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| - A grilled cheese toasted sandwich was sold for US $28,000 in November, 2004, on the electronic auction site, ebay.com. The toast was said to bear an image of the Virgin Mary on it. Can you believe that?! The woman who sold the cheese toast claimed that she grilled it 10 years ago. She said that she was about to take a bite into it when she saw the face of the Virgin Mary looking up at her - so she kept the toast, and it hasn't gone mouldy in 10 years. She also claims that it has brought her good luck, and that she has won over US $70,000 at the casin o because of it. To me, something sounds awfully wrong about the whole story.
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| - A grilled cheese toasted sandwich was sold for US $28,000 in November, 2004, on the electronic auction site, ebay.com. The toast was said to bear an image of the Virgin Mary on it. Can you believe that?! The woman who sold the cheese toast claimed that she grilled it 10 years ago. She said that she was about to take a bite into it when she saw the face of the Virgin Mary looking up at her - so she kept the toast, and it hasn't gone mouldy in 10 years. She also claims that it has brought her good luck, and that she has won over US $70,000 at the casin o because of it. To me, something sounds awfully wrong about the whole story. Visions of the Virgin Mary have been occurring for a long time now. A quick search on the internet will find that there are hundreds of sites dedicated to these apparitions. Search again for apparitions of other people or things, and suddenly the list of websites becomes very small. Almost all the websites are of so-called Christian visions and apparitions. There are a few websites dedicated to the phenomenon of seeing big dark animals, called "black dog apparitions". These apparitions have apparently been going on for centuries in England, but apart from these, there isn't much else out there being reported except by psychiatric patients. I couldn't find any literature of apparitions of Islamic, Hindu or Buddhist origin, although I'd guess that visions to followers of these religions do occur from time to time. Most apparitions of the Virgin Mary tend to occur to members of the Roman Catholic Church, although not all of them are accepted as true by the Roman Catholic heirarchy or indeed most parishoners. When a apparition is reported within the Roman Catholic church, often either the local bishop or a panel from the the Vatican formally investigates the claim These investigation typically include initially examining the lifestyle and forming a judgement of the mental state of the person claiming to have seen the vision as well as ensuring the apparition doesn't contradict the church's doctrine. If no problems have been found in the initial investigation, then further investigations are often conducted by the congregation before any final conclusions are made. One Catholic website stated that there were 386 cases of Marian apparitions reported in the 20th century. Of these, the Catholic church made "no decision" about 299 of the cases, made a "negative decision" about 79 cases, and stated that "yes", a supernatural cause was behind 8 of the cases (Fatima in Portugal, Beauraing in Belgium, Banneux in Belgium, Akita in Japan, Syracuse in Italy, Zeitoun in Egypt, Manila in the Philippines and Betania in Venezuela). Even Pope John Paul II believes he saw a vision of Mary whilst recovering from an assination attempt in 1981. Apparitions, of course, are not exclusively reported within the Roman Catholic church. There have been numerous reports of visions of the Virgin Mary in the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox churches, and a few in the Anglican Church. Visions of the future and hearing the voice of Christ are also reported in Pentecostal churches and in various Christian cults and off-shoots. Apparitions tend to fall into one of the two categories. There are those that stick around for other people to see, and those that don't. The vision of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes in France in 1858 is probably the most famous of the don't-stick-around type of apparitions. Here, a young girl named Bernadette Soubirous claimed to see Mary, who introduced herself as, "The Immaculate Conception". Her companions with her could not see the vision, nor does anyone see Mary there today. However, millions of people visit the Lourdes each year, some out of curiousity, others as a personal pilgrimage after a religious experience. Many of the apparitions that appear however, do not disappear. These apparitions often only bear a vague resemblance to what they are claimed to represent. In South Australia, in the small town of Yankalilla, some Parishioners of the local Anglican Church noticed one day in 1994 that there appeared to be a impression of the Virgin Mary on the wall. Since then, this story has made the news on several occasion, and the parish priest, Father Nutter, has spoken of the numbers of people that have been healed of their illnesses when praying at the site. Many people who have visited the church have reported that they cannot see any impression of the Virgin Mary and that it simply looks like some peeling plaster. I've driven through Yankalilla a few times (I live in a city a couple hours away by car), and I certainly can't see any divine contribution to the plaster work of the wall. My personal opinion is that people see what they want to see in the wall, in the same way that if you stare at clouds for long enough, you can start to imagine you're looking at pictures of well, pretty much what-ever you want. But maybe that's just the sceptic in me. People who claim to have seen an apparition are often seem completely convinved that they have been witness to a miracle. But a bit of common-sense logic immediately reveals that a number of possibilities could account for these apparitions
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