St. Juan Diego's tilma: "completely outside" science

DeaconsBench ^ | Monday August 24, 2009 | Beliefnet/Deacon's Bench

[Salvation]

St. Juan Diego's tilma: "completely outside" science

Monday August 24, 2009

Take a look:

A physicist who has spent years researching the tilma bearing the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe is affirming that there is no scientific explanation for the phenomenon.

Adolfo Orozco stated this in a presentation given at an International Marian Congress that took place Aug. 6-8 in Phoenix.

The congress, sponsored by the Knights of Columbus, the Phoenix Diocese and the Institute of Guadalupan Studies, was dedicated to Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Orozco gave a presentation on the image of the Virgin imprinted on St. Juan Diego's tilma, stating that it is "completely outside" any scientific explanation.

He explained that due to the humid, salty environment around the basilica where the tilma is kept in Mexico City, the cloak material should have decomposed years ago.

In fact, the researcher noted, this is what happened to a painted copy of the image that was made in 1789, on a material similar to the original tilma.

Although the copy was preserved behind glass, like the original, it had to be discarded eight years later because it was falling apart and the painting was fading, the physicist reported.

The original image, however, which was imprinted on the cloak when the Blessed Virgin appeared to the saint, remains intact after 478 years.

Orozco told his audience that this phenomenon is heightened by the fact that it should have been destroyed twice, once when nitric acid was accidentally spilled on a section of the cloth, and another time when a bomb exploded close to it.

He affirmed that there is no natural explanation for how the image has survived undamaged through time and potentially destructive events such as these.

[MarkBsnr]

You wish it were true.

Reality is true. Straddling the fence will only result in pain in some rather tender spots. Our Lord and Saviour is not going to look kindly at the Judaizers - Acts will bear me out in this.

[Alamo-Girl]

I'm glad to hear you are reading Enoch! Please let me know your impressions when you can.

One thing I am recently coming to realize is that even though, by God's grace, I see a lot of the puzzle, (maybe not as much as my brother in Christ master puzzle builder Quix does) I will never see it all. That is OK! I do not know but, Thank God, God knows. It is so cool! The only thing that matters is faith IN our Lord Jesus Christ! The puzzle stuff, and wisdom in seeing it, only comes from God to those who are poor in Spirit to whomever God decides to reveal it to.

Well and truly said, dear brother in Christ!

Like you, I am content with knowing whatever He wants to reveal to me.

[mitch5501]

"The Book of Enoch (Enoch I) is written for the end times much like Revelation"

"...lost (and conveniently forgotten) for a thousand years. But with an uncanny persistence, the Book of Enoch found its way back into circulation two centuries ago."

"O my Lord, what shall be the end of these things? And he said, Go thy way, Daniel: for the words are closed up and sealed till the time of the end.Many shall be purified, and made white, and tried; but the wicked shall do wickedly: and none of the wicked shall understand; but the wise shall understand" (Daniel 12:8-10)

"But ye, brethren, are not in darkness, that that day should overtake you as a thief." (1 Thessalonians 5:4)

I read some of the book of Enoch many years ago and my first impression was that it looked as though someone had taken present day pre-trib escatology and tried to write it up to look like ancient scripture.

Dear FRiends,these times we live in are interesting to say the least.

Maranatha!

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so very much for the beautiful Scripture, dear mitch5501!

Indeed, commentators assumed that Enoch had been written after Christ's time on earth due to the apparent references to Herod, Christian phrasing, etc. But that was before the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, including fragments of copies of Enoch carbon dating to centuries B.C.

Maranatha, Jesus!!!

[Quix]

INDEED. INDEED.

PRAISE GOD FOR HIS FAITHFULNESS IN PROTECTING HIS TRUTHS.

. . . for those with eyes to see and ears to hear.

[esquirette]

Amazed. Thanks sister, for your posts.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for your encouragements, dear esquirette!

[betty boop]

Thank you ever so much, dearest sister in Christ, for your beautiful witness and testimony!

There are people who believe that such experiences as you have had are simply "subjective projections," which are held to be false in principle — since they cannot be put "under the lens" of the scientific method. I am of course speaking of materialists, positivists, atheists.

It cannot be entertained by such folks that you may be sensitive to impression by events transpiring in a realm transcendent to the 4D spacetime of "normal" experience. Which is to say that Reality is comprised of more dimensions than we are made aware of on the basis of direct sense perception/direct observation. It appears you sense the "vertical" or "volumetric" (one can also say "spiritual") extension of 4D spacetime that most people are utterly blind to.

