Question for Atheists

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shoewindow3000

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What do you make of the prophecies given to Mother Mariana de Jesus Torres by Our Lady of Good Success back in the 17th century, which came true EXACTLY as they were told? (You can look it up yourself. They were not vague-they were specific.)

For example, she was told of how (among other things) the Pope in the latter part of the 19th century would declare the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception and Papal Infallibility, and then how this same pope would be imprisoned in the Vatican by the papal states because of an uprising?

You can’t say it was written after the fact, because it was published and well known BEFORE the fact.

You can’t argue that pope tried to fulfill it. Even if he did, how would he secretely convince people to usurp against and imprison him? Even if he DID manage this big conspiracy to fulfill the prophecy, what about all the other ones that came true, such as the one concerning the Liberation of Ecuador in the same time period, or the state of the Church and world in the 19th and 20th centuries?
 
shoewindow3000 said:
What do you make of the prophecies given to Mother Mariana de Jesus Torres by Our Lady of Good Success back in the 17th century, which came true EXACTLY as they were told? (You can look it up yourself. They were not vague-they were specific.)

For example, she was told of how (among other things) the Pope in the latter part of the 19th century would declare the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception and Papal Infallibility, and then how this same pope would be imprisoned in the Vatican by the papal states because of an uprising?

You can’t say it was written after the fact, because it was published and well known BEFORE the fact.

You can’t argue that pope tried to fulfill it. I think it is safe to assume that the Pope believes in God, and someone who believes in and loves God usually doesn’t try to mock Him.
Even if he did try to though, how would he secretly convince people to usurp against and imprison him? And even if he DID manage this big conspiracy to fulfill that one prophecy, what about all of the other ones (which also came true), such as the one concerning the Liberation of Ecuador in the same time period, the persecution of the country’s president, or the state of the Church and world in the 19th and 20th centuries?
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Are you aware of the prophecies of other religions? Are you aware of how many have “come true”.? Have you researched them? How many buddhist miracles are you aware of? How many Islamic ones? Hindu?

I don’t think you understand the athiest mindset when you ask questions like this. I have researched some religious Miracles and Phrophetic claims and every single time to date there is a realistic(non-supernatural) explanation. People can pick their miracle and prophet of choice. From Fatima, to the phropehcy of christ. Once, you get a general idea that all you research can have a non-spiritual basis you put them all in the same basket. Every now and then you’ll get something that really challenges and may put your mind to it, but for the most part a bit of research can show the non-supernatural point of view.

You will find that most athiests haven’t researched every saint, every miracle, and every religious claim in christendom.

And add every religion in the world(And their claims) into the mix, we will ALL be “willfully” ignorant about such religious beliefs.

The answer to this question is simple.

Athiests realize most claims, can be explained naturally with enough research. If it cannot, then we accept it cannot be explained until we gain further knowlege. The athiest, will not put the “god” equation onto an historical event. They are an athiest. It’s a different mindset. They will simply say, we dont’ know.

And those that research it and do know, will be at your google fingertips 😛
 
shoewindow3000 said:
What do you make of the prophecies given to Mother Mariana de Jesus Torres by Our Lady of Good Success back in the 17th century, which came true EXACTLY as they were told? (You can look it up yourself. They were not vague-they were specific.)

For example, she was told of how (among other things) the Pope in the latter part of the 19th century would declare the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception and Papal Infallibility, and then how this same pope would be imprisoned in the Vatican by the papal states because of an uprising?

You can’t say it was written after the fact, because it was published and well known BEFORE the fact.

You can’t argue that pope tried to fulfill it. Even if he did, how would he secretely convince people to usurp against and imprison him? Even if he DID manage this big conspiracy to fulfill the prophecy, what about all the other ones that came true, such as the one concerning the Liberation of Ecuador in the same time period, or the state of the Church and world in the 19th and 20th centuries?
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Let’s say it was written before the 19th century. I’m not absolutely sure that it was, but I’m willing to believe you on that point, for the moment.

