources - not good practice.
Yeah, I and a few others pushed back on this the first couple times Scott did it, making the exact point that he ought to cite the sources used by whatever LLM he was citing, but either that point wasn't clear, or he didn't/doesn't agree with it.
Sometimes learning requires reinforcement :)
Reminds me of "The Human Light Show," a chapter in Michael Crichton's interesting autobiography "Travels." He reports experiencing strange visual phenomena when meditating with a particular woman who was known for glowing in different colors (when meditating).
oh yeah, that vance quote definitely sealed the deal for me.
I think especially for those of us who grew up in a religion where these types of eye-witness miracles were given as proofs of the religion, the correct way to reason out of them wasn't to try and figure out the specific mechanism by which people were confused, but to realize that Catholics, Hindus, Buddhist, Protestants, Mormons, Muslims, Spiritualist, UFOs, etc. are all basically mutually exclusive but each have their own eye-witness miracles that don't have ONE obvious rebuttal where we can say, it wasn't a miracle it was definitely X. The best we can do is say x, y, or z, and a bunch of other things are all plausible alternative logical explanations. If you're predisposed to believe in that world view and don't realize that every other world view has similar miracles they use, "it's a legit miracle" seems more plausible than all the alternative explanations. But because so many mutually exclusive belief systems can cite eye-witness unexplained phenomena, our intuition that it is strong evidence is wrong and it's actually quite weak evidence. So you're more or less okay ignoring it for any of x, y, or z.
But I can see as a psychologist interested in mental phenomena it would be nice if we could figure out the exact mental failure that is happening to convince the original eye-witnesses. Although it wouldn't surprise me if there's many different mental failings (or even outright lying in some cases); so maybe there's a specific one in Fatima that is interesting if we figure out what it is.
I nevertheless suspect divine intervention considering me quickly finding a kosher car park for car and trailer a few steps from my city destination this week.
Reminds me of an episode in one of Carlos Castaneda’s books. CC thought he had a Christian metaphysical experience of seeing a giant Jesus. His guru Don Juan laughed so hard it angered CC. Did it talk? Move? Do anything? Nope. It was inert. DJ eventually explained that it wasn’t Jesus. Jesus is an assumption we make. A label. In fact the image of a pure perfect creature was a kind of primal image we all have access to, of our own pure original “self” before accumulating all our life experience.
Now here is the crazy part. A few years after reading that I read a small news article that said one of those famous mega church preachers in the USA had the same experience and took it as a sign that parishioners should donate to his university. Ha ha ha.
Wow, you believe Don Juan really existed? That's even more of a miracle!
I did not say that so please do not put word in my mouth.
Apologies, just that Castaneda was such a fabulist I barely believe him when he said his name is Carlos. Any alleged visions he claims to have seen (and then got the Read Native Magic Wisdom from Don Juan about such) are to be taken with a sackful of salt, be that alleged visions of Jesus or of other entities.
Agreed with your diagnosis. I’d call Casteneda’s genre fiction, magical realism, or some kind of fantasy. (I still liked it). But it amazed me that something he described happened to Oral Roberts about 10 years later! And it related to the OP.
I often heard about Wad Dhammakaya (วัดพระธรรมกาย) when I lived in BKK. It was widely regarded as a shady organization that was innovating by implementing commercial style marketing and flock-management practices to build significant financial resources. As a result, it was both successful/popular and also reviled.
Perhaps interesting: I never heard about this miraculous vision. I think there are two reasons:
(a) the sources are not considered trustworthy with these claims forming part of the bigger, suspect marketing message
(b) the base level of superstition is already so high that this event is not really that interesting.
To explain (b) a bit more: almost every house, neighborhood, and business has a collection of small shrines to local spirits, others to a version of Buddha, and most also have at least one to a past king (this writing is clunky, I just want to be clear that there are multiple shrines, not one catch-all.) Random personal events are explained as interventions from supernatural forces. Why get excited about something a bunch of other people are claiming to experience if you directly felt the effects of intervention during your morning commute? Or your job hunt? Or your marriage search? etc etc.
Separately, one reason that translation models aren't super helpful is because (1) Thai isn't super well supported to start and (2) the words in the religious register of Thai are rare and unusual, so the vocab for this event will be poorly represented in training sets. Also, Thai newspapers are notorious for slang/short hand that makes it very hard to follow without good context on the article.
