A person named Don Flood conributes this bit of apologetics to one of my posts, “Catholics claim that lies are truer than truth“, which dealt with the inability to comport the results of genetics with the fiction that Adam and Eve were the literal ancestors of all humanity. Here goes (I’ve broken the comment into paragraphs to make it easier to read):
What biologists, such as Professor Coyne, fail to understand is that Adam & Eve, having been both specially created, had within their germ lines all the variation which we see among human beings today. In other words, all the offspring of Eve had distinct DNA, such that if a geneticist had tested them he/she would find that they were not even “related” to each other, even though they were born from the same parents.
This “genetic bootstrapping” on the part of the One and Triune God would have allowed Eve’s children to marry and have sex with each other, allowing them to have normal human offspring. As with the Virgin Birth of Jesus Christ, Science cannot enter the realm of the supernatural, that is, actions performed by God which violate the Law of Conservation of Energy, which He established to give order to His Creation.
These events by God are what Catholic theology terms as being “miracles”: raising those who are in a state of clinical death back to normal life, restoration of an adult amputee’s amputated limb (such as occurred in the Miracle of Calanda), simultaneous apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary to tens of thousands of individuals over hundreds of square miles (such as occurred with the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima), etc. Since Adam & Eve were both specially created, their bodies were not like ours. They were not conceived, but instead, were formed out of the “dust of the earth”, coming into existence possessing thought and speech. In many respects, their creation was like that of the angels, immaterial beings whom God simply willed into existence ex nihilo. As such, modern genetic theory and assumptions simply do not apply to Adam & Eve. We accept their existence as a matter of divine revelation which came to us through the One and Only Son of God, Jesus Christ, which He entrusted to His Church, the Holy Roman Catholic & Apostolic Church, outside of which no one at all will be saved.
What I find unusual about all this is the scientific acumen it gives to God: knowing that, in 2011, Heng Li and Richard Durban would assay human genetic variation, concluding that the population of our ancestors could not have been smaller than 1200 in the last several million years, God took the step of adding genetic variation to Adam and Eve, giving them lots of extra alleles at each locus (and I mean lots, for Flood argues that the children of Adam and Eve could not even be diagnosed as siblings by genetic testing). In fact, God would have had to give Adam and Eve hundreds of different genes at some loci, when the norm is two copies of each gene per person. Or maybe the extra copies were just inserted into the gonads? Since you want to comport science and the Bible, Mr. Flood, could you kindly tell us God’s mechanism for that? You do, after all, seem to have a remarkable handle on how God did things.
Flood, of course, suggests no way that those extra gene copies could reside in Adam and Eve without screwing up their development. But that’s okay—it was a miracle!
As for the fact that this allowed incest, I guess God isn’t really against brothers and sisters actually copulating with each other, but simply doesn’t like the genetic effects of inbreeding: the homozygosity of deleterious recessive genes that causes problems in the children of relatives.
If you think like this, then there is no point adducing evidence at all, for it can always be explained away by God’s miraculous intervention, making the world seem as if it evolved even though it didn’t. In other words, God is the Immaculate Trickster, arranging all of life—and geology—to deceive our senses. All those fossils in a good evolutionary order? Miracles! The existence of birdlike dinosaurs right before modern birds appear in the fossil record? God’s amusing intercession to fool paleobiologists!
It is so sad that someone is so committed to the literal truth of an ancient, cobbled-together collection of folktales that he simply makes up miracles to save his book. For such people there is no hope.
Oh, and about that amputated leg. The Miracle of Calanda was new to me, so I looked it up. There’s a decent account at Wikipedia, telling the story of a 17th-century Spanish man, Miguel Juan Pellicer, whose leg was supposedly amputated and then, one night while dreaming of the Virgin Mary, it came back again! There are testimonies, of course, but also this:
Author Brian Dunning has done extensive research and notes that “there is no documentation or witness accounts confirming his leg was ever gone.” He presents a non-miraculous explanation that Pelicer’s leg did not develop gangrene during the five days at the hospital at Valencia. He spent the next 50 days convalescing, during which he was unable to work. He turned to begging, and discovered that having a broken leg was a boon. After his leg had mended, he decided that if a broken leg helped, a missing leg would be better. Traveling to Zaragoza, he bound his right foreleg up behind his thigh and for two years played the part of an amputee beggar. Later, back at his parents home in Calanda, forced to sleep in a different bed, his ruse was discovered. The story of the miracle was a way to save face. Dunning notes “that no evidence exists that his leg was ever amputated — or that he was even treated at all — at the hospital in Zaragoza other than his own word. He named three doctors there, but for some reason there is no record of their having been interviewed by either the delegation or the trial.” That the hole in the cemetery of the hospital of Zaragoza in which the leg had been buried was found empty is consistent with the leg never having been amputated.
