Lack of faith is a good thing. How can you be wrong for not believing something without any evidence to back it up?

If you have to have faith to believe that an old rag has an impression of some dead bloke on it is actually 1200 years older than it is, then you can easily replace the word faith with gullible.

And what question do you have about stigmata? How many confirmed instances have you seen?

What is it about these two things that make you want to believe in a god?

A TV commercial. The main character, a woman, says to her BFF, "No, sorry, I can't go to the gym with you today."

BFF: It's your stigmata again, isn't it?

Woman: I just don't feel in control!

BFF: Have you tried Stigmex? I read an article that it really works!

Voiceover (an authoritative male, of course): In clinical trials, Stigmex reduced or eliminated unsightly stigmata in over sixty percent of the cases!

Cut to Woman, happily riding a bike in a skimpy outfit. "Thanks to Stigmex, I've got my life back again!"

The words miracle and magic share the same meaning, That is something that takes place outside the laws of physics. If something is outside the laws of physics it by definition is not real.

As humans we naturally are inclined to assign agency to any thing we do not understand. It is also known as the "god of the gaps fallacy. "I don't know,therefore God."

The shroud of Turin and Stigmata have in no way been proven by science to have any validity concerning the claims of believers. Their mystery is really just hype propagated by believers. Let's say that science for some reason seemed the validate the claims but we still did not know their origins. Would it actually mean that they were supernatural? By definition the answer would be no. If it exist or has been created outside of natural means by magic it by is not real.

So what are we left with? We simply don;t know. It is perfectly fine to say I don't know. I don;t know the origins or the universe but I'm not going to pretend to know what I do not know and attribute it to a magic god in the sky.

I did see a really interesting documentary on how science has used modern technology to reveal the face and body of the person who was wrapped in the shroud of Turin. Amazing what forensic science can accomplish these days.

Was this person Jesus Christ? Who knows? But it is clear that the person who was wrapped in the shroud of Turin was tortured to death, and the wounds on the body match those described in the Bible. That's not really defining evidence one way or the other. Torture techniques used during that time period were probably pretty consistent.

why do people assume a mystical answer when they are confronting an unknown? thats why we are in this whole mess of deities within a religion in the first place.

It all started out as the "rules" (or whatever we want to call them) that existed in the little communities that were bound together by farming. We had shifted from nomadic hunter/gatherers grouped mostly as a small, immediate family to little farms with many family members and other families even ... spreading to the point of making the first villages. To live together they had a few rules that would inevitably arise as we were always accustomed to just familial closeness in the past.

This is where the doctrines that would eventually form religious beliefs first began - from the social interaction necessary at the shift from hunter/gatherers to farmers. If we'd left the stupid "assumed mysticism" out of it we'd have the history of a nice set of social documents that could refine future governance. Instead we taint it with "spiritual beliefs".