Very interesting find, thank you for sharing.
For completeness, could you please provide Claude's sources for (a) scholars classifying Dhammakaya as a form of āloka kasina, and (b) the UK survey of kasina practitioners?
Also, minor proofreading oddity:
> Fandom So from an outside scholarly perspective
The word 'fandom' seems to have snuck into the beginning of this sentence, where it has no business being.
Sources available at https://claude.ai/share/b4726b8e-1d17-4415-9aef-114cb0d3287f
Thank you.
It seems that the survey comes from Meditation: A Therapeutic Tool For Managing Stress, an unpublished 1998 M.Sc. Nursing Studies thesis by Kruawan Sookcharoen (King’s College, London). It's not available online (at least as far as my Claude can tell), and the few sources that mention it never cite anything from it other than the 3-15% meditation statistic. This survey also seems to be Claude's source for scholars classifying Dhammakaya as a form of āloka kasina.
It's worth noting that this seems pretty weak, though I don't think it makes much difference to your overall conclusions.
Incidentally, it's pretty easy to prompt Claude to provide in-text citations for specific facts in addition to its overall list of websites used. I'd recommend doing this to make it easier to follow Claude's reasoning and understand its use of sources.
Just here to say that as a kid, on long car trips, I stared at the sun in the sky for really long periods of time. (No one told me it was bad, and I don’t think my parents were paying attention, and I guess it didn’t hurt my eyes enough?)
I distinctly remember the sun becoming like a disk and “spinning” (or something) and becoming weird colors…it was pretty cool to stare at for awhile, which is why I did it in car trips for so long.
So I’m inclined to think it’s a visual thing that happens even if you’re not primed to think it will.
Fascinating, thanks. Did this happen regularly, or just one time? Do you remember what time of day it was (ie did it only happen at sunrise or sunset, or could it have been other times too?)
Regularly 😂
My brother did this too, I’ll also ask him about his experience.
I remember the sun being high in the sky when I would stare. So like 10-2?
Never low in the sky. (Then I guess things would obstruct it?)
Could you explain what it means for a white disk to look like it’s spinning? Everyone who sees it describes it like that, so it must mean something intuitive to people who witness it, but I still can’t picture it. Thanks!
Imagine a quarter spinning on a table (flat side more parallel to the table vs the other way), but the quarter is a white sun disc with some kind of color and dimension? I’m not sure the best way to describe, plus this is my memory from like 30 years ago. 😆 hope that helps.
It does, thanks again!
Dhammakaya is the strongest anti-miracle argument. Independent replication, uncontaminated context, different religion entirely. Same phenomenon every time, parsimony wins.
I like these miracles. Those are high-quality miracles. Compare those with the worst miracle in history.
The miracle was allegedly performed in Egypt by a clean-shaved Muslim Sheikh (“Elder”) called Jamal Oddin, fond of visiting cemeteries. He was confronted during a funeral by a religious judge (a qadi) called Ibn Omaid. After an exchange of insults, the qadi referred to Oddin’s regrettable lack of facial hair, and Oddin responded immediately, according to the traveler Ibn Battuta:
“The Sheikh said, mark me: he then rubbed a little alcohol on his eye-brows, and lifting: up his head, presented a great black beard, which very much astonished the judge and those with him, so that the judge descended from his mule. The Sheikh applied the alcohol the second time, and, lifting up his head, exhibited a beautiful white beard. He then applied the alcohol the third time; and, when he lifted up his head, his face was beardless as before. The judge then kissed his hand, became his disciple and, building a handsome tomb for him, became his companion for the rest of his life.”
As Ibn Battuta adds, presumably in earnest, after a while the Sheikh died and was buried; and when the judge died, he was buried, as it had been expressed in his will, in the door-way of the miracle man’s tomb, so that everyone who should visit the tomb of the Sheikh would have to pass over his grave.
oh that temple
This is so frickin exciting. I was one-shotted by Fatima at age 11 and I didn't get how people can ignore this. Took me a lot of years until I encountered EA and truly allowed myself to think freely. It's such a powerful testimony to the rationalist spirit that a bunch of nerds can just sit for a while with a puzzle that everyone else finds too uncomfortable to think about, that was lying about for a literal hundred years, and solve it.
