How do atheists and prots explain eucharistic miracles, which have been confirmed by scientists?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucharistic_miracle_of_Lancianohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucharistic_miracle#Scientific_analysis_of_flesh_and_blood_miracles
>>18519449Eucharistic miracles still happen at the catholic church.
>>18519443Can't explain what doesn't happen. Maybe once upon a time the bread and wine became flesh and blood, but it sure doesn't anymore.You'd think they'd be embaressed, but they just get pissed at anyone who points out that they obviously aren't getting God's cooperation anymore for their ritual.Im pretty sure I know exactly why, but it doesn't really matter since they'd rather die than admit they've strayed from the path.
>>18519452See: >>18519451
even you own wiki links show how both weren't actually proven, also the blood type can also pop up with certain bacteria/fungi
>>18519454>The task was performed by Odoardo Linoli, head of the laboratory of clinical analysis and pathological anatomy of the hospital of Arezzo—full professor of anatomy, histology, chemistry, and clinical microscopy—and Ruggero Bertelli, professor of anatomy at the University of Siena. The histological and microchemical studies revealed that the relics were human heart muscle tissue.[16][4][17]How does this not prove things? Even a cardiologist called Franco Serafini concluded the same in "A Cardiologist Examines Jesus: The Stunning Science Behind Eucharistic Miracles". Moreover, the fungi theory was disproven for Sokolka in "Eucharistic miracle from the scientific perspective" published in Teologia i Człowiek .
>>18519443Garbage OP picture. There's no accounting for taste among Catholics, I suppose.
>>18519461hey you forgot to copy paste the statement right after that one on the wiki>Kelly Kearse and Frank Ligaj highlighted possible problems surrounding the 1971 report and other subsequent claims about human blood. They mentioned Linoli actually documented the accumulation of fungus, spores and hypha of hyphomyces, as well as the blood substance being entirely composed of a uniformly hardened material that was difficult to detach without strong pressure. They state while the Lanciano investigation was commendable as being the first attempt, it's unfortunate that in later years it has been associated with fraudulent activity involving others.[6]
>>18519465And? How does that discount the human heart tissue? If there was tissue, there was flesh, not blood.
Should not every eucharist be a eucharistic miracle? So either every eucharist should be testable and observable as actually changing, or none at all, or else you have a hypocritical and arbitrary belief system that rewards just plain superstition.
>>18519477That makes no sense. It doesn't need to literally be transformed into flesh to still be flesh of Christ
>>18519480Then you admit it is needless.
>>18519475reread it bro, they are stating the "heart" tissue is actually fungus, which is also why all these just so happen to have the same blood type, in other words your miracles is just some guy growing red looking mold
>>18519484>some guy growing red looking moldHow do you know Jesus wasn't mold?
>>18519484Are you suggesting a scientist somehow mistook fungus for heart tissue? How would you even be able to do that?
>>18519486well parts of him would certainly have been mold after a certain point
>>18519488its because the guy himself didn't report heart tissue, it was just somebody else claimed he reported it and you fell for it
>>18519480Then why does it sometimes randomly transform into flesh then?>>18519443I just don't find any of it to be very convincing and more often it comes across as cheap parlour tricks and outright lies. The Living God shouldn't need to be proven through lab test ran on millennia old materia combined with flimsy accounts of its origins.
>>18519491No, Linoli did report heart tissue. Do you even know how histological and microchemical studies work? They would be able to tell immediately that it was real from fungi. Moreover, what exactly is the problem with blood substance being hardened? It only means that its dry, nothing else.
>>18519491>>18519465NTA and I'm not a catholic, but I'm a bit too dumb-dumb to get what they mean here, and why it was actually fungi.
why would you want to consume your god's flesh and blood sounds like cannabalism.
>>18519513There was a reason, but that aspect of the religion it no longer utilized.
>>18519443Lanciano literally only became known in the 16th Century, and is almost 1:1 with Mass of St. Gregory, and there were many legends like it come 16th Century. We don't know where the two came from, but we can pretty sure they weren't there in the 8th Century. Even if the host is human flesh like Linoli claims, it doesn't prove there's anything divine about it. It's not exactly difficult to get human tissue and make a fucking cracker from it, and then present that as Jesus. Humans have done fucked up things with human parts in the past. Moreover, as anon pointed out >>18519465 there's no way to determine if the "blood" even is blood or not, or just dye, or something else. There were literally vegetable and fungi in the substance found, and bacteria can make blood seem like it has AB blood.