We have a prophecy where three elements were supposedly fulfilled:

(1) The pope made papal infallibility a dogma.
(2) That same pope made the immaculate conception a dogma.
(3) Papal states rose up against that same pope.

At first glance, this indeed seems like quite a coincidence. Now, I should point out that even a coincidence such as this is not nearly specific enough to rationally convince a person that a creator-deity exists. But moreover I also need to say that this coincidence is not all that you say.

As you suggest, we could say that (1) and (2) were self-fulfilling prophecies, but (3) was out of Pius IX’s control. And so (3) is what really makes this an amazing prophecy. How stupendous if Pius IX fulfilled (1) and (2), and then (3) was fulfilled, as well! But that’s not what happened, is it? Rather, (3) was fulfilled first, and only then were (1) and (2) fulfilled.

What does this tell us? Well, namely it gives us a possible natural explanation: Pius IX, upset by (3) and aware of the prophecy, may have decided to fulfill (1) and (2). This is a reasonable option, since the Papal states had been giving a number of popes trouble over a period of many years (e.g. Pius VI, VII, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries). So it’s nothing miraculous to note that Pius IX also had serious trouble.

The dates support such a view. The revolt under Pius IX began in 1848 and a Roman Republic was declared in 1849. It was in 1848–precisely during this period–that he began considering a possible dogma of the immaculate conception, and in 1854 the dogma was instituted. Later, in 1869-1870, the dogma of Papal infallibility was formally defined by the First Vatican Council, which convened under Pius IX.

So that’s one possible explanation. But I don’t want to give the impression that I subscribe to it, personally. Surely it is a far more reasonable thing to say that Pius IX knowingly fulfilled the prophecies for the sake of fulfilling them than to say that God exists, and provided Mother Mariana de Jesus Torres with a prophetic vision. In my opinion, though, an even better explanation is that this was simply a historical coincidence.

Now, perhaps you think that’s a stretch. But is it really? Let’s look at a translation of the supposed prophecy itself:

This signifies the Most August Sacrament of the Eucharist, which will be distributed by my Catholic priests to faithful Christians belonging to the Holy Roman, Catholic and Apostolic Church, whose visible head is the Pope, the King of Christianity. His pontifical infallibility will be declared a dogma of the Faith by the same Pope chosen to proclaim the dogma of the Mystery of My Immaculate Conception. He will be persecuted and imprisoned in the Vatican by the unjust usurpation of the Pontifical States through the iniquity, envy and avarice of an earthly monarch.

right[/right]

A number of inaccuracies stand out, here. First of all, it was the First Vatican Council, and not Pius IX individually, who defined Papal infallibility. Second, I am not aware of any imprisonment in the Vatican–although I freely admit I could be missing something, there, since I am not a historian of mid-19th century Papal politics! But the really monstrous error is the fact that the 1948 revolution was democratic. In other words, there was never any earthly “monarch” who precipitated the resistance of Papal States to Pontifical authority.

God only knows what other scattershot prophecies this Mariana de Jesus Torres foretold, which missed wildly!
 
The last two posts only show to what absurd extent atheists will go in their denial of the supernatural. It doesn’t matter what proof you offer. They are close minded. There being no God, there cannot possibly be any miracles. Case closed. What seem to some to be miracles, in time will be proven to be natural events.

You know, like the Big Bang.
 
Shoe – I was an atheist for many years and recently became a believer again. When I was an atheist, my response to this would have been, basically, “So what?” To put it more fully, a prophecy coming true could be the result of:
  1. Pure coincidence.
  2. A combination of coincidence and educated guesswork.
  3. The work of some god other than the Christian god.
  4. The work of some unseen being with powers we don’t have but not a god (a demon, an extraterrestrial, time travelers, etc.).
If you’re not a believer, then any one of those explanations is at least as likely to be correct as (and 1 and 2 are much more likely to be correct than) “the prophecy came true because the Christian God exists.”

