More Random Irreligious Thoughts

* Imagine the following: Destroy every religious text of any persuasion in existence; eliminate every religious institution; sack anyone involved in organised religion (or even disorganised religion); purge the name of any and every deity ever proposed, and then for good measure wipe clean the memories of every person with respect to anything and everything to do with religion in any shape, manner or form. Let’s turn the entirety of humanity into a flock of another kind, just like real sheep who presumably have no concept of all the sorts of things religions go on, and on, and on about.

Firstly, that would make for a much more peaceful planet, but that’s not my real point here. If the human race all of a sudden had no inkling of religion and associated rituals like prayer, deities, and thou shall nots, and miracles, and associated baggage - the slate wiped clean – would we invent it all over again and if so would it all be in the same old form as we know it now?

All of our religions cannot possibly be correct, but all of them could be wrong. Assuming that’s the case, could there be out there a really bona-fide god or gods – supernatural deities – with some sort of associated baggage that we have no comprehension of? Say these hypothetical supernatural entities have never made contact with Planet Earth.

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* Why is religion (and history too for that matter) so popular vis-à-vis say science or economics. Religion (and history) is told in story form and we’re natural born story tellers and recipients of say bedtime stories. Whole bookstores and libraries are filled with variations of “once upon a time” “they lived happy ever after”. There are multi-tens of thousands of movies and TV shows that play upon our need for stories. So that’s one reason. Another reason that religion is so popular is that it comes as a package deal. All the Big Questions (is there a God, your purpose, the meaning of life, free will, your soul, an afterlife, etc.) are wrapped up together in a nice box with a lovely pink ribbon. Reject religion, reject the pretty box of answers to your Big Questions, and you have to actually do some hard intellectual yakka to find out your own answers to those questions, individually, one at a time. So most take the easy road, the package deal, instead of striking out on their own, seeking their own intellectual answers come what may.

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* In May of 2013, the current Pope (as noted on the “Huffington Post”) said that atheists were okay for salvation and a place in heaven providing they had lived the sort of life that God intended. Alas, the very next day a spokesperson for the Vatican refuted that – no way can an atheist get on the good side. Well, so much for papal infallibility! It really is all so phoney – an absolute joke. 

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* Miracles (if they exist) are God’s correction fluid (whiteout) – assuming God exists. If existence is affirmed on both counts that actually makes a mockery of an all-knowing, all-powerful supernatural deity since it would have been logical and preferable to have set in train the necessary conditions that would have negated the need for a later miracle. For example, don’t bother to raise the dead; rather ensure they don’t snuff it in the first place!

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* Despite many references in the Bible of God talking to someone, Adam and Eve, Cain, Jacob, Jonah, Moses, etc. we never get an actual description of what God looks like. He speaks in a cloud or as a burning bush. All images of God, artworks, are of the human imagination. So, what did God really look like and why was He ashamed to actually show His face (something true unto this very day). Perhaps God doesn’t want to be seen because He was starkers – absolutely naked – and perhaps, assuming some mortal actually saw God, well no one dares mention the ‘emperor’ who has no clothes. If humans were made in God’s image, and God was ashamed of His nudity (as Adam and Eve were ashamed of there lack of clothing post their nibbling on a forbidden snack), then perhaps that accounts for our reluctance in most public environments to show off our birthday suits.

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* If you’re really honest about things, what’s THE most important wish list part or objective or goal or aspect of your life? Is it money? Is it power? Is it reputation? Is it winning the Nobel Prize? Is it success? Is it having the most perfect family? Is it pitching a perfect major league ballgame? Is it becoming POTUS, or perhaps Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? Is it (fill in the blank)? No! More likely as not, your number one priority it is NOT DIEING! Well good luck with that ‘cause it ain’t gonna happen.

So, what’s the next best objective? An afterlife! Why? What’s really annoying about snuffing it is lose of consciousness. The idea that your consciousness that you spent a lifetime building up from scratch will just dissolve into grey goo to be consumed by bacteria is pretty abhorrent. If you have an afterlife, the minimum you must retain is consciousness or self-awareness. You may still be old and grey and can’t get it up; you may not have access to alcohol and tobacco and other similar addictions; you may only get TV reruns and old magazine issues to read; you favourite pizza may not be on the menu; you may even have to share your afterlife with your ex-boss, or your ex or your in-laws, others you’d rather not share anything with or be within ten miles (or kilometres) of; in short not everything will be just hunky-dory, but at least you’ll retain your consciousness for all eternity (and be bored witless even before the first several thousand years or so passes by). Is that a price you are willing to pay?

