The “Mass Hallucination” explanation is hardly even necessary, since it implies a premise that we are under no obligation to accept in the first place.
]Notwithstanding that we don’t even have a clear picture of just how many people were present to witness this “miracle” (A few thousand? 10,000? 30,000? 70,000? 100,000?), we don’t have a clear picture of what any great portion of that crowd saw.
And how many people were at Woodstock? A half million?
10,000? Please point out a source that says that. As I say towards the end of this post, the military of the secular government of Portugal was trying to keep people from even going to Fatima.
Most of us don’t want to exaggerate anything but I haven’t heard figures as small as 30,000 or 10,000.
We do know that certain people in the crowd that day reported seeing nothing unusual at all (a fact that often goes ignored by Fatima believers). We also know that many self-reports from supposed witnesses to the miracle were not gathered until decades after the event (in the books of John De Marchi - a Catholic priest).
I would happily grant you, that if even only a few thousand people were present at Fatima, and they were all reliably reported seeing the same miraculous event, that this would be quite compelling evidence. But that isn’t the playing field we’re dealing with. We don’t know how many people saw anything, much less what they really saw. But we do know that some people who reported seeing something had over 20 years to potentially compare notes with their neighbors and get their stories straight.
Not sure about this, “Meet the witnesses” does relay wide accounts and the accounts to cross check and again, this was reported in newspapers including O Seculo and of course, the NY Times and seen from 30 miles away.
At any rate, “Mass Hallucination” doesn’t mean that everyone has the exact same hallucination. The social effects of mob-think are long and well-documented. Gather a mob of people together who desperately want something to true, and then get enough people in that group to think their beliefs are being confirmed, and eventually you reach a tipping point that pushes everyone else over as well. You see this play out in faith healing shows all the time.
Not sure about this “mob-think”, Francisco and Jacinta, two of the seers were killed by Influenza so common in 1919, the Spanish flu I believe that was such a killer. Then on top of that Portugal was involved in World War I and lost soldiers and though they were not involved in World War II, all of these along with the Spanish Civil War are very significant events to think decades later, witnesses got their stories straight with each other.
For 1917, it sounds well documented for the time:
Columnist Avelino de Almeida of O Século (Portugal’s most influential newspaper, which was pro-government in policy and avowedly anti-clerical),[3] reported the following: “Before the astonished eyes of the crowd, whose aspect was biblical as they stood bare-headed, eagerly searching the sky, the sun trembled, made sudden incredible movements outside all cosmic laws - the sun ‘danced’ according to the typical expression of the people.”[10] Eye specialist Dr. Domingos Pinto Coelho, writing for the newspaper Ordem reported “The sun, at one moment surrounded with scarlet flame, at another aureoled in yellow and deep purple, seemed to be in an exceeding fast and whirling movement, at times appearing to be loosened from the sky and to be approaching the earth, strongly radiating heat”.[11] The special reporter for the October 17, 1917 edition of the Lisbon daily, O Dia, reported the following, “…the silver sun, enveloped in the same gauzy purple light was seen to whirl and turn in the circle of broken clouds…The light turned a beautiful blue, as if it had come through the stained-glass windows of a cathedral, and spread itself over the people who knelt with outstretched hands…people wept and prayed with uncovered heads, in the presence of a miracle they had awaited. The seconds seemed like hours, so vivid were they.”[12]
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_F%C3%A1tima
And in fact, I don’t think it matters that much to synchronize the stories between the witnesses there, a God could allow each of us to see whatever he chooses us to see in how all things would be possible with God.
Considering the timeline, 1952 was when the movie “Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima” came out :
amazon.com/Miracle-Our-Lady-Fatima-VHS/dp/6300270998 which basically has these accounts in it, considering movies were still silent in 1917, a rural area, 2 World Wars, an epidemic that killed millions world wide, the Spanish Civil War and that the Vatican had deemed this apparition worthy of belief only 13 years after 1930, 1952 doesn’t seem too long a time to make a movie of the full version in English.
The church always takes time in approving an apparition but this one was approved in 1930 after occurring in 1917.
So, what we would really need to look at would be the Vatican documents themselves on witness accounts because what you say about witnesses getting their stories straight does not readily appear to be the case.
Also, just like the movie said, Military soldiers were actually trying to prevent the people from going to the reputed appartions site.
In the middle of the road a force of infantry and cavalry of the Republican guard was preventing the people from passing, or completing the remaining one and three quarter miles which separate Fatima from the Cova. I asked some bystanders whether anyone had in fact passed. Until midday, I was told, everyone had gone through, but then the mayor had arrived and forbidden it.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_F%C3%A1tima
Great post to find a skeptic view and link to it. And then make the claim it is a good debunking!
