I’m an italian atheist and I’m searching the rational explanation of the most recents christian catholics miracles. For the most famous miracles I found a rational explanation but there is a miracle, less famous, that I didn’t find it.
The fact is the fasting of Alexandrina da Costa. I searched for hour and days but i didn’t find a person with an explanation. At many sites there is also the observation of alexandrina’s medics that confirmed the fact, if this is true. have you an alternative explanation?
Here’s your explanation: she had an awful diet but didn’t exert herself at all, and she still lost a ton of weight and died at the age of 51. That’s not a miracle, that’s suicide by stupid.
Here’s someone who ate nothing but chicken nuggets for fifteen years. That’s not a miracle either.
but how could she live fourty days without food and drink when the medics controlled her?
Do you have a cite for this claim? Wikipedia only mentions the thirteen years eating only eucharist crackers.
I’m not exactly seeing the requirement for supernatural intervention, either.
Wow.
I’d never heard of her before now, and I just finished reading her biography at the Vatican.
It strikes me as a perfect example of how people delude themselves with religion. Jesus said that if you believe in him, you will get whatever you ask for in prayer. She believed in him, and prayed to be healed of her paralysis. Instead, she got worse.
A rational person would conclude that Christ’s promises are bullshit. Instead, she concluded that God’s answer to her prayers was to tell her to become a professional sufferer. So that’s what she did, eventually going on a bread and water diet until it killed her.
What a racket. Special this week — send me a hundred bucks, and I promise to answer your prayers. Of course, the answer might be, “Suffer for the rest of your miserable life,” but you never know.
No checks, please.
i found many websites with the medics evidence.
http://alexandrinabalasar.free.fr/the_fast.htm
http://alexandrinabalasar.free.fr/ruy_joao_marques.htm
the second is in Portuguese and the fourth in Portuguese or Spanish.
In the last link there are also the photocopy of another medic and in other link there are the evidence of alexandrina’s medics
in some links there is also a page of a newspaper. In web there are also thousand of link with the story and medics evidence of this case but there aren’t a websites with a rational explanation
There are simpler explanations than Jesus, though.
-The accounts are incorrect.
-The medics were fooled.
-It is possible for a person who is completely sedentary to subsist on bread and water for a very long time.
Rule out those possibilities and… well… you’ll still have a long road before proving a miracle happened.
I think this is what Catholic snuff looks like. Ick.
This first one proves you are wrong: one of the doctors who wrote about the forty days of observation explicitly states it was “in order to investigate whether or not Alexandrina did indeed live without even minimum feeding, except the Sacred Eucharist”. Then later he says “What I want to prove to the world is that she lives without food or drink.”
What kind of doctor doesn’t know that the Eucharist is food?
And if you’re a Catholic, you believe it’s brimming with nutritious protein, since it magically turns into the body of Christ.
And if you go to JustinBieber.com, you will find that he is the greatest singer of all time. It’s very hard to believe you’re an atheist, if you are so gullible that you consider websites with her name on them to be credible sources.
yes but an host is a disk of bread with a diameter of five cm and a thickness less than a mm. The calories of this are very few. and the water?
How many was she eating, though? If she was going through them like potato chips…
I’m a new atheist becouse up to one year ago I was a catholic for the influence of the church in my country. I try to changed my thought myself but there are events, like this, that I didn’t find an explanation.
I searched and searched for this case and I discoveded that these doctors are really lived in Portugal sixty years ago. In particular dr Azevedo really wrote a lot of letters and evidence for this case
That is where you will fail as an atheist. It is the religious-minded who insist on an explanation for everything. A free-thinker can say, with confidence, “I don’t know. I do not have enough information to reach a firm conclusion.”
According to the accounts you have posted, something odd had occurred. Those accounts are clearly biased by miracle-mongers who are looking to prove that a woman starving herself to death is an example of divine intervention.
As with all such claims, evaluate the evidence, and decide what is most likely. In this case, these are the possibilities:
a. she did survive for 40 days with no food and water.
b. she consumed some food and water during the 40 days.
It seems that b is far more likely than a- the only thing that must be assumed for b to be correct is that she was lying, and the attending witnesses lied as well, or were deceived. I find it far more believable that some (perhaps even just one) of those close to her was an accomplice in getting small amounts of sustenance to her (or some other explanation), then she survived with no sustenance. And if she did indeed survive with no food or water, there may even be a mundane explanation.
Another way to approach this is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. There doesn’t appear to be extraordinary evidence for this occurence, so I think it’s far more likely that there is an ordinary explanation.
A few years back, I went looking for what theists had documented as a true miracle since Straight Dope is supposed to have some of the smartest theists. This is the best of what they could come up with at the time: Faith and miracles isn’t what it used to be. I’m sure this thread will be more of the same.
There’s not much profit in trying to explain miracles and magic, because the real explanations are almost always so boring and stupid that there’s nothing to be learned. The usual answer is that someone made up a story, and convinced people around them that the story was true.
Atheism isn’t so brittle that one “unexplained” “miracle” is enough to prove that the Catholic Church is the one true religion. There are hundreds of “miracles” that occur every day in India, you haven’t investigated and explained them, but that doesn’t prove that Hindu mystics have supernatural powers. The Book of Mormon contains sworn testimony by eyewitnesses that Joseph Smith really did have golden plates that he translated from. Does that mean Mormonism must be true?
Since there are hundreds of ways that people can make false statements and believe false things, the exact reason someone says something false might never be known. Are they consciously lying? Were they fooled by someone else? Did they hallucinate? Did they draw the wrong conclusions from the evidence? Did they have a dream? Did they just form a firm conclusion from internal belief without any sort of evidence? Who knows?
And furthermore, trying to defend a miracle via scientific means is missing the point entirely. Christianity depends on faith, not logical certainty. If one feels the need to use science to justify their Christian beliefs, they are not exhibiting faith.
Hebrews 11:1 Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.