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* There are many, probably a majority of the population, who will claim to have had some sort of up close and personal experience with God, or Jesus, or angels, or some sort of supernatural entity. They will of course use that very personal experience as not only evidence, but proof that God, etc. exists. And it is extremely difficult to counter argue their conviction based on their experience. However, I too have had an intense up close and personal experience too, but one which I’m sure shows that these sort of profound spiritual experiences are some combination of wishful thinking (a desire to believe) and mental hallucinations. 

Now like many hundreds of thousands, even millions of people, I like to put out food for wild birds, especially in environmentally stressful times like winter or during a drought. Over the course of many years, I’ve had thousands of visitations – what bird is going to turn down an easy free feed? At the end of the day, there’s usually some cleanup to be done like sweeping up all the leftover birdseed husks, etc. And so it came to pass one early evening, I was waiting for two birds to finish up before I did the daily cleanup. And in due course they flew off, up over my roof. And so I went outside to start the cleanup, but there sitting on the apex of the roof were the two birds. As I looked up at them, they looked back at me, and for some inexplicable reason, I received a telepathic message from the two birds: “thanks for all the food; we’ll be back tomorrow”. And then they flew off. It was so real an experience that I just stood there stunned, in fact so moving was that experience, so bonding was that human-animal encounter that tears immediately started welling up in me.   

This was the first and only time I ever had such a vivid even spiritual feeling that remains as vivid and as spiritual now as it did seconds after the fact. But clearly I was imagining the whole thing. Birds cannot speak the human language. Telepathy doesn’t exist far less exist between birds and humans. Birds probably have no concept of being given a gift and thus no mental concept of giving thanks.

So yes, when someone says they had an up close and personal encounter with God (or equivalent), I’m sure that they are 100% sincere and a believer. But I’m equally convinced it’s a case, as was mine with the two birds, of self-deception.

The ‘Miracle of the Sun’ at Fatima (1917)

UFOs aren’t anything new. In fact, if my premise is correct, that the polytheistic gods (including the monotheistic God) were not deities but extraterrestrials (‘ancient astronauts’) then their aerial and sometimes fiery chariots so often referred to in mythology were nothing but shuttlecraft out of their mother-ships or star-ships – what we might now term UFOs. For a possible example, consider a tale from Portugal in 1917, a tale of the dancing Sun.

Mythologies are full of events that could be interpreted, if they happened instead within the last six plus decades, as a UFO event. The ‘Star of Bethlehem’ and ‘Wheel of Ezekiel’ are both cases in point from Biblical mythology. Many of the mythological ‘gods’ or characters rode around in aerial or fiery chariots, perhaps akin to what was seen at Fatima in 1917. A UFO chariot by any other name is still a UFO chariot even if by 1917 no one interprets unknown flying (or dancing) lights in the sky as actual ‘chariots’. On the other hand, the phrases ‘unidentified flying objects’ or ‘flying saucers’ weren’t yet in vogue. So post ‘chariot’ mythology, yet pre our modern UFO era, we have neither ‘chariots’ nor ‘flying saucers’ but perhaps a dancing Sun. 

Okay, so we have possible Biblical, therefore religious, UFOs associated with Ezekiel (that ‘Wheel’), the Birth of Christ (‘Star’ of Bethlehem), Jonah (inside the belly of the UFO), and Joshua (who was provided some additional illumination by some UFOs). Another classic and more plausible UFO event in a religious context was the so-called ‘miracle of the Sun’ which occurred on 13 October 1917 near Fatima in Portugal.

As the story goes and unfolds, we have three children out mucking about in the fields doing your typical child thing (actually they were herding sheep) when behold they receive a vision of a lovely lady in May 1917 who is reputed to be the Virgin Mary. They receive all sorts of wondrous messages and prophecies from her as well as being required to do rituals of prayer and penance and all those other things required of the faithful.  Of course who is going to take the word of three kids regarding their visions which kept repeating monthly like a stuck LP? It takes a little while, a while which also included some rather brutal treatment of the kids at the hands of officialdom, but the kids finally convince their elders and Doubting Thomas’s that they aren’t pulling pranks and are really telling the God’s honest truth! But, to put the matter to rest, a miracle was promised by the Virgin Mary (otherwise called ‘Our Lady of Fatima’) as related by those three young children to occur on that date – the 13^th of October noted above – at High Noon (if I recall correctly).

Of course a large and expectant crowd gathered on the commons to witness whatever miracle was about to unfold. Although the weather on the day was petty wet, just in time the Sun broke through the thinning overcast clouds and made an appearance. The gathered crowd, some 30,000 to 100,000 in number (the usual figure is given as roughly 70,000) saw some highly unusual luminous phenomena. Witnesses spoke of the Sun appearing to change colors, rotate like a wheel, and do zigzags and in general perform an aerial version of the tango. Now a key point being here those witnesses were able to actually look directly with no discomfort at the Sun – if Sun it was.