.
 
Charlemagne_II said:
The last two posts only show to what absurd extent atheists will go in their denial of the supernatural. It doesn’t matter what proof you offer. They are close minded. There being no God, there cannot possibly be any miracles. Case closed. What seem to some to be miracles, in time will be proven to be natural events.

You know, like the Big Bang.
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I’m curious to hear what about my post you think is absurd.

I’m also a bit troubled to hear that you think I have gone to some “length” to explain the alleged prophecy. My explanation boils down to pointing out that it’s nonspecific and inaccurate. In other words, this prophecy is essentially the same as every other prophecy from Nostradamus to Cayce.
 
Charlemagne_II said:
The last two posts only show to what absurd extent atheists will go in their denial of the supernatural. It doesn’t matter what proof you offer. They are close minded. There being no God, there cannot possibly be any miracles. Case closed. What seem to some to be miracles, in time will be proven to be natural events.

You know, like the Big Bang.
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A person who disagrees with you is not absurd. They simply disagree. We do not deny the supernatural, we simply disagree with you that it exists. To deny something, is to recognize it exists in the first place. This is illogical.

Why, do religious people have such a difficult time realizing that those who have access to the same information they do, may actually draw different conclusions?

This is not absurd, its human nature . We alway’s disagree, given the same information…because we as humans are unique and different. Nothing wrong with that.

Are we all absurd?
 
what about the dozens of convergent prophecies in Scripture? written over millenia by men who didnt know eachother, live in the same places or times, yet they came true in Christ. there are so many, and many of them are very specific, the mathematical odds against such a thing are astronomical.

the corollary being that the possibility of coincedence, is vanishingly tiny, unless your going to claim it was all faked after the fact, but then thats going to take massive amounts of evidence. not just assertion and supposition.

they make Christianity unique, no other faith has this pattern of prophecies fulfilled. it is after all why so many believed that Christ was the Messiah.
 
warpspeedpetey said:
what about the dozens of convergent prophecies in Scripture? written over millenia by men who didnt know eachother, live in the same places or times, yet they came true in Christ. there are so many, and many of them are very specific, the mathematical odds against such a thing are astronomical.

the corollary being that the possibility of coincedence, is vanishingly tiny, unless your going to claim it was all faked after the fact, but then thats going to take massive amounts of evidence. not just assertion and supposition.

they make Christianity unique, no other faith has this pattern of prophecies fulfilled. it is after all why so many believed that Christ was the Messiah.
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I disagree with your assessment of the odds. There is nothing at all extraordinary about the supposed “prophecies” of the Bible, either individually or collectively.
 
Well, the conditions for a prophet are not simply foretelling the future and it coming true. You must claim that God came to you and said that this is what would happen, and your claims can never once fail to be happen exactly as foretold.

There are a variety of various causes for different seemingly bizarre foresight or past sight.

For instance, people spent many years believing that they were having dreams of past lives and still do. But now we have evidence that memory patterns CAN be genetically inherited and these seemingly realistic dreams of past lives are actually distorted memory patterns inherited from your ancestors, which IS somewhat chilling because if that is proven to be the case, then what that tells us is that these dreams really are a window in to the past and be used to give us incredible insight in to day to day life hundreds or even thousands of years ago. That’s if it can ever be proven.

Regarding foresight and the like, I am actually quite familiar with this as I have Shaman blood in me and am a legitimate psychic. That said, psychic abilities, like Dyslexia, is a highly misunderstood capability, depicted as something extraordinary and almost supernatural when the truth is much more down to earth, in my case, mostly being able to pick up on what people are feeling much more then the average Joe. It’s sort of like how you get when you can feel that someone is near but you can’t see or hear them. For me, that sense is significantly stronger then the average Joe. I really can pick up on people’s senses and how they are feeling, but I cannot read minds like psychics are said to be able to do.