See Dunning’s more extensive analysis at Skeptoid.
But even if Pelicer’s leg was restored by God, Flood has to explain why this happened only once, and why such miracles, despite the supplication of many more amputees, are not enacted in the modern world? Has God gone out of the limb-restoring business? Why, as a friend of Anatole France pointed out, are there no discarded wooden limbs at Lourdes?
“This “genetic bootstrapping” on the part of the One and Triune God would have allowed Eve’s children to marry and have sex with each other, allowing them to have normal human offspring.”
This is a pretty roundabout way to create a population. Rather than creating just two people, why didn’t god just zap out several thousand and be done with it?
But then, I’ve never seen a good explanation about why god created anyone at all.
Because he’s a sadist, and knowing that 99% of all people would not be “saved,” he did so in order to have a large group of people to torture forever and ever? Just a guess.
You do raise an interesting point; if the smallest origin of mankind had to be at least 1200 individuals, would we then expand the special creation of Man from 2 to 1200 souls?
You have to feel sorry for people like this. Why are they so afraid of the creation myth being untrue? What is it that troubles them so much psychologically, and how does this myth ameliorate it?
“Why are they so afraid of the creation myth being untrue? What is it that troubles them so much psychologically, and how does this myth ameliorate it?”
Because if the creation myths fails, then original sin fails which means christ is unnecessary. The whole thing falls apart
And that means that death is the end of personal consciousness, a conclusion that they do not wish to accept.
I don’t buy that explanation at all.
Why? Because I strongly suspect that “believers” no more believe the bullshit than I do. They just pretend to believe it in order to be one of the crowd or to earn brownie points or something.
An alternative explanation that I like a lot better is that “church” is the single most important social institution in many people’s lives, so any dissing of religion is a threat to the social context of believers’ lives.
What the world needs is a good 5¢ religion with lots of complex ritual, inspiring buildings, and elaborate vestments, but no book of what to believe. And good potluck suppers every Friday night!
Alain, is that you?
If a believer was brainwashed from birth to believe this crap taught to them by parents and elders as being absolutely true, what they are afraid of is probably the cognitive dissonance with its painful, enveloping mental/emotional confusion when their strong and long-standing beliefs are challenged, and not necessarily the dissolution of the belief itself. Also some brains can handle cognitive dissonance better than others.
Or, if they are so dependent on the creation myth being ‘true’, why do they not claim that the creation myth was initially told by, and later written down by, fallible people who failed to comprehend the truths god was telling them. An assertion like that admits what everybody knows: that people are fallible (and hence ‘need god’). It implies that there is a lot more to learn about ‘god’s purpose’ (job security for priests, imams, ministers, rabbis, monks, etc.), and it either places the ‘fundamental truths’ beyond the purview of science, or it allows for a retroactively preexisting ‘we were here first!’ claim. Instead of going with the most basic characteristics of their delusion (god is all powerful, subtle, mysterious, etc.) they go with the superficial characteristics (Adam & Eve, Moses, Jesus, etc). It is as if their delusions are a hollow shell with nothing of value beneath the ornate exterior.
Your analysis is valid. You are just giving most people way too much credit.
I get so bloody angry at people like that using amputations as an reason why “miracles” happen. Yes, I suppose that I could have chosen any of the so-called medical miracles, but this one is personal.
I am an amputee
I am also. Plus similar reaction to yours.
Jerry!!!!
He plagiarized my adam and eve myth from your contest several years ago!!!
It’s come full circle!!!
Here it is as I first began to postulate it.
Here is the linky
I don’t see why extra germ lines are needed. Between them Adam and Eve have four copies of any given locus – and there are only four possibilities A/T/C/G. Just load up Adam and Eve collectively with every SNP variant, and assume that God has perfect control over recombination during meiosis. Any given individual in the next generation can have whatever genotype God wants.
Accounting for indels, and proving that Adam are in fact viable is left as an exercise for the interested graduate student.
That’s the trouble with sarcasm. Someone will always take it literally.
**
Apologetics are skilled in popping up with all kind of ad hoc arguments. If they should not do so, they would have to look for another career.