>>18519615Why would faithful Christians make something so grotesque from someone's heart? How would you even make a host from heart tissue by hand?
>>18519630have you seen the shit they do with saints? They literally bought pieces of supposed saints to eat the relic100% some depraved religious lunatic could do this
>>18519443>we have scientific evidence for miraclesoh ok, i wonder what sort of>said to have occurred in the eighth centuryThis kind of shit is why no one takes you people seriously.>>18519461>"A Cardiologist Examines Jesus: The Stunning Science Behind Eucharistic Miracles"Ah yes this sounds like a fair and unbiased investigation.
>>18519443The Lanciano miracle is the most rigorously tested. In 1971, Dr. Odoardo Linoli, a professor of anatomy and pathological histology, examined the samples. His findings:The flesh is human cardiac tissue -- specifically myocardium, the heart muscle. The blood is human, type AB. The same blood type found on the Shroud of Turin and the Sudarium of Oviedo.The flesh and blood were found to be fresh, as if taken from a living person that day, despite being over 1200 years old. No preservatives or embalming substances were detected.The protein patterns in the blood are identical to those of fresh normal blood. The tissue shows no evidence of decay or mummification.These findings have been independently corroborated by the World Health Organization in 1973.There are other verified Eucharistic miracles: Buenos Aires (1996), where then-Archbishop Bergoglio -- now Pope Francis -- ordered scientific testing. The results were identical to Lanciano: human cardiac tissue, type AB blood, white blood cells intact, tissue from a person who had suffered severe trauma.Atheists can claim fraud if they want, but they have to explain how 8th-century monks faked cardiac tissue that modern science can't distinguish from a living donor's.
>>18519496>No, Linoli did report heart tissueAnd you can quote Linoli, himself, saying this?
>>18519785>These findings have been independently corroborated by the World Health Organization in 1973.And you can show me this?
>>18519785>There are other verified Eucharistic miracles, where then-Archbishop Bergoglio -- now Pope Francis -- ordered scientific testing. I was baptized Catholic so I have no beef with the Church, but this has about as much legitimacy as asking a Mormon to verify the validity of Joseph Smith's stupid gold plates. You have to be beyond retarded if you think anyone is going to take scientific testing overseen by the Pope for the fucking Shroud of Turin as legitimate.
>>18519810And it's never an original source with any of this stuff. It's always a long chain of Catholics like "CatholicAnswers.com says that the Sacred Heart of Mary Institute said that Dr. Lorenzo Valleri who attends the Chapel of St. Joseph & St. Martin in Capua inspected this".
>>18519443Which scientists? Why the Our Blessed Virgin Lady of Saint Sulpician and the most Immaculate blood of the crowned Christ triumphant Institute for Eucharistic Miracles, of course. No, you cannot test them, that'd be blasphemy.
>>18519829I wonder if Catholics ever find it weird that Saints only heal unseeable internal issues or things your body can heal on its own. They never regrow lost arms, legs, or fingers that people can actually see. I guess Mary works in mysterious ways
>>18519630>Why would faithful Christians make something so grotesque from someone's heart?Do you have any idea how many fraudulent texts you could make this same sort of argument about? "Why would a faithful believer lie about this?".But we don't even need to suppose that it was seen as something grotesque when it was made. If we grant for the sake of argument that inside this object really is old human heart tissue (and there are considerable doubts about that, but granting it for now), that tells us nothing about it being miraculous. The thing is so old it could have simply been a reliquary, seen as righteous and holy, and then legends cropped up about its past, as always happens with old and sacred things in every culture. Remember that we have nothing in writing about it until it was already nearly a thousand years old.So the physical analysis is really a red herring since the miracle claims are actually staked on sources that are around a thousand years after the events. This makes them historically worthless and, consequently, so are arguments based on them.
>>18519486this is an unironic theory about ancient psychedelics in christian mystery cults
>>18519461Oh, it's Serafini, the hack who sends the same sample to labs across the world for years until he gets the response he's looking for and ignores all the others saying it's not a tissue sample. Even the RCC doesn't like to talk about him in any authoritative capability because he makes the Church look so bad.Kinda sad that OP falls for such charlatans.