How exactly it works is still a bit of a mystery but the theory is that the Aura, which contrary to many new age goof balls, is entirely physical, being an energy field which can be effected by one’s PHYSICAL emotional responses, which in turn, can be picked up on. Again, we all experience this. For guys like myself, the censorship is just very strong.

Anyway, being able to pick up on that strongly can be an extremely powerful tool in being able to predict what people are going to do, not just on an individual scale, but you can come to understand the patterns well enough to have great insight in to how people will behave on larger scales. I think the main reason is because you have better insight in to what behaviors and signs are more consistent with people’s real feeling then what the average Joe sees. If you take the cases of the TV shows: “Lie to Me” and “The Mentalist” it’s more or less the use of the same nature of methods to foresee the future, or basically predict what people are going to do based on their behaviors and what not. Any one of us can predict that if you go up to some black homeboy in the ghetto and call him the “N” word to his face, you are going to get assaulted. We can predict that through pure logic. The same can be done at a much more intricate scale and on much larger scales. This is entirely a matter of understanding people and people’s behaviors and use of logic to foresee the future, but it can easily be mistaken for and even sold as genuine spiritual insight in to the future when it’s being done by someone who is known for their ability to pick up on other people’s senses much more then normal.

There are also some hoaxes out there which follow the fortune cookie trick. Foretelling the future in such broad context that it’s hard for it to NOT come true.

Now, getting away from all the party tricks and moving on to the real thing, there really are some phenomenons out there from foreign religions in which people have predicted the future centuries in advance and the future having come to pass in a way that seams too bizarre to be pure luck, but we can also suggest that the people who did this were not always good people and the sources of their foretelling of the future maybe not being exactly the source you want to be on good terms with.

For instance, perhaps some of you have herd of Tamerlane? For those who haven’t, he was the king of Samarkand in the 1300s and a decedent of Genghis Khan by marriage. What’s more, he’s the guy who really made the psychological warfare tactic of holding someone down and sawing their head off really popular in the east, and he was not doing an occasional “Nick Berg” stunt. This guy was marching in to towns and villages and had whole rows of men systematically beheaded this way in front of their families and it would seam that his psychological warfare tactics may have had some strong influence on European barbarianism as one of his strong military allies (Mircea Cel Mare pronounced: “mEEr-cheo chel mo-re” with a rolled “r”) was Vlad the Impaler’s grandfather. Vlad the Impaler’s infamous Timpa Hill massacre was executed in a similar fashion, though less organized and less brutal (since they were hacked up rather then slowly decapitated) if you can believe that. There is a famous woodcut that many of you have undoubtedly seen which depicts the event. Google search for: “Vlad the Impaler” and you’ll find it quickly.

The bottom line is that this guy was a sick puppy.

In his death bed, he said that those who disturbed his tomb would face a wrath far worse then his ever was. In 1941, the Soviet Union excavated his tomb. We all know what happened to them that year (shortly after the excavation. Does that make Tamerlane a prophet of the creator? Well, no. As crazy as it may sound, his barbaric behavior is not what we should be looking at. What we need to be looking at is the source of his predictions, how many he made and if any ever failed to happen. In his case, he never claimed that anything he foresaw was shown or told to him by God.

When you look at the prophets of the old testament, we see a very clear picture. They did not beat around the bush. They made the record very clear that God came to them and either told them of future events or showed them to the prophets, and consequently, they have all come to pass exactly as predicted, except for those speaking of the last days, in which case the time for the prophecies to be fulfilled has not come yet.

For someone like myself, the importance of prophecy isn’t knowing what will happen in the future, but reassurance that the people giving the prophecies are no fakes and no joke, and what they say about afterlife and what you need to be doing is true.

