A simple test of the supposed facts would be for a colored die to be put in the supposed source of the water to see if it leaks out of the statue in the new color.
Just don’t let the color be red as the believers would now be seeing tears of blood.
Actually, the pope’s statement on the shroud, roundly trumpeted by a media eager to promote sensationalist stories to sell advertising, does not say that he supports a belief in the shroud being genuine. He certainly pushes it as an object to promote belief, but he makes no claim as to its authenticity.
You have also garbled the story of Alexandrina da Costa, at least as it pertains to miracles. There is one claim that several bishops made a request to Rome, based on her asking for it. However, the request, (only attested by one person, not a bishop), was supposed to have been based on her spiritual life, not any miracle, and it is supposed to have occurred in 1938, four years before her supposed fast began. So we still do not have any evidence of the hierarchy “promoting” a claim for a miracle.
You are free to rail against the church, of course, but your specific claim that the hierarchy is promoting miracle beliefs lacks any evidence, at all.
You really should spend some time looking at the history of your claims. The church hierarchy has been the most resolutely hostile group when it comes to miracles. From the Shroud of Turin, (condemned as a fraud by the local bishop when it was first displayed), through stories about Our Lady of Guadalupe, Bernadette Soubirous and Our Lady of Lourdes, the three kids at Fatima, Portugal, and the current hoopla at Medjugorje, the church hierarchy has always been the last group to accept them as miraculous.
If you want to make the case that accepting the idea of miracles promotes the belief in miracles, I can see that point. If you want to claim that the church habitually promotes belief in specific miracles, you are simply wrong.
This is really not necessary. Sanal already demonstrated the source of the water. Credulous people are not going to believe him and the rest of us accept his explanation.
I was born and raised a Catholic, and I still practice it, though deep inside and my wife knows this, I’m an atheist.
Short reply to the OP: religion is just religion. It’s a human invention. Boohoo to you if you let it screw up your life. In the same way, science is just science. I’m not that warm to it either.
Can you quote the part that says the bishop supports the charges?
Let the hair-splitting and hand-waving commence.
Nah. That’s just sloppy reporting. We don’t know which groups the bishop is praising for what actions. It’s a quote with no context.
:dubious: Science is the world around you.
Well, perhaps the leaking drain itself is the miracle. Did you ever think of that? Did you??
California code mentionsboth actions AND threats as hate crime.
If the Pope masterminded this stupidity I would publicly denounce his action as thoroughly stupid. He’s the Pope, not God.
Church officials all around the world are extremely wary about calling anything like apparitions, weeping statues, or stuff like that a miracle. Priests that promote such event are routinely penalised.
I deny that emphasising suffering increases suffering.
That is completely wrong. Church officials are constantly saying that things are NOT are miracle. Every case I remember, at least here in Peru, where an apparition, healing, image, stigmata has appeared on the news, the bishop or priest has always, been extremely cautious and never saying it is a miracle.
From th WSJ article.
“In a letter to The Examiner, a Catholic Newsletter, the bishop said he did not believe the water to be a miracle. “But to make that an occasion to hurl false allegations against the Christian community and its leaders is quite another matter,” Bishop Agnelo wrote.”
Par for the course for a bishop. The problem is not calling it a leaky pipe not a miracle. There is the, apparently, attack on the community and insults. The law is not one to my liking.
The guy wanting to appear as a new Rusdie looks like a publicity stunt.
Yes we do. The two Catholic Secular Groups that made the complaint. The people ‘standing up’ for his Imaginary Friend. Hair-splitting FAIL.
Uff da!
And besides - the Bishop is a lying SOB concerning the ‘no collections’. Yea. Right. Let’s see what a post on the church’s own forum says.
At the very best he can claim they were not partaking in any added-value fleecing of the gullible, there was no ‘now with added tears’ surcharge but just like all over the world. - where there’s a shrine there’s the Church with its grasping paws stuck out.
It’s not that peculiar. Geert Wilders was prosecuted for essentially the same thing in the Netherlands.
I have checked that code for criminalizing speech debunking something alone, and no, it does not treats it as a crime.
Not really, you need to see what CNN in India reported, and once again, it would be easy for the church leaders to tell their zealots to drop the lawsuit; just like in other scandals, it is worse when the leadership just decides to have it both ways.
Totally agree. India is a fucked up retarded piece of shit country whose people are dumber than republicans for having such a law.
For some background, this is the same Indian skeptic who challenged a Tantric mystic who claimed he could kill anyone through mystic to murder him on live television while they were on a talk show. This turned into a multi hour stand off and one of the most watched events in Indian television.
In an interview I heard from that time, he started getting worried when the mystic had a knife brought in “to help him focus”.
That would have been a magnificent gotcha, (or at least a tepid are-you-sure?), if you had not gotten your churches mixed up. Your link is to a church on the Bay of Bengal on the East coast that has been having reports of miraculous healings for around 400 years, since a shipload of Portuguese washed ashore there after a cyclone. Places with long histories of (alleged) miracles tend to become shrines where people choose to donate money.
The church discussed on this thread is in a suburb of Mumbai/Bombay on the West coast of India that happens to be dedicated with the same name. They are a bit over 700 miles apart.
Except for, maybe, those of us who don’t accept them as miraculous.
I find it difficult to believe that a church that has miracle beliefs is somehow not promoting miracle beliefs by having miracle beliefs. The way not to promote miracle beliefs is not to have them. Otherwise, you’re just someone on a fad diet claiming that you’re a skeptic because you don’t believe in all fad diets.
If you do not accept a miracle, you cannot be the last one to have accepted it. 
Among those who do tend to believe in miracles, the church hierarchy has a long tradition of being the last to accept them. Better?
You’re just aching for a one-way ticket to Finland, I guess.