>>18519905>who sends the same sample to labs across the world for years until he gets the response he's looking for Source?
Are you sure you wanted to post that article on wikipedia? Literally every single example there is shady as fuck.Probably the most important:>Catholic scientist Kelly Kearse analysed claimed shared AB results from various relics, including Eucharist hosts. He discovered they are likely due to bacteria contamination, as AB antigens are not unique to human blood and serological tests cannot distinguish between them. Moreover, he notes none of the AB studies were published in peer-review, and DNA testing would be required to confirm human origin.[42] Kelly Kearse and Stacy Trasancos have both noted scientific problems with Eucharist miracle claims, which includes Lanciano, Buenos Aires, Tixtla, Sokolka, Legnica, and Tyrol.I would even say that the DNA studies were a really hard blow for eucharystic miracles as none of these showed actual human DNA outside of very minot contamination (which is to be expected).
>LOOK GUYS, PROOF>*link to wikipedia article which notes there is no proof*kekked, why do so many do this
How do papists explain the fact that these Eucharistic miracles only appear after transubstantiation became widespread doctrine?
>>18520278I’m focused on the first link he posted. I wonder if he even bothered to read it, because it is extremely embarrassing to his cause>The first known reports of the event date to 1574 and do not specify the exact year in which it would have occurred, but some believe that certain historical circumstances allow it to be placed chronologically eight centuries earlier, between 730 and 750. The Byzantine emperor Leo III the Isaurian, who reigned from 717 to 741, implemented a strict policy against religious images by promulgating an edict in 730 ordering their destruction. Mosaics and frescoes were destroyed with hammers, icons were thrown into the fire and several Greek monks were killed. As a consequence, many religious people, including numerous Basilian monks, took refuge in Italy.[7][8]>The miracle is described as follows: In the city of Lanciano, Italy, then known as Anxanum, some time in the 700s, a Basilian hieromonk was assigned to celebrate Mass at the monastery of St. Longinus. Celebrating in the Roman Rite and using unleavened bread, the monk had doubts about the Catholic doctrine of the real presence. During the Mass, when he said the Words of Consecration ("This is my body. This is my blood"), the priest saw the bread change into living flesh and the wine change into blood, which coagulated into five globules, of different shapes and sizes.[9]>Since there are no contemporary sources, the details and not even the name of the protagonist of the events are known; however, some sources give the idea that he must have been a priest of the Byzantine rite and a Basilian monk.[10]So this supposed miracle happened in the 730s, but the first it appears in history is 1574, which is bad enough, but that is also the height of the Protestant Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, a time when they would be highly motivated to fabricate such a miracle to own the protties, especially considering the story also demonizes the Byzantine iconoclasts
>>18520278>>18520311The story is also anachronistic, since it attributes the mass and transubstantiation to the early 8th century, when the latter would first be formulated about a hundred years later (and received pushback) and the mass would not develop for another 400 years approximately.
>>18519443>When water started trickling down a statue of Jesus Christ at a Catholic church in Mumbai earlier this year, locals were quick to declare a miracle. Some began collecting the holy water and the Church of Our Lady of Velankanni began to promote it as a site of pilgrimage.>So when Sanal Edamaruku arrived and established that this was not holy water so much as holey plumbing, the backlash was severe. The renowned rationalist was accused of blasphemy, charged with offences that carry a three-year prison sentence and eventually, after receiving death threats, had to seek exile in Finland.These "miracles" are just cases of contamination. Catholics perform the Eucharist almost everyday why isn't there overwhelming evidence supporting it?
Why are catholics so schizophrenic lmao
>>18519443How do you explain this? It can be demonstrated with physics if you're sincere to accept the reality of facts. It's demonstrable by repeated testing aswell.
>>18520421>It's demonstrable by repeated testing aswell.What's an example of such a test that has been done?
>>18520315>>18520311>>18520284>>18520278You will turn a blind eye to clear scientific evidence. The host was human flesh, and that's that.
>>18519636>>18519867But how would you even make a cracker from a human heart tissue? Human hearts aren't very big, you know.