When it comes to betting eternity on something, I would much rather go with sources like that then someone who had a good moment, or got his information from a source who is not your friend, such as the “other team.”
 
hatsoff

I*n other words, this prophecy is essentially the same as every other prophecy from Nostradamus to Cayce. *

How would you know this for a fact? Have you read all the prohecies? Have you read all of Isaac Newton’s studies of OT and NT prophecies? Why would you put his interpretation of the ancient prohecies in the same fallacious categories as “every other prophecy from Nostradamus to Cayce”?

Which ones?
 
Charlemagne_II said:
The last two posts only show to what absurd extent atheists will go in their denial of the supernatural. It doesn’t matter what proof you offer. They are close minded. There being no God, there cannot possibly be any miracles. Case closed. What seem to some to be miracles, in time will be proven to be natural events.

You know, like the Big Bang.
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That is true. The possiblity of miracles is denied before the evidence is evaluated. Then, a decision follows to not even bother investigating any miracles since it is already concluded that there are no miracles and none have ever occurred.

There is a very thick book by Joan Cruz on the Miracles of Catholic saints
Mysteries, Marvels, Miracles In the Lives of the Saints

There are hundreds of documented miracles.
 
Charlemagne_II said:
hatsoff

I*n other words, this prophecy is essentially the same as every other prophecy from Nostradamus to Cayce. *

How would you know this for a fact? Have you read all the prohecies? Have you read all of Isaac Newton’s studies of OT and NT prophecies? Why would you put his interpretation of the ancient prohecies in the same fallacious categories as “every other prophecy from Nostradamus to Cayce”?

Which ones?
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I’ve looked over several dozen so-called “prophecies,” the bulk of which are Biblical. I don’t remember them all. But I have kept a tally of how many prophecies turned out to be demonstrably genuine upon close examination: zero.

Based not only on this unambiguous trend, which commands much inductive power on its own, but more importantly on the failure of any prophecy in history to withstand the skepticism of professional inquiry at large, I have tentatively concluded that divine prophecy is a myth.
 
hatsoff said:
I’ve looked over several dozen so-called “prophecies,” the bulk of which are Biblical. I don’t remember them all. But I have kept a tally of how many prophecies turned out to be demonstrably genuine upon close examination: zero.

Based not only on this unambiguous trend, which commands much inductive power on its own, but more importantly on the failure of any prophecy in history to withstand the skepticism of professional inquiry at large, I have tentatively concluded that divine prophecy is a myth.
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the pure math of the situation and the large number of prophecies are impossible to ignore. there are simply to many specific prophecies to dismiss out of hand. only a few need be true to make our point.
 
To the OP,
I appreciate what you are trying to do, but you’re wasting your keystrokes.
During all of the years I spent as an atheist, talk of miracles, big or little, well-known, or local, just made me roll my eyes and shut my ears.
If you don’t believe God exists, you certainly won’t believe that He would miraculously heal little Timmy’s brain tumor.
🤷
That’s simply not the proof they are looking for.
And, to be honest, I LOVE the Catholic Church, and I’m still not too moved by people’s private revelations.
Just my nickel… (I adjust for inflation)
 
(I am the OP of this thread)

There is a house in my family. Family members and I have experienced everything from things flying across the room, to levitation, to apparitions, and it was common knowledge within my family for about 30 or so years. The reason why we keep it a secret is because people mock these sorts of things. At least on here I am anonymous! Now when people say they saw a ghost, instead of reverting to my narrow-minded atheism/materialism of before, I show dignity and respect and I listen to what they have to say!

I was an atheist. I found comfort and security in it. But now, since I have personally experienced the supernatural, I know beyond any doubt it exists.

The skeptics talk a big game, but if they ever experienced something like what I did, I know they would run for the door, leaving nothing behind except for a trail of smoke!
 
warpspeedpetey said:
the pure math of the situation and the large number of prophecies are impossible to ignore. there are simply to many specific prophecies to dismiss out of hand. only a few need be true to make our point.
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You are welcome to believe the prophecies are “true” and “specific,” but I can see for myself that they are no such thing.
 
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