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Equality 7-2521 
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 Posted: December 10 2010 at 15:19 |
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Wouldn't it be infinitely more likely that there were several hundred people in different countries who looked 100% identical to person, rather than him being able to bi-locate?
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"One had to be a Newton to notice that the moon is falling, when everyone sees that it doesn't fall. "
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The T
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Posted: December 10 2010 at 15:49 |
 Equality 7-2521 wrote:
Wouldn't it be infinitely more likely that there were several hundred people in different countries who looked 100% identical to person, rather than him being able to bi-locate?
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Oh come on, when every other explanations fails, go for the physically impossible 
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Ivan_Melgar_M
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Posted: December 10 2010 at 16:11 |
Equality 7-2521 wrote:
Wouldn't it be infinitely more likely that there were several hundred people in different countries who looked 100% identical to person, rather than him being able to bi-locate?
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I'll follow it Equality.....Even in that case.....Hundreds of mulatto Dominican Monks in an time when black people couldn't wear the robes? He was the ilegitimate son of black woman and an influential Spanish, so he was accepted by exception, I don't believe there were hundred's of black monks in the 1600's in all the world.
But that's not the point, the point is that a canonical court listened the testimonies and believed them, studied his life of impeccable service to the Church and studied at least 30 more confirmed miracles.
So focus in the testimonies, hundred's of witnesses are enough to convict or declare not guilty in any court of law...Why should we criticize the method followed by the Church, even if you don't accept miracles?
Iván
Edited by Ivan_Melgar_M - December 10 2010 at 16:48
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Dean
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Posted: December 10 2010 at 18:27 |
Ivan_Melgar_M wrote:
I know it's impossible for you to believe this, you will probably call it fraud, but no court can reject more than 100 coincident testimonies as valid evidence.
Iván
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Hang on a minute... we're talking about the 17th century... no TV, photography or Hello! magazine (ˇHola!!) so no mass media of any kind to spread the message or his image so people could recognise him when they saw him and yet this individual was recognised has having visited several different lands throughout the world without ever leaving Peru and there are over 100 accounts that were verified as being true 200 years after the event ... Believing any of that is a miracle to be sure.
...now reading about his life story on Wiki I can see he was a noble and honourable person who did good deeds that are well worth commemorating and remembering. Why not simply admit that and honour him for the real good works he did rather than for some unsubstantiated (yes, the written accounts are unsubstantiated) accounts of miracles.
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Ivan_Melgar_M
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Posted: December 10 2010 at 18:38 |
Dean wrote:
Hang on a minute... we're talking about the 17th century... no TV, photography or Hello! magazine (ˇHola!!) so no mass media of any kind to spread the message or his image so people could recognise him when they saw him and yet this individual was recognised has having visited several different lands throughout the world without ever leaving Peru and there are over 100 accounts that were verified as being true 200 years after the event ... Believing any of that is a miracle to be sure. |
Believe it or not, he had more paintings than the Viceroy, and all are coincident (seen most of them), even during his life.
Dean wrote:
...now reading about his life story on Wiki I can see he was a noble and honourable person who did good deeds that are well worth commemorating and remembering. Why not simply admit that and honour him for the real good works he did rather than for some unsubstantiated (yes, the written accounts are unsubstantiated) accounts of miracles. |
Not unsubstantiated for me, some clients I represented were declared not guilty with only two testimonies, so 30, 40 or 100 are more than enough to be considered evidence, hundred's of people with no interest can't be lying or mistaken.
Iván
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Dean
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Posted: December 10 2010 at 18:59 |
Ivan_Melgar_M wrote:
Dean wrote:
Hang on a minute... we're talking about the 17th century... no TV, photography or Hello! magazine (ˇHola!!) so no mass media of any kind to spread the message or his image so people could recognise him when they saw him and yet this individual was recognised has having visited several different lands throughout the world without ever leaving Peru and there are over 100 accounts that were verified as being true 200 years after the event ... Believing any of that is a miracle to be sure. |
Believe it or not, he had more paintings than the Viceroy, and all are coincident (seen most of them), even during his life. |
Indeed there are - 2minutes of Google searching has reveals dozens of paintings ... and no two look the same, using any of them to recognise the real person is impossible. Several of them have the wrong colour robes for a Dominican friar.
Also, practically all of them show him with a halo, which means they are painted after his beautification and are not contemporary with his lifetime. This is understandable, he would not have been famous enough to have more paintings than the Viceroy until after he was honoured by the church.
Sorry, this is looking even less believable now.
Ivan_Melgar_M wrote:
Dean wrote:
...now reading about his life story on Wiki I can see he was a noble and honourable person who did good deeds that are well worth commemorating and remembering. Why not simply admit that and honour him for the real good works he did rather than for some unsubstantiated (yes, the written accounts are unsubstantiated) accounts of miracles. |
Not unsubstantiated for me, some clients I represented were declared not guilty with only two testimonies, so 30, 40 or 100 are more than enough to be considered evidence, hundred's of people with no interest can't be lying or mistaken.