>>18521465First, look at your fist. That's about the size of your heart. Now take a holy cracker and place it on your palm. Moreover, if you open the heart, you'll get even more space to cut a cracker from it. Third, cut the cracker. Four, present it to the church as a real holy cracker from a legend that wasn't invented until two hundred years ago, where it slowly mummifies due to good conditions and upkeep (like rather many bodies under church floors have mummified). Sixth, present it to a catholic scientist after hundreds of years, who doesn't submit his study to any peer-review, and whose many problems are raised later, especially regarding the extremely small unreliable sample of 20mg of tissue (usual minimum is 3-400 mg to get any reliable results, he might have literally just seen mammalian flesh) and the fact that there is no real way of telling whether it's blood or not. So no, Lanciano has not been proven, and will not be proven, unless church agrees to a reexamination - which they will never agree to, because they know the high possibility of it being fake, and thus losing followers and pilgrims.
>>18521508Removed flesh cannot mummify. >Linoli's analysis revealed no traces of preservatives in the elements, meaning that the blood could not have been extracted from a corpse, because it would have been rapidly altered."How can unpreserved flesh not decompose?
>>18521465Didn't I already explain? The object could well be...well, exactly what it looks like: a reliquary. Keeping hearts in reliquaries is a well-known practice. See pic related for St. Laurent d'Eu's heart preserved in a reliquary for example.
>>18521569The fucking cracker has a literal hole in it. It's very obviously decomposing. Moreover, your own quote only mentions stuff about the blood. Nothing about the flesh itself. Moreover, there is absolutely no reason to believe that the heart tissue couldn't mummify. We have 3000 year old egyptian hearts from mummies, and Louis XIV's heart is on display to this day. Moreover, dissecting a human heart is not difficult at all in the first place. It's muscle. You can absolutely dissect it, and it's really easy to make a cracker out of one, as I already pointed out. You just cut a thin slice, maybe put it under a stamp etc they use to make those crackers, and voila, a human-shaped holy cracker. If anything, the fact that it is a cracker makes it more likely to mummify, as it's a very small object. People absolutely knew how to dry their meat, and you don't even need any salt for it.
>>18521589The relic looks like this btw. It's no wonder that it has survived without "decomposing".
>>18521629Not decomposing btw
>>18521633>>18521629>>18521589>>18521624How would you explain the crusts of the host, then? How could you even make them on a piece of meat, without it bouncing back?
>>18521656Pic related, though I fail to see how it even relates to the conversation of authencity. There might be numerous reasons for why the "crust" survived the longest. However, what I do find interesting is why there are holes in the crust. What kind of sacramental bread has dozens of random holes around its crust? Wouldn't the more plausible explanation be that those are holes created by small meat hooks used to stretch the piece of meat so it'd become thin as a wafer?
>>18521665You can't make crusts like that for meat.
>>18521680You literally can if you stretch meat. Moreover, it's not crust, and its survival doesn't mean that it used to be bread. It just means that the centre of the meat was thinner than its edges. It's a typical thing that happens when things are stretched. The edges don't get thinner, it's the centre. And once again, why would Jesus allow for the centre of the crust to be so weak, it's begun decomposing away? And why would there be nail or hook marks on sacramental bread?
>>18521413I wasn’t talking about so-called scientific evidence, I was talking about historical evidence that the story is a fabrication. You have been lied to.
>>18519630Because Romanists are not Christians. They are unbelievers holding to a different gospel, which is not another, and caught in the devil’s snare. They are unregenerate and there is no restraint on their flesh. This explains why they have such a long, proud history of lying, cheating, stealing, and murdering. The truth is not in them and they are still in their sins.
>>18521691Doesn't explain the crust.>>18521693Explain the crust. How do you get a crust like that on mummified meat?
>>18521703Explain the crust
>>18521782Is it your position that it is not meat, i.e. is not human flesh?
>>18521826My position is this: It is human flesh that used to be a sacramental bread. Because these breads always have a very distinct crust, the same can be seen in this piece of heart tissue. The edges are much more solid than the centre, which can't be explained if it was just a piece of human flesh that people tried to make to look like sacramental bread. The "crust" or the edges wouldn't be that thick if it wasn't originally bread that was turned flesh. It's very simply impossible. If it is possible, I'd like to see you prove it, because I can't think of a reason.
>>18521850I don’t see a crust at all
>>18519443>>18519453>>18519461Still waiting for this to happen in a White first world nation or the Vatican instead of poor, 3rd world churches who suddenly are met with a flood of donations and faithful pilgrims.
