“On July 1st, 1995, I visited THE Virgen of Guadalupe in Medellin, Extremadura, SPAIN, the one that CORTEZ introduced to Mexico”
So, are you under the impression that the one in Spain somehow *outranks* the one in Mexico?
“we asked the priest when the ‘last miracle’ was performed. He laughed. He said it’s not real.”
It’s a sad thing, but some of the enemies of the Church are clergy. A priest who has no faith like that remains a priest only to attack the faith of others.
“Sorry, people see UFO’S and believe in them, others the tooth fairy.”
Really? You have heard a rational, sober adult advance a serious claim to have seen the tooth fairy? I think you’re engaging in hyperbole. Nothing wrong with that, per se, but in this case your logic is seriously faulty.
The only syllogism one can derive from that sentence is, “People sometimes claim to have seen things that don’t exist. Therefore, God doesn’t exist.”
Let me pose a couple of questions.
If there were a God, capable of creating the universe, all that is seen and unseen, wouldn’t He be capable of devising some means to communicate His existence to His creatures? And to communicate it unmistakeably, beyond confusion with delusion or hallucination, in such a way that rationality wouldn’t allow the communication to be dismissed?
If that were true, what would one expect to see? (This is just off the cuff here; it’s not meant to be exhaustive.)
1. Multiple reports of such experiences.
2. Commonalities and similarities among these reports.
3. Consistency with what we already know of God.
4. The communication during these reported experiences of information that was not or could not have been obtained through ordinary means.
5. A remarkable lack of anger or indignation when the communicatee is mocked or accused of lying and insanity. (This would be rare, at least in the West today, as most people who have had such experiences do not choose to discuss them with skeptics.)
Skeptics often assert that, because no human being can prove the existence of God to them, God’s non-existence is proved.
They seem not to consider that God can demonstrate His own existence to anyone He chooses, or that rejecting that assertion without sufficient examination is no more scientific or rational than belief in the Tooth Fairy.
“Believe what you want.”
You may believe what you want, if that suits you. Rational, intelligent, educated adults try to believe what experience and knowledge show to be true.
In “Orthodoxy,” G. K. Chesterton wrote, “If I am asked, as a purely intellectual question, why I believe in Christianity, I can only answer, ‘For the same reason that an intelligent agnostic disbelieves in Christianity.’ I believe in it quite rationally upon the evidence. But the evidence in my case, as in that of the intelligent agnostic, is not really in this or that alleged demonstration; it is in an enormous accumulation of small but unanimous facts...I can only say that my evidences for Christianity are of the same vivid but varied kind as his evidences against it. For when I look at these various anti-Christian truths, I simply discover that none of them are true. I discover that the true tide and force of all the facts flows the other way. Let us take cases...”
G. K. Chesterton’s writings are available for download at no cost.
Truth is often lost in poor translation. The priest was probably indicating that this particular image is not the real one. The authentic image is in Mexico. That is the AUTHENTIC image.
Rovenstinez, did you watch the program? It was filled with scientific facts.