The general rule is that you should always try to rule out all the natural and normal explanations for something before you jump to a supernatural or paranormal one.
It's not, as I've said before, that I think outlandish explanations are necessarily wrong. For one thing, even science can be an awfully weird place sometimes; just the (extremely well-documented) results of quantum physics and the General Theory of Relativity should be enough to convince you of that much. Also, whatever your particular favorite flavor of strangeness -- be it aliens, ghosts, UFOs, cryptids, psychic phenomena, or whatever -- I'm not going to say any of it is impossible. But what I stand by is that if you can find a rational, scientific explanation for something, it's vastly more likely to be true, so you should go there first.
After all, the burden of proof is on the one making the outlandish claim. Demonstrate that we have something outside of the realm of conventional science, and then we'll talk.
The reason this comes up is because of two claims in the last week of Signs and Portents, one from Colombia and one from India. The first comes from near the village of Morcá, where a musician named Jimmy Ayala reports coming back from visiting a shrine to the Virgin Mary with his family, and coming across some people who seemed to be praying to a rock outcropping. He came closer, and found this:
The devout apparently consider this a divine message; many are considering it a genuine miracle. Me, I want to know if anyone's looked closely to see if it was carved with a chisel. I'm reminded of cases where statues of the Virgin Mary were claimed to "weep holy scented oil," and then when investigators checked it out it turned out that they had a hole drilled in the back (the statues, not the investigators) and were filled with oil, then someone had used a knife to nick the glaze on the inside corner of the eyes so the oil could seep through.
Miracles, apparently, sometimes need a little human help, and I suspect that's what's going on with the rock wall in Colombia.
The second, which occurred in the village of Farabari, India, apparently alarmed the absolute shit out of a number of people, when the following appeared in the clouds:
So that one is pretty certainly just a case of pareidolia, the common phenomenon where we see faces in inanimate objects. Our brains are wired to key-in on human faces, pretty much from birth; it's a huge part of the bonding and socialization process. This can misfire and cause us to think there are faces on tortillas, dirty walls, grilled cheese sandwiches... or on Mars:
The upshot is that I'm not seeing either one of these as a convincing Sign or Portent or whatnot. Maybe there is some superpowerful being who wants to send us a message sometimes, but it'd be nice if (s)he (1) did so in a less ambiguous fashion, and (2) made it clear what the Sign and/or Portent actually means. For example, let's say the glowing face in India really is supernatural in origin. What are we supposed to do about it? Cower in terror? Okay, but the thing dissipated completely in about fifteen minutes, so even assuming we cowered for another five minutes or so after that, just to be polite, it's kind of weak. Repent of our sins? A fat lot of good that'd do. Knowing how humanity acts, once the face was no longer glowering at us we'd all be right back to sinning away like usual.
It'd be nice if just for once, the Superpowerful Being would do something big and obvious, like put up a sign in the sky saying, "STOP COVERING UP FOR PEDOPHILES. NO, I REALLY MEAN IT, JUST STOP."
I wonder what Mike Johnson would do. Despite his very public belief in an all-powerful God, my guess is that he'd piss his pants and then have a stroke.
But apparently such conspicuous, obvious miracles went out of fashion after the Old Testament times. Pity, that.
In any case, if you know of a candidate for a genuine miracle, I'm happy to hear about it. It'd be kind of cool if there was; it'd mean someone more powerful than humans was actually in control. This would be good news, because at the moment, we humans are doing a pretty piss-poor job of running things.
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