>>18521656>How would you explain the crusts of the host, then?It's no different from how slices of cheese get hard on the outer edges and corner before they get hard in the the middle
>>18521629this looks freaking disgusting. "Behold! A miraculous heart!" no it looks like exactly what it is: a very old gross piece of meat
>>18521629>>18521633like holy lord seeing this I cannot believe how ridiculous Catholics are. If God makes a miraculous heart shouldn't it look alive, gloriously living? Instead it looks like something you find in the back of a Boomer's fridge with a 1977 expiration date
>>18519443Generally, the same way monotheists and caths explain pagan and hindu miracles confirmed by pagan and hindu "scientists", by pointing out they are frauds and hoaxes that aren't repeatable, falsifiable or analyzable..
>>18519443A guy could turn bread in to a hunk of flesh in front of me and that wouldn't be proof of anything except that he was a sorcerer. Would I be inclined to take his word on faith? Maybe. But the act wouldn't be proof of anytbing other than itself. Why would it confirm events that every other investigation deems unlikely to be true? A guy with sorcerous powers is not evidence of the veracity of iron age religious writings.
>>18521871What's the thick and dark stuff around it then?
>>18519480Why does there literally have to be anything at all then, why can't you just imagine yourself being a flesh eater and blood drinker for it to still be the flesh and blood of christ and if that is the case, why aren't imaginary gods just as real as any other?
>>18519451>Eucharistic miracles still happen at the catholic church.
>>18519443How do theists explain people being miraculously healed when regular human kings spit on them?
Regular reminder that a church near Rome claimed to have Jesus' foreskin. An actual piece of Jesus. And therefore an actual piece of the almighty creator of the universe. You know what they did with it? The priest kept it in a shoebox in his wardrobe apart from when it would be put on display once a year.A piece of God, treated like a mouldy wanksock. Unless they didn't actually believe it was real...
>>18522405Examples of this happening? Impossible mode: anything after the invention of photography.
>>18522410After photography like the 8th century example OP gave?https://www.jstor.org/stable/42611999
>>18522412>8th century Yes trust this monk. He would never lie for Christ.
>>18519443Science has not established that Eucharistic miracles are genuine supernatural events.What science can sometimes establish is something much narrower:. A sample contains human tissue.. A sample contains human blood.. The tissue appears to be heart muscle (myocardium).. The blood type appears to be AB.. The sample has unusual characteristics that investigators consider difficult to explain.Don't wait for science to solve things related to truth. Science only deals with facts, and facts change over time. Truth is changeless.
>>18522512>What science can sometimes establish is something much narrower:>. A sample contains human tissue.>. A sample contains human blood.>. The tissue appears to be heart muscle (myocardium).>. The blood type appears to be AB.>. The sample has unusual characteristics that investigators consider difficult to explain.None of those are established either.
>>18522346It looks like coagulated blood. The idea there’s bread crust in there is exclusive to yourself, right? Like, the church claims it’s all flesh and this is your own personal private cope?
>>18522614I think he meant that the edges are flesh, but he thinks they're originally crust that was turned into flesh. He doesn't think there's any bread, but it's flesh that looks like bread. Or that's how I understood it.
>>18522666>>18522346I don't see any fucking crust, or anything even resembling a crust, nor do I think mummified bread crust would look like that in the first place. We have found real ancient sacramental bread, which have cleaner borders than that. Can anyone who knows anything about flesh, is that an unnatural edge or not, and is it impossible for normal flesh to make anything like that? No? There's nothing special about it.
>>18523184>>18522346Here's literally a 1300 year old sacramental bread crust found in Turkey. Why do the borders look nothing like over here >>18521633. We can only see that some parts are darker than others, but it's hardly evidence, since there's no clear shape even being made. Moreover, that dark area is connected in darkness to the edges, just like the centre part at the top. There's literally no evidence of it ever portraying a picture like in many sacramental breads, not even Catholics, who have studied it for centuries, have never mentioned it showing a stamped image of any kind. It might just be congregated blood, as was said earlier, or the tissue could be more thick in that area. And as I said, prove to me that you can't make those kinds of edges with flesh. Because I don't fucking see anything that would point towards this once being made of bread, much less a sacramental bread. And again, why are there fucking holes on the edges, when even this bread has none? And once again, why is there no discernible figure in the flesh, or any kind of clear picture, if they stamped it like sacramental bread? Prove to me that this thing couldn't have been created from a human heart.Moreover, what kind of fucking God lets his flesh decay like this, when one of the main tenets of faith is that his body didn't undergo human changes after death.