I mean, speaking as a person who doesn't believe that either event was genuinely supernatural, I don't think we can describe the event as "solved." We don't have an actual mechanism, we just have a strong basis for believing that there's some kind of optical or psychological phenomenon underlying the observations that's not unique to Fatima, that there's at least one other mass religious sighting claiming something similar as a miracle for an incompatible religion, and that taking either one as a miracle proves too much.
Even in a world where we didn't have the Dhammakaya Temple event as evidence to draw on, I would say "in a world where Catholicism is literally true, we really would not expect this one weird visual event in Fatima to be the best-attested supernatural event to testify to the truth of Catholicism in particular, the world does not on the whole look like we'd expect it to if Catholicism were actually true, this probably wasn't an actual miracle, whatever caused it." And I'd say I'm in basically the same situation now, just with more evidence that this wasn't a unique occurrence only associated with the event at Fatima. We still don't understand why either event actually happened.
One thing that’s funny about the demonic explanation of the Buddhist sun miracle is that if they did it in order to mock/cast doubt on the Fatima sun miracle, their goals won’t have been achieved until now, when Sophia, Arthur, and you uploaded these Substacks, since no one had spotted the parallel; if the demons had preter-natural foreknowledge—or were, more weakly, meticulous superforecasters—then given that you have the largest audience of the three, it could well be that their primary intended goal was you uploading this blog post.
lmao!
What do we do when faced with two undeniable miracles, one that vindicates say Catholicism and one that vindicates Sunni Islam? what are we supposed to do then? If you choose wrong you go to hell possibly for eternity, it's terrifying.
What’s the Sunni miracle you have in mind - the Khomeini moon miracle?
I'm just thinking of a hypothetical scenario, if that was the case, what is one supposed to do to avoid suffering.
In a comment to the last post on this topic, I said the following: "Science depends on replication - if a phenomenon cannot be observed repeatedly under different conditions, then it's useless to try to model it. This remains true even if the phenomenon is real in the material world. Something which cannot be reproduced cannot be included in our models, so we might as well not worry about it. Of course, if this phenomenon *can* be reproduced, which is the point of recording evidence of similar events elsewhere in the world, then we may have something."
Well done.
The Sun shines on everyone alike: atheists, Catholics, or Buddhists.
So it would be perfectly in-character to show Buddhist miracles to Buddhists, Catholic miracles to Catholics, and nuclear fusion to atheists, which makes each group believe that they have seen the truth.
Maybe but this is kind of contradictory to Catholic dogma
I still don't understand the point of pretending any of this is interesting. No sane person here believes any of these phenomena are actually supernatural occurrences, and the remainder - which specific combination of psychology, biology and physics caused them - is simply not that interesting.
Via meta-atheism I have arrived at the position that on some level, nobody, not even deeply religious people, *really* believe their religion - it's all just pretending/coping in some way. Despite that (and - who knows - because of that) religion still *works* in a functional sense, i.e. it appeases people's fear of death, makes them worship the great leader/country/in-group, and all. In light of that, I get the sense that this series of sun miracle posts is coming at a very similar religious attitude to mainstream religion, but with another layer of meta on top of it. Instead of pretending one really believes, one pretends that one doesn't really believe, which masks the pretense that one *does* really believe.
Before you say that sounds far-fetched, consider how similar this case is to those mathematical/ontological arguments for the existence of god. Only someone who takes as a prior that god exists would care to expend any mental effort at all on such things, and so by working on arguments for god's existence one is reinforcing the pretense that one really believes, thereby strengthening the functioning of religion in ones life. One meta-level higher, we have here: only someone who *pretends to take as a prior that god exists* would *pretend that expending mental effort on proving that miracles really exist is worthwhile*, thereby strengthening the function of religion in ones life.
Just something to keep in mind when the question "is rationality a cult" happens to catch to our attention once in a while. These are just my current thoughts on the matter that I'm still not super sure about, if anyone has better insights on the phenomenon "Scott pretends to be interested in proving miracles" that would be most welcome.
edit: I guess more succinctly my point is: if religion is self-deception, then self-deception about self-deception is also religion.
