I am not interested in any other threads here, nor Hume. I am discussing this with you. Please don't refer to anyone else.
There will be no further references to Hume, then. I will, however, require recourse to those who claim Fatima is a demonic deception. The partisanship of any miracle is important. Presumably we are talking about Fatima because you believe it redounds to the favor of God and Roman Catholicism. Otherwise we could just accept every single miracle claim of every single religion; a miracle would have no meaning or ultimate significance unless it pointed to something beyond itself. Everyone would simply shrug and classify miracles as extraordinary or unexplained phenomena, devoid of any theological implications.
What you wrote doesn't matter one bit, because many atheists came and saw the same thing.
I've always wondered about this. First, how many atheists did Portugal have in 1917, and second, how many atheists out of that small segment of the population were motivated on a wet Saturday to go to a muddy field in order to scoff at Catholics awaiting a miracle? I have to question whether it was "many."
Granted, I do think we should give a certain credence to non-partisans, as they come with a negative bias and will not be so easily swayed. But everyone has their own human flaws and motivations. There is always the motivation of the non-partisan who switches sides: he or she suddenly becomes special in the eyes of their new party. There has long been a cottage industry in politics and religion of people who write profitable books about their conversion experiences: ex-Marxists turned Republican, ex-atheists turned Christian, &c. and vice versa.
And consider how many atheists even today are of the sort who get derided as "incel neckbeard losers living in their parents' basement." If the lonely Portuguese equivalent in 1917 showed up at Cova da Iria and saw the thousands of people around him begin exclaiming about a miracle, some of whom must've been pretty girls, he could easily be motivated (whether consciously or subconsciously) to offer a false or embellished testimony, and to reap some level of praise and acceptance as a prodigal son returned home, having given his new party the gift of a weighted confirmation of their miracle. The testimony of a few atheists in a crowd of Catholics is not nothing, but neither is it terribly conclusive. Whereas if even a mere 200 atheists gathered at a Richard Dawkins conference collectively claimed to have seen an apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary and they all subsequently converted to Catholicism, then that would be truly extraordinary.
It was reported in the anti-Catholic newspaper of the day.
But that very report is called into question by Catholics who consider Fatima to be a Judaeo-Masonic-Luciferian hoax or psy-op. For them, the Masonic newspaper was
playing its part in creating a diversion, by getting Catholics to go down a rabbit hole, chasing gooey miracles and wild prophecies. I do not cotton to this theory myself, but it has to be refuted if we are to determine whether this miracle was wrought by heaven or is a trick of the devil and his minions.
There was no harm to people's eyes. In fact, over 70,000 people. Only a small portion saw Lucia point up, and she did NOT say "sun".
I don't see how we can know that there was no temporary harm to, or effect upon, people's eyes. It seems quite possible that there was, given the bizarreness of the reports. I take your point that in a crowd of that size, only a small portion would've been able to see Lucia pointing up. Which is why somebody surely said, "look at the sun!" if Lucia was pointing up.
Which brings me to an uncomfortable mention. I do not wish to be impolite in saying this. But something has to be remarked of what we might call the "Southern European" or "Mediterranean" character—that of the Portuguese, the Spanish, and the Italians. The common temperament of these southern races is usually one of passion, emotion, and expressiveness, at least in comparison to the generally more reserved and sober temperament of the northern peoples (the British, the Germans, and the Scandinavians). Perhaps this is just my northern bias speaking, but the Spanish-Argentine writer J.L. Borges noted it himself. And I daresay that the Mediterranean mentality is slightly more prone to superstition. I will put it this way: I am far less surprised that the folk religion
cult of the mummified monkey-boy saint exists in Catholic Peru than I would be if it had taken hold in Lutheran Sweden.
With this in mind, we need only to wonder at the kind of religious energy that might've swept through the crowd on that day. In my mind's eye, I can see little Lucia pointing up. And then I can see a "pious old lady," the kind of widowed granny who still dresses in black a decade after her husband's death, and she squeezes the hand of her bachelor son. She gasps out hoarsely, "the sun!" And so her son hollers, "Mama says to look at the sun!" A peasant-girl seer, some pious old ladies, a crowd of Portuguese Catholics, and the sun emerging from the clouds on an overcast day. Is it so wrong to have a reasonable doubt about whether a bona fide miracle occurred?