>>18523272Actually, let me make this even clearer: The red part is just flesh that has not decayed as much yet. It's not a sign of there being any picture like in sacramental bread. It just means that those parts haven't decayed as much. You can see similar shades of redness under some of the greyish parts. You can see signs of that redness on the sides as well. Moreover, there is also decay on the dark red parts, and outright holes there. Moreover moreover, the fact that the centre is gone pretty clearly means that it has decayed away, and that it was not thick like the "crust". So no, there was no sacramental bread or even a stamp used here to make it from a heart, since there is no image of any kind, and there never was any sort of image. It's just decayed flesh. The edge is not "crust", it never was bread, there is no sacramental image on it, and it was objectively speaking always human tissue.
>>18522522>>18519867>>18519829Here's a top cardiologist looking into the studies.https://catholicexchange.com/the-ancient-eucharistic-miracle-at-lanciano/>The structure of the Flesh does not lend itself to the hypothesis of a “fake” specimen maliciously crafted in previous centuries: only a very expert hand in anatomical dissection could have tangentially cut through the surface of a hollow organ so neatly to obtain such a thin cross section or “slice” from a cadaveric heart (as deduced by the mostly longitudinal course of the bundles of muscle fibers seen in the histological samples).>The specimens — the Blood in particular — would have rapidly undergone putrefaction if originating from a corpse.>However, salts of preservative substances were never detected in the tissue samples.It's impossible for it to have been faked, or what kind of expert hand could have made something like this. I humbly await a debunk.
>>18519905Debunk this: >>18523532How could it have been so expertly cut by human hand? How did it not undergo rapid putrefaction?
>>18523532>>18523534First of all: A skilled human hand would still be able to cut it. Even if Linoli is right, and that somehow cutting this thing would need an expert hand, what does it realistically prove? That the person who cut it had a skilled hand. Is it impossible to cut the hear in such a way? Of course it fucking isn't. That's ridiculous, and even Serafini doesn't claim that it couldn't be cut by human hand. An expert hand, maybe, but it's not like they wouldn't have been able to cut it so. People in the past were pretty good at cutting meat, especially butchers and doctors.>The specimens — the Blood in particular — would have rapidly undergone putrefaction if originating from a corpse.Mummification.That's absolute bullshit. We have many mummified body parts to this day, as pointed out earlier. There's no reason to believe this body part couldn't have been cut from a fresh corpse. Executions of criminals happened often, and they could have used a criminal's heart here. Maybe they even murdered someone to get a fresh heart. People do fucked up shit for stuff like this. There's nothing to point this is somehow unnatural, and even Serafini admits this. Moreover, why did the flesh die, if it's holy?
>>18523611Sorry, I meant that both Linoli and Serafini confirm that although it's a difficult cut, a human could have made it. They don't deny this, just use it as an argument towards there being no unfair play in it. However, that still does not prove that it was not done by human hand.>only a very expert hand in anatomical dissection It was "a very expert hand", but it doesn't prove it was impossible to be cut, and neither of them claim this. This argument still means that a human hand very likely did make the cut. There's no need to believe that there wouldn't have been a human capable of making such a cut. Moreover, it's outright ridiculous to think it would be impossible for a human to make such a cut, but more likely for an actual miracle to have happened here.
>>18523611>>18523651If you read between the lines, they're saying it's impossible to cut by human hand, especially by a medieval person. Moreover, the heart would have needed to be alive.
>>18519443So why did a simple biblical metaphor make catholics shit their pants and want to actually consume human flesh? Is it because they are spiritually brown and therefore cannibalistic?
>>18523718Are you a fucking idiot? Do you enjoy reading into things that they don't say?At no point in the article do they say it's impossible for a human to have cut it, or for it to be unlikely. They just said that it would have required great skill, which they use in favour of a miracle. However, at no point they denied that it would be possible for a human to have cut it. It's objectively very possible. It's not an impossible cut, and they admit this themselves.