Of course, apologetics can be explained psychologically. For some reason they are strongly attached to their creation myths, so strong that they will endure severe psychological suffering. In order to coop with all kind of arguments against their beloved myths, they will create all kind of non-sensical reasonings to refute their critics.
But according to the bible there must have been another bottleneck in human history due to the great flood. I suppose if one believes in Adam and Eve, he has to trust that story as well. Only Noah, his wife, his children and their family survived. I don’t think they comprised 1200 persons. Were those people also polyploid? And what about the animals (two of each “baramin”). I doubt that the genetic diversity of the current populations of every species can be reconciled with such a narrow bottleneck only a few thousand years ago.
I was just thinking the same thing. What about Noah & immediate family? Were they specially “willed into existence ex nihilo” as well? Another “deus ex machina” moment is needed to explain that, Mr.Flood.
Are you saying you don’t accept the Flood narrative? 🙂
It’s annoying when this happens – apologists can’t reasonably explain a myth (because that is the nature of myths) so instead of accepting that it’s a myth they use science in a mythical made up way then proclaim their made up science is right (without evidence) and that real scientists are wrong and don’t get their science-y myth.
This is a real revalation! I humbly suggest that Francis Collins issue at least one RFP to investigate this new science!
Oops, spelling: revelation.
I have a very poor vocabulary of the sacred.
Bless me father, for I have sinned.
another thing,
I can’t find the above comment on the post linked. Am I doing something wrond or was the wrong post linked?
Also, the post above comes from 2011, did he just comment on a 2 year old post?
What I don’t understand is that if Flood is going to argue that science can’t “enter into the realm of the supernatural” why does he twist himself into knots trying to reconcile science with the supernatural? What he says, however, does demonstrate the folly of trying to argue rationally with the faith-based–no evidence can prove their beliefs, so they can make up any evidence they want.
Pro tip: the more strained and bizarre your rationalization, the more obvious it becomes that the only person you’re really trying to convince is yourself.
Besides…once you grant the existence of miracles, no other explanation is necessary — or even adequate. Jesus has the power to do anything he wants any time he wants, right? Then, therefore, everything happens exactly the way he wants it to, and any time that something was about to happen the way he didn’t want it to he just miracles in whatever corrections are necessary. The Garden of Eden happened exactly the way Genesis describes it, and then Jesus miraculously fixed up all the loose ends and inconsistencies in the story. Problem solved!
This, of course, therefore means that Jesus is, at the very least, an active and willing accomplice in every crime on the planet.
Imagine a young boy pointing his video camera at his father and saying, “Dad, I’m going to take your machine gun to school today and gun down everybody in my classroom.” And Dad is, himself, a big and burly Marine. When Dad watches his son grab said gun and head out the door without even saying, “boo,” he takes upon himself full responsibility for his son’s actions — and you can bet that’s what the prosecutor will argue and the jury will decide when that video recording gets played at the trial. Yet, Jesus has so much more power to act…and somehow he still doesn’t even manage to ever even just call 911.
We seriously need an arrest warrant for the dude. Hell, put him at the top of Interpol’s most wanted list, and make his apprehension, dead or alive, NATO’s top priority.
Cheers,
b&
Your first sentence is crying out for a diagram which the apologist would love because it is science-y. 🙂
Donald E. Flood [45yo, Catholic from Iowa] seems to have a recent interest in going after science HERE IS his Youtube feed where you can see similar reasoning when he comments on a video called “Neil DeGrasse Tyson Destroys Bill O’Reilly” :-
If one Google searches for “Donald E. Flood” + Catholic you can experience more Donald wit & wisdom often gilded in Latin. Such as his post HERE called “Invincible ignorance is not observable to us at all” LOL
Ugh misapplying science, Latin & logic. The trifecta of tripe!
(I say this about Latin because church Latin soft C’s offend me)
I always found the hard C weird, having learned Latin in a secular school in an Italian-speaking area. It isn’t just church Latin that uses the soft C! I like the evolved, later pronunciation much better than the recent reconstruction of classical Latin widely used (but not consistently, e.g., Caesar) in the English-speaking world. De gustibus non disputandum est and all that…
I was introduced to Latin in an Italian speaking area but we were taught the hard C Classical Latin (even used the British Cambridge Latin course – they now have an American version – which was endlessly entertaining to us).
It is the proper pronunciation of Caesar that gave Germans the Kaiser.
And Käse ‘cheese’.
