Below is a picture of Mary floating out of a cloud in Conyers, Georgia, circa 1990s. For countless numbers of people who rushed down to a farmhouse in Conyers during the 1990s as if it were a Catholic Woodstock concert, and all to catch a glimpse of this floating Madonna, this image was proof positive that all of their hope in God (which was really just a hope that God would save them from all of the fears such people had of hell, the devil, and the coming apocalypse) was not in vain.
However much "believers" pretend their "faith" in their God is "to believe in things without evidence" (or despite the evidence), such "believers" are always looking for evidence in anything they can find. And because they are so desperate to find any shred of evidence supporting their "beliefs," despite pretending they do not need such evidence, they are forced to determine why their own flawed and fallible perceptions of things like Mary floating in the clouds above the skies in Georgia is perfectly real and infallibly true, while any other person's perception of something different - of say Bigfoot or the Lochness monster, or ghosts or aliens from another planet, or even a flat earth - are always proof of how human perception is fallible and flawed.
This image was captured during a time when a woman named Nancy Fowler was claiming to be receiving messages from Mary at her farmhouse. Mary began appearing to Fowler at her farmhouse after Fowler had returned from a visit to a small village called Medjugorje, in Bosnia-Herzegovina. There, the Virgin Mary was said to have been appearing and giving messages to the world since 1981. Those apparitions were proven to be a hoax, but not to the the "true believer" who wants (needs) proof their "faith" is not in vain. At http://www.catholicapologetics.info/catholicteaching/privaterevelation/medjugo.html, those apparation were determined to be a heresy of messages that undermied Church authority, and were therefore certainly false, and "cannot have come from Our Lady and Heaven." But again, to the true "believer," they are as valid as Bigfoot or Elivs sightings.
Upon her return from Medjugorgje, Fowler apparently realized how profitable it was for her to begin to claim that Mary had effectively followed her home like a lost cat, a stalker, or a crazed homeless person, where she began telling Fowler that “Jesus is going to get you all for being such sinners." This reminds me of the witch from the Wizard of Oz... "and your little dog too!" Replace “Jesus” with “the boogey man” and you get the idea. Here, Ronald L Conte gives his assessment of the messages Fowler claimed to be receiving, not from Mary, but from Jesus (even though Jesus never appears in the skies above her farmhouse – big surprise) According to Conte, “In my humble and pious opinion as a faithful Roman Catholic theologian, the messages and claimed private revelation to Nancy Fowler of Conyers, Georgia, (www.ourlovingmother.org) are false and are not from Heaven. A list of reasons and examples follows.” http://www.catholicplanet.com/apparitions/false53.htm
Is it really so surprising that the image seen as Mary looks just like she is depicted in the paintings and statues you can buy at any religious shop, even though this rendition of her is surely a modern day rendering, not an actual image of what a middle eastern woman from 2000 years ago named Mary would’ve actually looked like? Did she dress up to look like the modern version of herself so no one would be confused or dissapointed to discover she wasn't really a white woman? And why is she descending from the sky? Is that because that’s where children are taught to believe heaven resides? And why does she appear only over Fowler’s farmhouse and not to the world over all, where she is warning just a small subset of true “believers” of how much they need to believe even more than they already do (which is why they have pilgrimaged to her farmhouse in the first place) lest Jesus open a can of whoop-ass on the world, like his dad did in the days of Noah, and promises to do again in the final days, despite his rainbow promise not to use the flood again?
So is all of this real and “true”? To the “believer” who already believes it is, like an audience member who believes a magician is really a miracle worker, of course it is. To the person who bothers to use their god given skepticism to question the "vipers" who make a living peddling such snake oil, so as to NOT live in fear and dependence upon a church of charlatans, it is fishy at best and at worst, it is simply a form of emotional terrorism that only robs a person of any “free will” to live the life they would choose but for seeing such haunting spectacles.
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