I think your statements about paganism is what the Protestant branch of Christianity would say as well.

Another slightly unrelated anecdote: I once heard from a former priest that Catholics pray to the saints because they can’t believe that a father (male-like God figure) could be compassionate and would care about their troubles. I don’t know if that’s true, but I think it’s an indictment of men as fathers in general :/

The criteria for sainthood is three-fold:

1. The person must be dead.
2. The person must have lived a life of heroic virtue for the Christian life.
3. There must be more than 1 confirmed miracle attributed to the potential saint AFTER they have died. (Though I think martyrs only need 1 miracle.)

The idea in the Catholic faith is that the dead watch the living and plead with God on the living’s behalf. Therefore, if a miracle happens after a person has prayed to a potential Saint, that Saint may be attributed with that miracle (for the proposes of sainthood).

I like to think of it like the commission that clothing store clerks get. When you go to make your purchase at the Bloomingdale’s, the cashier would say “Did anyone help you with your purchase today?” And if you say “yes, Mandy recommended I get the red windbreaker instead of the grey overcoat”, then Mandy the store clerk gets the credit for the sale.

The potential saint gets credit for the miracle. There’s usually a long investigation by the church to prove that 1) a miracle actually happened, and 2) that the saint was “involved” somehow. In this case it seems like the investigation was abbreviated.

Definitely sounds like a trap.

(What follows is a slightly unrelated anecdote.) I knew a guy who was a tax preparer back in 2009 when Obama put out the “Making Work Pay” stimulus. You basically got a tax refund of like $400 per person if you met a pretty lenient criteria.

Well, my buddy told me that during the 2009 tax season, he would constantly have people coming into his office trying to file taxes, but they hadn’t filed in a few years. After hours of getting their paperwork together and running through the tax schedules for each year, the tax payer would find out that they owed thousands of dollars in back payments. Rather than file their taxes and paying the delinquent taxes, they would just say “yeah, all I wanted was the $400” and just walk out.

I’m sure the IRS cleaned up that year if anyone who owed was bold enough to actually file.

YUP

Can’t imagine what it would be like to lead so many people at 28. Really cool story.

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Zed’s dead, baby. Zed’s dead.