How is “czar” pronounced in Russian?
I don’t know if “царь” will appear in the post (I put the Cyrillic letters in the quotes but I don’t know if they’ll show up when I click “Post”) but it’s pronounced [tsarʲ]. The ‘cz’ digraph is not used in Russian; in Polish*, ‘cz’ is pronounced like the ‘ch’ in English “chest”.
The spelling “czar” is pronounced by most English speakers as [zar]; A Polish speaker would say [char]. The ‘ts’ combination in English phonology only appears at the end of a syllable, usually as the result of plural formation (e.g., “cats”)**. It never appears initially; although the letters do sometimes appear together within a word, it almost always happens at a syllable boundary (e.g., “catsuit”) and represents two phonemes, not one.
*Polish is the Slavic language most closely related to Russian. Other Slavic languages also use this pronunciation for the ‘cz’ digraph.
**This brings up an interesting question: would a Cyrillic transcription of an English word like “cats” use the letters ‘t’ and ‘c’ or the single Cyrillic ‘ц’?
What is always glossed over by Adam & Evengelicals is human race. To put it bluntly, how do we get a Chinaman or African from the miraculous two? And if the human races arose from genetic drift after Adam and Eve then what need for God? Genetics were already in play.
“Also, Dude, chinaman is not the preferred nomenclature”
They don’t gloss it over. The three sons of Noah were Shem (forefather of the Semitic people, in whom the people of the Far East are included, because otherwise even their fairy tale falls apart), Ham (progenitor of the African people) and Japheth (original ancestor of the European people). Standard racialist bullshit which held sway for hundreds of years; at least in large, urban centers nowadays, they don’t talk a lot about it in public.
It was extremely common to attribute the inferiority of blacks to the curse on Canaan, one of Ham’s sons (Genesis 9.27); this also comported nicely with the bible’s approval of slavery.
Triune God? Pshaw!! Once they invented Triune™ Razor Blades everyone thought shaving couldn’t get better but then they invented Quadriscisial™ razor blades.
I’m keeping my beard until they invent the ultimate Quantum™ Razor Blades with an indeterminate number of blades.
Tee hee
One thing that never fails to amuse me about creationists is that they seem absolutely aghast at the notion of being descended from an unbroken chain of life that is billions of years old in favor of having been created de novo from a pile of dirt.
Instead of being the proud inheritors of survival against great odds, we are some deity’s mud pies.
Fah!
Yep, they get all atwist over abiogenic origins for which there are at least some experimental suggestions, while they meanwhile put great stock in one for which there are no details at all.
Dear Mr. Flood:
Don’t give up the day job; your attempts at writing comedy really suck.
Sincerely,
Mark Joseph
Interesting choice. This ding-dong invents genetic variation all within Eve as some kind of bizarro creation of God and other creationist loons have decided the dinosaur bones were buried by Satan. Creationism must be right, ’cause it is so complicated and hard.
You know, seeing that Brian Dunning has done extensive research on what is so obviously a ridiculous fabrication is kinds depressing. A bit like reading about the tribulations of our host in trudging through the Bible. Maybe someone has to do it, but these are not only dirty jobs, they are such a colossal waste of time.
…kind of depressing…
“His Church, the Holy Roman Catholic & Apostolic Church, outside of which no one at all will be saved.”
What a nasty, vicious, sadistic, self-satisfied and narcissistic thing to say and believe. You’re all damned except those who buy into our particular brand of cr*p. Trouble is all the other religions are saying the same thing. A pox on the lot of you.
Yes. It is rather surprising that such loving people are really very nasty.
I had never heard of the miracle of Calanda before. Calanda is a popular brand of beer here in Switzerland. Somehow at first I was picturing a much more interesting kind of miracle…
Picture this:
“…a 17th-century Spanish man, Miguel Juan Pellicer, whose leg was supposedly amputated and then, one night while dreaming of the Virgin Mary, it came back again!”
Maybe that wasn’t his “leg”.
Don Flood’s own last name is, ironically, the hole in his whole hypothesis. If Genesis is true, we are not merely the descendants of two original people, we are also the descendants of Noah and Ezmara plus the three additional women brought abord the Ark as wives for his kids.
Whatever genetic variation Flood believes God implanted into Adam’s testicals and Eve’s ovaries would have been wiped out by the flood, and we’re right back to five original DNA sources: one man and four women. And the story places them MUCH more recently than 6000 years ago.