Would anything convince you that people truly do believe? They are not like you. The religious truly do believe, the mathematicians are actually trying to find justification and not just doing this out of some pragmatic 4D chess, and I'm increasingly convinced Scott truly believes as well. Unfortunately for him, it conflicts with his (equally arbitrary) principles in regards to truth, which leads him on a desperate and hopeless hunt for concrete evidence of the divine. But the initial motivation is still just his unsubstantiated prior towards the existence of a benevolent god.
Probably not. But the idea that Scott believes more earnestly than I gave him credit for is interesting, thank you for that.
Wow. As a Buddhist, I was highly skeptical of the Fátima miracle. Now that I see that it was merely a variant of a Buddhist miracle, I am convinced that a Bodhisattva manifested in Fátima a hundred years ago, whom the people took to be the Virgin Mary. Going forward, I know to be less skeptical of any reports of such divine miracles.
Why shouldn't this miracle also be attributed to the Catholic god? Causing Luang Pu Sodh to appear in the sky seems a much less inexplicable divine decision than, you know, creating a world filled with pointless suffering.
Because it is contradictory to Catholic dogma on the purpose of divine signs
God famously pranked Abraham. This could be another such prank where the punchline has yet to be revealed.
Enough of this silly business!
Reminds me of Imam Khomeini (AS) in the moon on 27 November, 1978, during the Islamic Revolution in Iran. In the next two months, the regime of the Shah collapsed.
"A rumour spread like a fire through the bush that a pious old lady in the holy city of Qom had found a hair from the Prophet’s beard in the pages of her Qur’an. The same evening an apparition had informed the saintly lady that the faithful would be able to see the face of Imam Khomeini in the full moon on 27 November. No one bothered to ask how the old lady knew that the hair belonged to the Prophet or whether any such old lady existed in the first place. Within a single day almost everyone had heard the rumour and millions of people gathered on the rooftops on the promised day and waited for the full moon, shouting ‘Allah Akbar’. It was also rumoured that only miscreants and bastards would fail to see Khomeini’s face in the moon. Tehran and other major cities experienced a festive moment that sharply contrasted with the rest of that bleak, bitterly cold and bloody autumn. Tears of joy were shed and huge quantities of sweets and fruits were consumed as millions of people jumped for joy, shouting ‘I’ve seen the Imam in the moon.’ The event was celebrated in thousands of mosques with mullahs reminding the faithful that a sure sign of the coming of the Mahdi was that the sun would rise in the West. Khomeini, representing the sun, was now in France and his face was shining in the moon like a sun. People were ready to swear on the Qur’an that they had seen Khomeini’s face in the moon. Even the Communist Party shared in the collective hallucination. Its paper Navid wrote: ‘Our toiling masses, fighting against world-devouring Imperialism headed by the blood-sucking United States, have seen the face of their beloved Imam and leader, Khomeini the Breaker of Idols, in the moon. A few pipsqueaks cannot deny what a whole nation has seen with its own eyes.’ "
- Page 241-2, The spirit of Allah : Khomeini and the Islamic revolution, by Amir Taheri
(The author was a contemporary opponent of the Islamic Revolution, and interpreting from the text, not a believijg Muslim - so his description of the Mass Hysteria is presumably accurate.)
So Sun Miracles are fraud, but We have the Moon Miracle. /s
Wasn't the decisive aspect in Fatima's believability that it had been prophesied by a group of children from a vision of the Virgin Mary that they supposedly experienced weeks in advance? The crowd that gathered there had come to argue or witness whether or not something would happen - and the near-universal consensus was that something did indeed happen. Without this previous, specifically divinely inspired prediction, the miracle would have far less cachet with Christians since the testimonies specifically seeing Christian symbols during the event are far slimmer than those simply recounting the sun distorting or changing colours. The Christian apologetic arguments build on the timeline of events and on the critical fact that people skeptical of the prophecy, who arrived fully primed to see nothing, abundantly testified to having seen extremely similar things to those who arrived expecting the prophecy to hold true.
This supposed miracle in Bangkok, on the other hand, involves a crowd composed entirely of religious practitioners, all - we must assume - sharing more or less the same general belief system about the nature of divinity, all practicing the same meditation technique which specifically can include strongly visualising a luminous monk, all very much not primed to see the Sun distort/change colours/otherwise divert from its normal state since that phenomenon apparently bears no tradition or meaning in the context of their religion. Very interestingly, this vision seems to have cascaded out from a single person, who first drew attention to it by specifically crying out what they were seeing when looking at the Sun.
