The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [72]
Not a single saint criticized the practice of torturing and burning ‘witches’ and heretics. Why not? Were they unaware of what was going on? Could they not grasp its evil? And why is Mary always ordering the poor peasant to inform the authorities? Why doesn’t she admonish the authorities herself? Or the King? Or the Pope? In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it is true, some of the apparitions have taken on greater import - at Fatima, Portugal, in 1917, where the Virgin was incensed that a secular government had replaced a government run by the Church, and at Garabandal, Spain, in 1961-5, where the end of the world was threatened unless conservative political and religious doctrines were adopted forthwith.
I think I can see many parallels between Marian apparitions and alien abductions, even though the witnesses in the former cases are not promptly taken to Heaven and don’t have their reproductive organs meddled with. The beings reported are diminutive, most often about two-and-a-half to four feet high. They come from the sky. The content of the communication is, despite its purported celestial origin, mundane. There seems to be a clear connection with sleep and dreams. The witnesses, often females, are troubled about speaking out, especially after encountering ridicule from males in positions of authority. Nevertheless they persist: they really saw such a thing, they insist. Means of conveying the stories exist; they are eagerly discussed, permitting details to be coordinated even among witnesses who have never met one another. Others present at the time and place of the apparition see nothing unusual. The purported ‘signs’ or evidence are, without exception, nothing that humans couldn’t acquire or fabricate on their own. Indeed, Mary seems unsympathetic to the need for evidence, and occasionally is willing to cure only those who had believed the account of her apparition before she supplied ‘signs’. And while there are no therapists, per se, the society is suffused by a network of influential parish priests and their hierarchical superiors who have a vested interest in the reality of the visions.
In our time, there are still apparitions of Mary and other angels, but also, as summarized by G. Scott Sparrow, a psychotherapist and hypnotist, of Jesus. In I Am With You Always: True Stories of Encounters with Jesus (Bantam, 1995), first-hand accounts, some moving, some banal, of such encounters are laid out. Oddly, most of them are straightforward dreams, acknowledged as such, and the ones called visions are said to differ from dreams ‘only because we experience them while we are awake’. But, for Sparrow, judging something ‘only a dream’ does not compromise its external reality. For Sparrow, any being you dream of, and any incident, really exists in the world outside your head. He specifically denies that dreams are ‘purely subjective’. Evidence doesn’t enter into it. If you dreamed it, if it felt good, if it elicited wonder, why then it really happened. There’s not a sceptical bone in Sparrow’s body. When Jesus tells a troubled woman in an ‘intolerable’ marriage to throw the bum out, Sparrow admits that this poses problems for ‘advocates of a scripturally consistent position’. In that case, ‘[ultimately, perhaps, one could say that virtually all presumed guidance is generated from within’. What if someone reported a dream in which Jesus counselled, say, abortion - or vengeance? And if indeed somewhere, somehow we must eventually draw the line and conclude that some dreams are invented by the dreamer, why not all?
Why would people invent abduction stories? Why, for that matter, would people appear on TV audience participation programmes devoted to sexual humiliation of the ‘guests’ - the current rage in America’s video wasteland? Discovering that you’re an alien abductee is at least a break from the routine of everyday life.