Of course, the Bible says nothing to imply any of them were anything other than normal egg- and sperm-bearing people.
And they, and all the pairs of other animals, have to breed like crazy while they migrate to their geographical ranges.
I’ve not seen kangaroos breed, but to have to travel several thousand miles as well?
Oh, but kangaroos can do it on the hop, and pop out joeys like a conveyor belt in a good year: one at foot, one in the pouch, one embryo in diapause, three kinds of milk on tap – change partners and round she goes.
It’s the Western Ringtail Possum (among others) that would have a problem; much lower rate of natural increase, much lower mobility, and low adult survival (after the carnivores switched to a meat diet).
As I learned from having gone through Catholic high school, true believers will resort to all sorts of mental gymnastics to reconcile church doctrine with reality.
What I find unusual about all this is the scientific acumen it gives to God: knowing that, in 2011,…….giving them lots of extra alleles at each locus
But, but, but, this IS god that we’re talking about. It could see the future, heck, it MAKES the future. So it knew what was coming and made arrangements for that.
Does beg the question though, it knows what’s coming cos it makes the future so, why all the anger when Eve eats the apple. After all, it knew she was gonna do that cos it set her future to make her do that. Or am I just going round in circles yet again, trying to understand religious logic?
So, um, thousands of alleles to show the same variation as thousands of breeders?
They must have special cells too unless I’m mistaken, many times larger than the usual cells. What would it do with white blood cells and neurons, especially optical receptors? In fact, I can’t think of any reason to call them human anymore.
If that is the theologian out, while maintaining the first pair was humans, they will be laughed out of church.
We can stop right there. This material is obviously pure crackpot.
(¬_¬)
Next we will be told magic exists.
(O_O)
But as it amuses me, the science (and I have said some of this many times):
I’m sorry, but that ship has sailed, in fact the whole armada has.
1. It is a perfectly well supported theory to claim that everything is physical, that it obeys conservation of energy. We have enough independent tests to claim this beyond reasonable doubt (simple estimates and using a binomial test is enough).
There is no problem with “no go” theories, but in fact this is a “go” theory. (“Go, Team Thermodynamics!”)
2. And we also see in the CMB that the whole universe obeys energy conservation, so have independent tests. In fact, we see that the universe _must_ be a result of a spontaneous and natural process.
3. LHC completed the standard particle sector with the Higgs field. That means, contrary to Flood’s beliefs, that biology especially is protected from any interaction, conserving energy or not. If there was a supernatural sector that interacted with the low energy standard particle sector it would be visible (as deviations from the extremely precisely predicted QED).
If it is permanently interacting we would see it today. Or if fleetingly interacting by changing the rules, the new vacuum would spontaneously usher in a new universe and erase the old. Not even omnipotent resources can unchange that, see 2 above.
But there isn’t any signs of that. No Universal Liar, no Immoral Trickster, no Immaculate Scaredy-pants (which sounds like a contradiction in terms (^o^) ), of theologians could get away with it any more than an Open Fraud of religionists.
So Miguel Juan Pellicer’s Third Leg became his other leg?
Now why is it that despite god’s magical scientific knowledge he calls a whale a fish? I can just imagine the conversation:
God: … and then I made a whale swallow Jonah and Jonah spent 40 days and nights in the stomach of that mammal.
Scribe: Fish.
God: A whale is a mammal; don’t contradict me.
Scribe: Are you some kind of idiot? Everyone knows that whales are fish.
God: No, it’s a mammal.
Scribe: Fish.
God: OK, fish.
Scribe: Told you so.
I eagerly anticipate my first opportunity to poke this broomstick into someone’s spokes.
I like the comment “..His Church, the Holy Roman Catholic & Apostolic Church, outside of which no one at all will be saved.” …That’s sure to upset the “Sons of David”, God’s favored people..I’m betting they thought they were the only ones to ascend.
Why can’t miracles ever be something like telling humans about natural disasters or germs. Always some petty bull****.
Isn’t all this speculation about Adam and Eve’s DNA kind of pointless since God eventually wiped out everyone except Noah and his family? So did God give Noah extra alleles too?
As well as every species on Noah’s yacht (The SS Kitty Litter), which I assume was all of them.
“…a three hour tour.”
Do I have this straight… God gave Adam and Eve SuperGenes so their offspring wouldn’t suffer the effects of inbreeding. All the time knowing A&E would disobey Him do severely he would need to punish all their future decendants. Of course, it was a setup, if God knows the future, he shouldn’t have planted the tree in the first place.