All I can say is there are aspects of Reality that are accessible to the human mind only on the basis of inner perception and imagination. Because they are not directly accessible to sense perception is not "proof" of their non-existence.

Thank you so much for your beautiful and deeply moving essay/post, dearest sister in Christ!

[Alamo-Girl]

All I can say is there are aspects of Reality that are accessible to the human mind only on the basis of inner perception and imagination. Because they are not directly accessible to sense perception is not "proof" of their non-existence.

I very strongly agree, dearest sister in Christ!

Thank you oh so very much for your encouragements!

[narses]

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[narses]

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Freep-mail me to get on or off my pro-life and Catholic List:

Add me / Remove me

Please ping me to note-worthy Pro-Life or Catholic threads, or other threads of general interest.

[Not gonna take it anymore]

This is a very Americanized version of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

[stonehouse01]

Our Blessed Mother is not “a dead woman”. She is alive in heaven glorifying God and is free to come and go wherever she chooses, including visitng this earthly realm.

Mary’s appearances do not imply that the work of Christ on the cross is incomplete. This is a straw man premise; each event is separate and to juxtapose the two is arbitrary.

Heavenly time is mystical and not the same as linear earthly time; things can happen that seem “out of sequence” to us, but aren’t in God’s big picture.

[marbren]

Hi Alamo-Girl! Ok here goes. Now these questions are only speculation! I do not necessarily believe these questions and am just asking. Remember, I do not know but, Thank God, God knows. If anything is heresy let me know:

Are we all nephilim until we are born again In Our Lord Jesus Christ?

Do nephilim exist today?

In the past nephilim were giants. Do they manifest in new ways today like shape shifters?

If they exist today can we tell who they are?

How do we tell without judging?

Is the seed IOW sperm of man corrupt and the egg of woman not corrupt?

Are demons actually the wandering spirits of the dead flesh and offspring of the angles who left their domain before the flood?

[editor-surveyor]

>> “Are demons actually the wandering spirits of the dead flesh and offspring of the angles who left their domain before the flood?” <<

.
No!

Enoch stated plainly that they are the spirits of the offspring of the unions between human women and the “watchers.” (fallen ones)

The fallen ones are immortal, but their offspring are not.

[editor-surveyor]

>> “Our Blessed Mother is not “a dead woman”. She is alive in heaven glorifying God and is free to come and go wherever she chooses, including visitng this earthly realm.” <<

.
What comic book is that from?

Christopher Hitchins would have loved to have it in his library.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for your question, dear marbren!

I believe the root of the problem is in the Hebrew word nephilim which means "giant" and occurs in Genesis 6:4 in reference to the offspring of the Watcher-angels and mortal women and again in Numbers 13:33 in reference to Goliath and family.

Some assume that this means the offspring of the Watcher-angels and mortal women survived the Noah Flood. But they didn't:

And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man: All in whose nostrils [was] the breath of life, of all that [was] in the dry [land], died. - Genesis 7:21-22

As editor-surveyor replied, Enoch says that the offspring physically died in the Noah Flood but their spirits survived and continued to roam the earth as demons.

One of the Enoch manuscripts suggests that the Noah Flood was targeted to the destruction of the Watchers' children and the Watcher's influence on men. The Watchers had taught men such things as weaponry, warfare and cosmetics. In effect, that would entail the destruction of "civilization."

You might find it interesting in that science discovered evidence that all civilizations around the world were destroyed simultaneously. Of course they attribute it to comets - though IMHO, it points to the Noah Flood:

Comets and Disasters in the Bronze Age

At some time around 2300 BC, give or take a century or two, a large number of the major civilisations of the world collapsed, simultaneously it seems. The Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia, the Old Kingdom in Egypt, the Early Bronze Age civilisation in Israel, Anatolia and Greece, as well as the Indus Valley civilisation in India, the Hilmand civilisation in Afghanistan and the Hongshan Culture in China - the first urban civilisations in the world - all fell into ruin at more or less the same time. Why? …

Some decades ago, the hunt for clues passed largely into the hands of natural scientists. Concentrating on the earlier set of Bronze Age collapses, researchers began to find a range of evidence that suggested that natural causes rather than human actions, may have been initially responsible. There began to be talk of climate change, volcanic activity, and earthquakes - and some of this material has now found its way into standard historical accounts of the period.

Agreement, however, there has never been. Some researchers favoured one type of natural cause, others favoured another, and the problem remained that no single explanation appeared to account for all the evidence…. The hunt for natural causes for these human disasters began when the Frenchman Claude Schaeffer, one of the leading archaeologists of his time, published his book ‘Stratigraphie Comparee et Chronologie L’Asie Occidentale’ in 1948. Schaeffer analysed and compared the destruction layers of more than 40 archaeological sites in the Near and Middle East, from Troy to Tepe Hissar on the Caspian Sea and from the Levant to Mesopotamia. He was the first scholar to detect that all had been totally destroyed several times in the Early, Middle and Late Bronze Age, apparently simultaneously.

