Tag Archives: john paul II

Sainthood by linear acceleration

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Former Pope John Paul II will be promoted to full sainthood in early 2014, setting a new record. Although the church admits that they (almost literally) ran though this process – faster than any time in the millennia before – they claim it still holds up to rigorous standards and close scrutiny.

And then they come up with this brilliant bit of reasoning:

“In fact, canonization by the Catholic Church simply formalizes on earth what is already in place in heaven. […] It’s not like Karol Wojtyla, John Paul II, will suddenly become a saint when the canonization ceremony occurs. The belief would be he is already in heaven with God, living the life of a saint. All that’s going to happen when the ceremony occurs is that the church will officially recognize that.”

OK. But then why have a process at all?

Holy Alka Seltzer!

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True ‘Miracles’ have become indistinguishable from the Placebo Effect, as the Catholic Church officially proved today.

In a couple of months, the catholic church will make saints out of two former priests. That’s nice. We’ll just note as an aside that they are made saints, and therefore, by definition up until now did not have had to be saints.

But just what is required of someone to become a saint? First, you have to be dead. That’s sensible – this precludes that future unsaintly actions of yours could embarrass the church. But the church allegedly sets ‘high standards’ before they elevate someone into sainthood. In the case of the late Pope John Paul II, the church requires no less than two miracles.

Now, that is a high standard. The problem is: the church has a lamentably low standard when it comes to miracles. This pretty much mirrors the way people nowadays believe that random occurrences are miracles. In NGNG is snidely commented:

Gods in the past created the universe, parted seas, smote unbelievers, regularly performed miracles on the grandest of scale, raised the dead, drowned whole populations and caused plagues. Today it is already considered a miracle when His/Her face appears on an ice cream stain. How pathetic is that? Gods of Today are sissies, while their believers talk up the good old times when their god still had some machismo.

The same pathetic standard is now applied to miracles performed by priests. The alleged ‘miracles’ are just two counts of a spontaneous remission of an illness. A real miracle would be if someone spontaneously regrows an arm or leg. If that happens, I’d be the first to acknowledge it. But – come on! – something that can’t be distinguished from the Placebo Effect? Something that is bound to happen given the sheer number of ill people? The only miracle here is that they only found two cases.

Now, if I was to be sainted for that, those ‘miracles’ would have been an embarrassment to me. After all, my fellow saints did some really miraculous stuff, not just a couple of lousy remissions.

The question here is when the Church will make Alka Seltzer a holy substance. After all, I can attest to it’s miraculous power to cure headache. More than just once.