Don’t they think through their load of crap first?
To quote Terry Pratchett, “When you’re a god, you don’t have to have reasons.”
Quite frankly, I don’t understand why anyone would think that Mr. Flood’s ramblings deserve an intellectual response. An eye roll? Yes. But nothing more.
It’s really startling how people can simply ignore parallelled human creation myths from clay and say their’s is the true one. Some examples that can be seen at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_of_man_from_clay
– “According to Egyptian mythology the god Khnum creates human children from clay before placing them into their mother’s womb.”
And anyone can see (http://hercolano2.blogspot.com.br/2012/05/great-pyramid-pyramids-and-geopolymers_3756.html) Knuhm creating a human being (Amenhotep III – XIV B.C.) on his potter’s wheel.
– “According to greek mythology (see Hesiod’s poem Theogeny), Prometheus created man from clay, while Athena breathed life into them.”
For example, one can read in Apollodorus (II B.C.) in The Library 1.7.1 “Prometheus moulded men out of water and earth* and gave them also fire,… ”
In the famous Enuma Elish babylonian creation myth (usually dated from 18th to 16th centuries B.C.) one can read at the sixth tablet:
3. “I will solidify blood, I will form bone. 4. “I will set up man, ‘Man’ [shall be] his name. 5. “I will create the man ‘Man.’
Anyone would be considered insane if he tried to apply modern genetics to make ancient myths (like Khnum or Prometeus) a valid explanation for man’s origin today, but some people will always think that the O.T. version “man formed from clay” is the only exception.
As the brain is a complex thing, I think belief is too. Its not as simple as either believing or not. I think a part of the brain that “knows better” manages the part that “believes”.
For example, a “believer” will pray that their injured leg doesnt need amputating, but once amputated, they wont pray for it to grow back. Why not?
They will pray for their sick grandmother to get well, but once grandma dies, they wont pray for god to resurrect her. Why? Because on some level they know god isnt real and miracles dont happen. At least thats the case for 99% of them. Not for the ones who fly planes into sky scrappers, I suppose.
I would have laughed at this, but it is so incredibly sad. How a person can come to live with such a delusion, yet be demonstratively sane in all other respects, amazing.
The brain remains a mysterious organ.
That makes sense.
But then some other person comes along and takes it seriously.
This is the danger of lying.
I think talking about Adam and Eve is a red herring, according to Biblical tradition it is all down to Noah, his three sons and their wives that have created all modern humans. The multiple lineages of Adam and Eve were all wiped out during the flood. Given the flood was supposed to have happened ~4000 years ago it becomes even less believable.
I do find it humorous that a man named Flood missed that.
Maybe Mr. Flood would be so kind as to let us kmow where he got all his knowledge from?
Armies of scientists needed centuries to reach today’s stae of knowledge, but Mr. Flood appearently needed nothing. That’s so amazing, that more information would be highly desirable!
LOL
I rather suspect that a response to your query will not be forthcoming from Mr. Flood.
So, let me give you my best guess: “Making stuff up.”
Like his god who imagined everything into existence, he imagined his “scientific” explanation for how his god imagined stuff 🙂
Brian Cox tweeted this hilarious article from the Onion from 2005 that is somewhat related to how believers make crazy stuff up on a pseudoscience way. http://www.theonion.com/articles/evangelical-scientists-refute-gravity-with-new-int,1778/
The article parodies ID by making a funny parallel to gravity, termed “Intelligent Falling”.
“17th-century Spanish man, Miguel Juan Pellicer, whose leg was supposedly amputated and then, one night while dreaming of the Virgin Mary, it came back again!”
– That wasn’t his leg!
Sorry, poor taste joke. But would sure make a more interesting religious story – not to mention miraculous.
It went something like this:
[Miguel Pellicer]: My leg’s grown back! When I come to the hospital, I had one leg…
Doctor Constantine: Well, there is a war on… is it possible you miscounted?
[The Doctor Dances]
Dammit… and now I find I’m at least the third person here with poor taste in humor.
Reblogged this on Mark Solock Blog.
Regarding God and amputees worth seeing this fragment from “Simon of the Desert” (1965), film of the great Spanish director Luis Buñuel. Even for those who don’t know Spanish will noticed the sense of sarcasm and unreality surrounding this miracle. By the way, Buñuel was from Calanda, Spain, as Miguel Pellicer as well.
Just Testing.
A Biologist’s Mother’s Day Song