These are quite stark differences - the only thing the two events really share are quite similar (but not really identical) eyewitness reports about the Sun deviating from its normal state for a little while.
The Bangkok Sun Miracle is nonetheless a very compelling addition to the list of such events generally, and plays very nicely with the theory that these events are mainly cases of hitherto unnamed optical effects experienced when observing the sun mixed with some kind of suggestion based on crowd psyche - thought I don't think it will move Fatima believers much, for the reasons I just listed.
Another thought came to me regarding the Buddhist Sun Miracle:
When the crowd was meditating, were their closed eyes facing the Sun?
It seems to me from personal experience that facing the Sun even with closed eyes still allows light to pass through the eyelids and that doing so becomes strenuous after prolonged exposure. The field of sight goes from black to cadmium red and one can feel one's eyes/eyelids heating up. After a little while, the heat and light becomes unpleasant and one feels compelled to look away. Perhaps these meditating practitioners were already in a state highly conducive to seeing the Sun morph due to having indirectly been staring at it for a long time, albeit with closed eyes. Add to that the psychological and physical strain of focused meditation, and it seems plausible that they were gently inducing a kind of trance state upon themselves - imagine staring at the beaming Sun with closed eyes while focusing all your energy on feeling and thinking as little as possible, meaning resisting the physical urge to look away and shield the eyes from sunlight - PLUS resisting the very awareness of that urge as much as possible.
If I recall correctly, a big component of the timeline of events at Fatima was that the crowd had been observing the Sun behind a veil of rainy clouds - perhaps a similar optical process as staring at the Sun with closed eyes, since both gazes include a sort of filter between the Sun and the naked eye. In your extensive write-up about Fatima, I believe you pointed out that people who specifically experimented with observing the Sun for long periods with the naked eye did not report identical visual effects as those present for the supposed miracles - perhaps because they were looking at the Sun on a clear day and not in rainy or cloudy conditions?
The aspect that I keep coming back to and that feels the most crucial to me, however, is the fact that this mass vision originated from one specific person, who literally described exactly what he was seeing instead of just shouting "the Sun is doing something weird". It's also very interesting to note that despite this being a group meditation in which everyone has their eyes closed, this person opened his eyes, since he otherwise wouldn't have noticed the Sun changing. If we want to take a skeptical approach, it becomes almost comically easy to break down what happened:
1. Crowd of cultish Buddhists gather for group meditation, mildly exposed to the Sun behind closed eyes
2. One such Buddhist was using the meditation technique that focused on visualising a luminous monk
3. Due to the strain of the sunlight on his closed eyes or a lapse in meditative focus, he felt compelled to open them for a brief instance, at which point the strong visualised image of the luminous monk overlayed with the optical effect of prolonged exposure to the Sun in "filtered" conditions
4. Being in a soft trance state and a faithful believer of a religion that already accepts visions and apparitions as possible, he immediately took this to mean that it was a vision of divine portent and shared what he was seeing with the rest of the crowd
5. The crowd of meditating Buddhists, who all had been exposed to the Sun by filtered means due their closed eyes, were violently snapped out of their meditative focus and dragged back into the physical realm by being told to specifically look directly at the Sun with the expectation that it would not look normal.
6. The other Buddhists who had also been using the technique of visualising a luminous monk experienced the same visual overlay effect, while those who were not using that technique did not see the any monk figure in the Sun, but merely report visual distortions.
7. Ergo, the apparition of the Monk is pure suggestion stemming from one person, mixed with a number of practitioners already being primed to see that image, while the distortions/colour shifts of the Sun are the result of simply experiencing sunlight for prolonged exposure in a veiled state (closed eyes in Bangkok, rainy clouds in Fatima) all while being in a heightened/atypical emotional state that perhaps intensifies or overwhelms the brains capacity to process visual information the way it would in a more casual context.
This seems like a solid causality to me - and strengthens the skeptical approach to these events. What still throws me off in the case of Fatima is that the event was prophesied in some form and that we have testimonies from skeptics.