Now not everyone saw the same things, and witnesses gave widely varying descriptions of the ‘Sun's dance’. Not all witnesses reported in fact seeing the Sun ‘dance’. Some people only saw the radiant colors, and others, including some believers, saw nothing at all. The phenomenon (in various guises) however was claimed to have been witnessed by most people in the crowd as well as by people many miles away.

However, and why is this of little surprise, no movement or other phenomenon of the Sun was registered by scientists at the time. Since scientists observed no actual movement of the Sun; since it was a generally overcast day, it’s probable the witnesses to the ‘Sun dance’ and the changing of the colors, wasn’t the real Sun at all but was a bona-fide UFO, making an appearance on schedule to bring credibility to the prophecy, the kids and the apparently supernatural nature of the Virgin Mary apparition.

Since it’s blatantly clear that a ‘dancing Sun’ is a violation of celestial physics some other explanation(s) have to be advanced to account for what happened. Could it have been a UFO?

Here are your options: 1) A Supernatural God, on behalf of His favourite girl, the Virgin Mary, works a miracle and allows a whole lot of people to watch the Sun do cartwheels in defiance of celestial physics; 2) There was no such event in reality and witnesses were smoking a bit too much of the good stuff - the option any sane betting person would take except it’s hard to discount 70,000 eyewitnesses and the many statements attesting to the event which are on the public record; 3) the story has some sort of foundation, in which case the violation of basic celestial physics – the Sun doesn’t and can’t dance in the sky - was only apparent and had to have been something else. Sceptics suggest it was anything from mass hallucinations/wishful thinking, to false images caused by staring at the real Sun to an optical phenomenon called a mock sun or sundog (though that would be a hell of a coincidence). But, perhaps that something else, had it been post-June 1947, might have been termed a UFO.  

One cautionary note which is probably not overly relevant but for what it’s worth, I’ve been briefly fooled on two separate occasions by an optical illusion caused by a combination of a rapidly moving overcast or broken cloud cover and a stationary light source. In the first case, the disc of the Sun was just barely visible through the rapidly moving overcast. The second case involved stars seen through a rapidly moving broken cloud cover. The illusion is that you can fool yourself into thinking that it’s the cloud cover that’s stationary, and, in my two cases, the disc and the stars that were actually moving. The probable flaws here as Fatima explanations is that the illusion provides linear motion not erratic movements; you quickly realise your error when it’s obvious you’re watching what you think is a rapidly moving object yet the position/tilt of your head doesn’t shift at all, even after several minutes, thereby confirming that the object wasn’t moving at all.   

But wait, there’s more! In addition to the Sun doing a zigzag tango, apparently all the rather (just before the big event) wet to the core witnesses and the rather soggy and muddy ground near instantly dried up as the celestial show unfolded! Since not even the real Sun can dry out all things drenched in a matter of minutes, something else must have been afoot. If the ‘big dry’ is true, and many so claim it to be, that’s got to rule out hallucinations, false images and mock suns/sundogs.

There’s actually way, way more to the Fatima story than just the original visions of the three children leading up to the ‘miracle of the Sun’ event. For example there are the three secrets of Fatima, prophecies and visions that were given to the children by Our Lady of Fatima, a.k.a. the Virgin Mary. Unfortunately, two of the original children who witnessed the original apparition died shortly after the original events of influenza; the third went on to becoming a nun, only passing away in 2005. These prophesies, the first two released in 1941, had things to do with visions of hell; Russia and the world wars, while the third has been shrouded in controversy, is a major topic in its own right, but falls well outside the point of this essay, as does the relationship between various popes and the entire Fatima story. Needless to say that third secret may, or may not have been released by the Catholic Church depending on your bent towards conspiracy theories.  

That entire chapter aside, the other interesting bit was that it was widely tipped, a prediction apparently made by ‘Our Lady of Fatima’ back in 1917 that there would be some sort of super-duper light show in the sky just prior to the start of another great war. Well, make of that what you will, but a super-duper aurora borealis, the likes of which hadn’t been seen since 1709, took place on 25 January 1938. Hitler the of course strutted his stuff in Austria a month later and the rest, as they say, is history.

As another aside, the events were depicted in a 1952 feature film titled “The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima”. It was promoted as a factually-based treatment of the events surrounding the apparitions of Our Lady of Fatima to the three children which kick-started off the subsequent events in 1917. A more recent retelling was the 2009 film “The 13^th Day”.