Iván |
Your clients have no bearing on this what so ever. Hundreds of people can be mistaken very easily, people claim to have seen Elvis after he died - do you believe them?
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Ivan_Melgar_M
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Posted: December 10 2010 at 19:22 |
Dean wrote:
Indeed there are - 2minutes of Google searching has reveals dozens of paintings ... and no two look the same, using any of them to recognise the real person is impossible. Several of them have the wrong colour robes for a Dominican friar.
Also, practically all of them show him with a halo, which means they are painted after his beautification and are not contemporary with his lifetime. This is understandable, he would not have been famous enough to have more paintings than the Viceroy until after he was honoured by the church.
Sorry, this is looking even less believable now. |
Not likely Dean, most of the paintings of him are Colonial, and he was beatified only in 1837, 16 years after Perú was an independent republic.
Most creole painters didn't cared about the rules of the Church, he was considered a saint but most Lima even before he died.
BTW: You probably have read it, but the African people that recognized him, did it i person when they came to Perú as slaves, as a couple Mexicans.
And the case of another black monk is very unlikely as I said, because they were not accepted by the Church.
Dean wrote:
Your clients have no bearing on this what so ever. Hundreds of people can be mistaken very easily, people claim to have seen Elvis after he died - do you believe them? |
Elvis was famous around the world, his photo and face was well known around the world, there's no reason to find paintings of San Martín de Porres in Philippines, Mexico or Japan (where the Church had very little influence except for the Jesuits who didn't accepted any other congregation or had a black monk).
As a fact I verified that no order was allowed to receive black members in the clergy in the 1600's, he was accepted a an exception being that his father "Juan de Porres" was noble and descendant of Crusaders, so it's almost impossible to mistake him with anybody.. Incredibly, in 1962, he was the third black Saint in the history of the Church.
Even worst, the Church had no interest in promoting his image outside Perú, being that they only accepted his beatification on 1837, 200 years after his dead.
But despite this natural doubts of an skeptic, you must accept that the process is documented and with valid evidence.
Iván
Edited by Ivan_Melgar_M - December 10 2010 at 19:37
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Proletariat
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Joined: March 30 2007
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Posted: December 10 2010 at 19:41 |
Equality 7-2521 wrote:
Wouldn't it be infinitely more likely that there were several hundred people in different countries who looked 100% identical to person, rather than him being able to bi-locate?
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Exactly! obviously he was cloned by the martians! this way they could build support for their puppet state: the catholic church!!!!
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who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob
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Dean
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Posted: December 10 2010 at 19:55 |
Ivan_Melgar_M wrote:
Dean wrote:
Indeed there are - 2minutes of Google searching has reveals dozens of paintings ... and no two look the same, using any of them to recognise the real person is impossible. Several of them have the wrong colour robes for a Dominican friar.
Also, practically all of them show him with a halo, which means they are painted after his beautification and are not contemporary with his lifetime. This is understandable, he would not have been famous enough to have more paintings than the Viceroy until after he was honoured by the church.
Sorry, this is looking even less believable now. |
Not likely Dean, most of the paintings of him are Colonial, and he was beatified only in 1837, 16 years after Perú was an independent republic.
Most creole painters didn't cared about the rules of the Church, he was considered a saint but most Lima even before he died.
BTW: You probably have read it, but the African people that recognized him, did it i person when they came to Perú as slaves, as a couple Mexicans.
And the case of another black monk is very unlikely as I said, because they were not accepted by the Church. |
It is the accounts of the African slaves that concerns me the most - these people were undoubly illiterate and probably had limited understanding of Spanish. The cynical skeptic in me does indeed question the veracity of these accounts, not from the African slaves themselves, but from the people who wrote them down.
Ivan_Melgar_M wrote:
Dean wrote:
Your clients have no bearing on this what so ever. Hundreds of people can be mistaken very easily, people claim to have seen Elvis after he died - do you believe them? |
Elvis was famous around the world, his photo and face was well known around the world, there's no reason to find paintings of San Martín de Porres in Philippines, Mexico or Japan (where the Church had very little influence except for the Jesuits who didn't accepted any other congregation or had a black monk).
But despite this natural doubts of an skeptic, you must accept that the process is documented and with valid evidence.
Iván |
No, as a skeptic I cannot accept that this constitutes valid evidence at all. Again I ask, since these paintings are not life-like representations and did not travel around the world in his lifetime, how was he recognised in these countries?
