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May 28, 2023·edited May 28, 2023

The religious are moved by the sight of a well-preserved religious corpse but have no feeling whatsoever for a 10-year-old girl who needed to travel across state lines to get an abortion after being raped and impregnated.

The religious are seriously screwed up.

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J.P. Richardson a.k.a Big Bopper was exhumed in 2007, at the request of his son, to give answer to the theory that he might have initially survived the plane crash and walked 40 feet away from the wreckage (x-rays determined broken and fractured bones that he did not). He was found to be remarkably preserved with a slightly purplish color to his skin. So St. Bopper, patron saint of rock it is.. 😄

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There is a perfectly plausible explanation for this "miracle". The church will downplay that as much as possible to keep the gullible believing, and to deflect from the almost daily revelations of abuse.

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I know it's really obtuse of me, but I don't quite understand how a body covered with a layer of mold qualifies ans "incorrupt." Did the same God who supposedly kept everything else about the corpse intact forget to notify the moldiverse, or what? If I found a piece of cheese in my refrigerator covered with mold and cheese mites, I wouldn't assume it was still edible. I'd toss it in the trash as fast as I could. If I found a slice of bread covered with green fungus, it would go into the trash too, in a heartbeat. The trash. That's where virtually everything about the goddamned Catholic church, the institution built on human ignorance and gullibility, belongs

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““We think she is the first African American woman to be found incorrupt,” said Mother Cecilia, the abbess for the monastery, to Catholic News Agency…

…For its part, the Church has not yet declared this a miracle.“

I wonder why the church hasn’t declared it yet?

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About 25 years ago there was a small church in the Sierra Nevada mountains that had a Genuine miracle of the Virgin Mary. Every afternoon, a pattern of lights would appear on the wall of the church. People saw without a doubt that it was the Virgin Mary appearing in this church. They came from miles around to witness the miracle. I remember one woman saying, “it is the Virgin Mary, and her message is world peace.” (shades of Fatima). The local bishop, being unwilling to either authenticate the miracle or deny it, covered his ass beautifully and came up with the classic from, I think, Thomas Aquinas. "for those who believe, no explanation is necessary. For those who don’t believe, no explanation as possible.”

Except, of course, that wasn’t true either. They actually sought out an explanation. They called in a scientist to find the source of this miracle, if it could be found. (If they called in a photographer like myself, it would’ve taken me about five minutes and a long stick to disapprove the “miracle”). The scientist was unable to find the source of the miracle, but he did say that it was reflection or refraction from some unknown source, and would probably not appear on the first cloudy day.

Guess what? On the first cloudy day, and on every cloudy day thereafter, the virgin failed to make her appearance. Moreover, later in the year, when the sun changed its position, the virgin stopped making her appearance. So much for that miracle. Science, real science, disproved what faith simply assumed.

The standard of proof for this miracle was apallingly low. All there really was, was the need for people to believe in a miracle, in order to "validate" their faith, but actually INVALIDATING it. It's not faith any more, but faith that has been "proved" to be true. They want it both ways.

At the same time, they really don’t want it both ways. They have no explanation why the Virgin Mary would appear as a pattern of lights on the wall in the church, or why she would appear to three illiterate peasant children when Lisbon, worldwide press, and universities were just a few miles away, something that would actually prove her existence and the truth of their faith and theology. Repeating myself, at the same time, they really don’t want it both ways. They have absolutely silly stuff like a single communion wafer turning into heart tissue with a ridiculously low standard of proof, when it would be relatively simple to turn a whole pile of them into heart tissue, Right in front of all of those atheist scientists, easily replicable to unlimited "atheist scientists", thus convincing the entire world that the Christian story is true. But that has NEVER happened, has it, because god needs to "test our faith". Why he needs to test our faith is never explained, and Real proof is never forthcoming. They would be upset if it did, because that takes the magic away from your faith.

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Laying her out in the open and letting gawkers touch her is a sure-fire way to preserve her. /s

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Something I've been told more than once is that the body of the deceased is, in many cases, lasting longer thanks to the number of preservatives most people are eating every day. I'm not entirely sure that's really true, but it certainly seems plausible, doesn't it?

This is one of those issues that exists mostly because people (including me) don't want to talk about it for the most part. We all know we won't live forever, but we don't want to think about what might happen to our remains after we die. It's normal. I will say I feel like the RCC is using that unwillingness to talk or think about the issue to its advantage, though, since most folks have no idea how long a body takes to become skeletonized. They'll eventually decide this is a miracle, canonize Sister Wilhelmina, and then talk endlessly about how wonderful it is a woman of color stands among the saints now. Considering they sainted Mother Theresa, I'm not sure that's much of an honor to speak of.

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I was force-fed Catholicism from birth but as time passed, and I got some separation from my family, I came to the realization I am simply not wired for the kind of magical thinking religion requires, let alone Catholicism. Remove the magical thinking and special pleading from Christianity, and very little remains.

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"Mary, Queen of the Apostles"?!?! Huh? Where the fuck do Catholics get all their dippy (but impressively holy sounding) terminology? (It's been a while since I read the bible, but I'm pretty sure there's nothing in it about the apostles having a queen--or wanting one.) Then again, I guess if you have the kind of mind that's impressed with preposterous neologisms like "incorrupt"when we already have the perfectly good word "uncorrupted," coming up with piffle like "Mary, Queen of the Apostles" must be duck soup.

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Taking kids to see a corpse? No problem.

Calling a kid by zir preferred pronoun? Outrageous!

(FWIW, I don’t have a problem with a kid seeing a corpse either, depending upon the situation. This situation? Not so much.)

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Mabye a better miracle would've been for her not to have died at all? What if they never needed to exhume her? How they believe this shit is beyond me.

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Obviously, they remembered to burp the seal.

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I guess Sister Wilhelmina will be the centerfold in the next issue of Play Necrophile.

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Interesting, at least. Paramahansa Yogananda, author of Autobiography of a Yogi, was alleged to have had similar observations about his body after his death in 1952. Whether his body was examined by independent observers or not, I don't know, and in that day and in India, it is far more likely that such an occurrence would be treated as a "miracle." In THIS day and age, I would sincerely hope that someone would insist on a dispassionate analysis of the body and the circumstances surrounding the nun's burial and exhumation.

Still, I think we can depend on the RCC to ignore science and scream "MIRACLE" at the top of their lungs.

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