Since the damage was far too excessive and did not show signs of military or human involvement, he argued that repeated earthquakes might have been responsible for these events. At the time he published, Schaeffer was not taken seriously by the world of archaeology. Since then, however, natural scientists have found widespread and unambiguous evidence for abrupt climate change, sudden sea level changes, catastrophic inundations, widespread seismic activity and evidence for massive volcanic activity at several periods since the last Ice Age, but particularly at around 2200BC, give or take 200 years.

Areas such as the Sahara, or around the Dead Sea, were once farmed but became deserts. Tree rings show disastrous growth conditions at c 2350BC, while sediment cores from lakes and rivers in Europe and Africa show a catastrophic drop in water levels at this time. In Mesopotamia, vast areas of land appear to have been devastated, inundated, or totally burned...

Yet what was the cause of these earthquakes, eruptions, tidal waves, fire-blasts and climate changes? By the late 1970s, British astronomers Victor Clube and Bill Napier of Oxford University had begun to investigate cometary impact as the ultimate cause. Then in 1980, the Nobel prizewinning physicist Luis Alvarez and his colleagues published their famous paper in ‘Science’ that argued that a cosmic impact had led to the extinction of the dinosaurs.. He showed that large amounts of the element iridium present in geological layers dating from about 65 million BC had a cosmic origin. Alvarez’s paper had immense influence and stimulated further research by such British astronomers as Clube and Napier, Prof Mark Bailey of the Armagh Observatory, Duncan Steel of Spaceguard Australia, and Britain’s best known astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle. All now support the theory of cometary impact and loosely form what is now known as the British School of Coherent Catastrophism.

These scholars envisage trains of cometary debris which repeatedly encounter the Earth. We know that tiny particles of cosmic material penetrate the atmosphere every day, but their impact is insignificant.

Occasionally, however, cosmic debris measuring between one and several hundred metres in diametre strike the Earth and these can have catastrophic effects on our ecological system, through multimegaton explosions of fireballs which destroy natural and cultural features on the surface of the Earth by means of tidal-wave floods (if the debris lands in the sea), fire blasts and seismic damage…

The extent to which past cometary impacts were responsible for civilisation collapse, cultural change, even the development of religion, must remain a hypothesis. But in view of the astronomical, geological and archaeological evidence, this ‘giant comet’ hypothesis should no longer be dismissed by archaeologists out of hand.

God's Name is I AM.

[marbren]

Thank You Alamo-Girl for the information! Very very interesting! I agree that the flesh did not survive the flood and it seems that demons are the wandering spirits of the corrupt flesh that died in the flood. Therefore they may not be fallen angels which was my understanding until this week. But that is OK because I am teachable.

Did the seed survive after Noah and start again? I heard Nimrod may have been 25 feet tall? Maybe all it took was for Ham not to follow the will of God?

Genesis 9:18-25 (NIV)

18 The sons of Noah who came out of the ark were Shem, Ham and Japheth. (Ham was the father of Canaan.) 19 These were the three sons of Noah, and from them came the people who were scattered over the whole earth. 20 Noah, a man of the soil, proceeded[a] to plant a vineyard. 21 When he drank some of its wine, he became drunk and lay uncovered inside his tent. 22 Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father naked and told his two brothers outside. 23 But Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it across their shoulders; then they walked in backward and covered their father’s naked body. Their faces were turned the other way so that they would not see their father naked. 24 When Noah awoke from his wine and found out what his youngest son had done to him, 25 he said, “Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers.”

[editor-surveyor]

Some have speculated that the wife of Ham may have been “serpent seed,” but there is no support for that theory to be found in God’s word.

To me, the curious thing is why, if Ham did the disgraceful acts, did the curse fall upon Caanan, specifically, and not the rest of Ham’s lineage?

BTW, Nmrd was a descendant of Ham through Cush.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for your questions, dear marbren, and thank you for that beautiful Scripture!

I do not see any way the seed of the nephilim could have survived the Noah Flood. If Nimrod were exceptionally tall (and I'm not aware of any ancient manuscript supporting that view) then I'm confident it would not be because offspring of the Watcher-angels and mortal women physically survived (Genesis 6-7)

Also, the only reason I can perceive why Canaan was singled out in the Noah curse would be that Noah was speaking prophetically, i.e. God sees the end from the beginning.