A: This does not require 100 look-a-likes that Pat described, it just needs a few monks and priests whose skin colour is slightly darker than the average Mediterainian - a touch of sunburn could do that and would look to be of mixed-race to someone from Mexico, Japan or the Philippines who were unfamiliar with European colouration and the effects of sunburn on pale skins. It also does not competely emiminate the possibility of monks of African or Middle Eastern or even Indian decent being mistaken for this monk from Peru - a point emphasised because these darker skinned monks were such a rare occurence they would be remembered for their skin-colour alone, and not for any actual facial features that we use to differentiate one person from another.
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Ivan_Melgar_M
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Posted: December 10 2010 at 21:12 |
Dean, just 2 questions:
1) Which are the odds that from hundreds of declarations all are wrong?
I guess that not more than 1 in millions
2) Why should the Church alter the declarations of African slaves that confirm that San Martin de Porres made miracles if they were obviously not comfortable with the sanctity of a black low rank member of the clergy?
Iván
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thellama73
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Posted: December 10 2010 at 21:39 |
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Wait, I'm confused. Is Dean saying that he doesn't believe that Elvis is still alive?
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Dean
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Posted: December 11 2010 at 04:13 |
Ivan_Melgar_M wrote:
Dean, just 2 questions:
1) Which are the odds that from hundreds of declarations all are wrong?
I guess that not more than 1 in millions |
I guess that it is easily 100 in 100. That's the miracle of mathematics and probability.
If something is a fraud then all documentation associated with it would be questionable. It is convieniently impossibe to check the provenance of every statement - to categorically prove that each statement was made by the person it claims to be by and that the statement is a truthful one is impossible. I would say that was pretty impossible in 1639, completely impossible by1837 and a miracle in 1962.
Ivan_Melgar_M wrote:
2) Why should the Church alter the declarations of African slaves that confirm that San Martin de Porres made miracles if they were obviously not comfortable with the sanctity of a black low rank member of the clergy?
Iván |
Who said it was the church that made the alterations? I'm just saying that the people who took the statements (if they actually took statements at all and didn't just make them up) may have misunderstood - rules against leading the witness would not have been enforced that's for sure.
It isn't obvious that the church was uncomfortable with the colour of his skin or his racial ethnicity - it seems that the church went out of their way to change the rules to allow him to be a full Dominican monk and later a Coadjutor (not such a low rank I believe), his Superior also allowed him to bend the rules so he could treat the sick as he saw fit.
In the 18th century and later in the 20th century there was propaganda to be made by beautifying and canonising a mixed-race saint.
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Dean
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Posted: December 11 2010 at 04:17 |
thellama73 wrote:
Wait, I'm confused. Is Dean saying that he doesn't believe that Elvis is still alive? |
If I were a religious man I would be praying that he wasn't since he's been buried in Graceland for the past 33 years.
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Mr ProgFreak
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Posted: December 11 2010 at 05:10 |
Ivan_Melgar_M wrote:
Equality 7-2521 wrote:
Wouldn't it be infinitely more likely that there were several hundred people in different countries who looked 100% identical to person, rather than him being able to bi-locate?
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I'll follow it Equality.....Even in that case.....Hundreds of mulatto Dominican Monks in an time when black people couldn't wear the robes? He was the ilegitimate son of black woman and an influential Spanish, so he was accepted by exception, I don't believe there were hundred's of black monks in the 1600's in all the world.
But that's not the point, the point is that a canonical court listened the testimonies and believed them, studied his life of impeccable service to the Church and studied at least 30 more confirmed miracles.
So focus in the testimonies, hundred's of witnesses are enough to convict or declare not guilty in any court of law...Why should we criticize the method followed by the Church, even if you don't accept miracles?
Iván
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"Believe" is the crucial (no pun intended) aspect. What if we get enough people together who swear on their immortal soual that they saw someone walk on water? A scientist would ask for a demonstration - and until it is demonstrated, the scientific choice is to *not believe*.
Those miracles aren't "confirmed", they're "believed".
BTW: I'm not familiar with that particular thing, but I've read and heard a lot about the Lady of Guadalupe (Mexico). Another "confirmed" miracle that's obviously bunk, once you like at it without the bias (faith, trust in the church and its records).
Edited by Mr ProgFreak - December 11 2010 at 05:11
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Mr ProgFreak
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Posted: December 11 2010 at 05:19 |
Dean wrote:
A: This does not require 100 look-a-likes that Pat described, it just needs a few monks and priests whose skin colour is slightly darker than the average Mediterainian - a touch of sunburn could do that and would look to be of mixed-race to someone from Mexico, Japan or the Philippines who were unfamiliar with European colouration and the effects of sunburn on pale skins. It also does not competely emiminate the possibility of monks of African or Middle Eastern or even Indian decent being mistaken for this monk from Peru - a point emphasised because these darker skinned monks were such a rare occurence they would be remembered for their skin-colour alone, and not for any actual facial features that we use to differentiate one person from another. |
Absolutely. This also reminds me about what Bart Ehrman said in Jesus, Interrupted about whether miracles can be confirmed by historical evidence *at all*. The answer is, of course, no. And the simple reason is:
For any freak occurrence that is recorded in historical documents, we can come up with one or more alternative explanations that don't require an alteration of the laws of physics. Many of those explanations may sound implausible or far-fetched ... but what should be kept in mind is that the proposed miracle theory is infinitely more far-fetched and implausible to begin with.
In this particular place: A person being in several places at once without actually travelling. Yeah, right, and it's obviously a particularly Catholic trait, for reasons untold. And monkeys might fly out of my ass.
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Dean
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Posted: December 11 2010 at 06:32 |
Ivan_Melgar_M wrote:
Dean, just 2 questions:
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Asking questions in reply to a question is not an answer.
You accept that people claim to see Elvis after he died because is face is well known around the world.
When I asked how Martin de Porres was recognised in his lifetime all around the world, you said there were hundreds of paintings made of him. I pointed out that these paintings are not life-like or even contemporary with his life-time and you contradicted yourself by saying that there was no reason to find these paintings in [the] Philippines, Mexico or Japan.
So again, there is no way that anyone in the Philippines, Mexico or Japan could recognise a monk as being from Peru in the 17th century. With the communications system that was present in the 17th century it is highly unlikely that anyone outside Lima knew his name or that people in the four corners of the World knew that there was even a mixed-race monk in Peru at that time.
So how can anyone categorically state that it was him and how could anyone claim that these accounts are factual 200 years (and then 300 years) after they occurred?
The miracle was not that he was seen in those countries, but that he was recognised.
A more likely scenario was: "I saw a dark-skinned priest once" - "Oh, you must mean Martin de Porres, I'll just write that down..."
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Ivan_Melgar_M
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Posted: December 11 2010 at 08:31 |
Dean, you'e assuming that:
1.- All testimonies are fake 2.- Everything s a fraud
With no evidence.
Mike, this:
| In this particular place: A person being in several places at once without actually travelling. Yeah, right, and it's obviously a particularly Catholic trait, for reasons untold. And monkeys might fly out of my ass |
Is not an argument at all.
Iván
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Dean
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Posted: December 11 2010 at 08:43 |
Ivan_Melgar_M wrote:
Dean, you'e assuming that:
1.- All testimonies are fake
2.- Everything s a fraud
With no evidence.
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No. I am not assuming that at all - I am postulating reasonable explanations based upon the evidence provided. If the evidence is "unbelievable" and more rational explanations are eminently possible then those should be considered and given greater weight.
You are assuming everything is genuine and true without evidence.
If these accounts of sightings were offered as testimony in a court of law as alibis for some heinous act it would get thrown out. Because the act was benevolent they are acceptable? That is not reasonable to me.
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Ivan_Melgar_M
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Posted: December 11 2010 at 08:56 |
I'm not assuming all the declarations are true, I believe some are true and in some cases there can be errors or inaccuracies.
But there's no reason to believe everything is a fraud and a mistake just because we don't agree.
Iván |
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Dean
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Posted: December 11 2010 at 09:25 |
Ivan_Melgar_M wrote:
I'm not assuming all the declarations are true, I believe some are true and in some cases there can be errors or inaccuracies.
But there's no reason to believe everything is a fraud and a mistake just because we don't agree.
Iván |
Nope. That doesn't hold water either.
I'll rephrase for the sake of clarity - I assume nothing, and do not claim that everything is a fraud or a mistake but state that more rational explanations should be given more credence.
If you believe that some are true and in some cases there can be errors or inaccuracies then you must have some conclusive proof because the only evidence we have is inconclusive. The evidence can all be false, all be true or some it can be true and some of it false - each permutation is possible based upon the lack of provenance for each claim. The evidence for the evidence is lacking and that casts doubt over the claims.
I don't need to prove anything, I just need to demonstrate that reasonable doubt exists.
If you cite a miracle as proof of anything in an atheist thread then you must expect counter explanations. If you post the same in Rob's christian thread you will receive a similar response because not all christian denominations accept non-biblical miracles - only in a catholic thread would you get unanimous agreement and nods of approval.
If the catholic church wants to elevate individuals to sainthood in recognition for good deeds then I don't have issue with that - in the secular world honorifics are given to people in recognition for good works in every walk of life. If Martin de Porres or Mother Teressa did good work then by all means honour them (and although I tend to side with Hitchens on Mother Teressa's attitude to birth-control in the third world, I do accept she did good).
Similarily I don't have a problem with supposed miraculous acts being attributed to a person for the sake of canonisation, that's perfectly acceptable to me as long as it remains within the confinds of the religion. However, I will take it to task when it is detatched from the religion and used as evidence of paranormal activity in the secular world. Here, what is acceptable as proof in the church is not acceptable as proof in the scientific community.
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