Comment by legohead | Hacker News Reader

Comment by legohead | Hacker News Reader

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from reddit [1]:

* Saint Bartholomew was skinned alive - he is the patron saint of butcher, tanners, book binders etc.

* John the Apostle was boiled alive - he is the patron saint of burn victims

* Simon the Zealot was sawed in half - he is the patron saint of sawyers, lumberjacks and curriers (leather tanners who specialize in shaping and stretching leather)

* St Sebastian was shot full of arrows, recovered, an beaten to death by a bunch of clubs by the emperor's soldiers - he's the saint of archers and soldiers

* St Barbara was tortured and then beheaded, when they were carting her body off, the cart was struck by lighting, catching fire - she's the patron saint of firefighters, artillerymen, and those who work with explosives

* St Lawrence got cooked to death over hot coals. After being roasted for a while, he told his executioner "I'm done on this side, turn me over" - patron saint of cooks and barbeque and comedians

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/b9u3d8/statue_of_sain...

This seems like Polytheism to me.

I find it deeply amusing how much Mankind loves polytheism and yet most of today's major religions are monotheistic.

That's the essential genius of Catholicism - it is monotheistic in doctrine, but polytheistic in practice. It absorbed and adopted the most compelling aspects of pagan practice. If the people want talismans and relics and patron saints a midwinter feast, let them have it.

The idea is that saints, or for what it's worth Mary, cannot really do anything on their own, but they have a direct channel to God to relay your prayers. So it's still monotheistic, the trinity is where things get weird, but it still gives people something they feel "closer to them" than a single omnipotent divinity.

It's not much different from many polytheistic religions though - the idea that there's some kind of supreme proto-deity, from which other more specialized gods derive their powers (or even of which they're facets), is quite common.

And I don't think it's a stretch to assume that this is where the Christian cult of the saints derives from. Especially when you look at some of those saints, and see how they have effectively overlapped with some pagan deity from older times. For example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elijah#Pagan_associations_and_...

Right? Patron saints are such an interesting and weird compromise to polytheism.

Catholics believe that all mankind is made in the image of God. The saints are just the ones who turned out best and we authoritatively know made it to heaven, and thus have achieved the perfection we all had before the Fall. Veneration is not worship, it's more like asking an experienced mentor with access to excellent resources for help.

This all is true as a matter of Church doctrine, but the actual practice among worshippers is rather different (not just in Catholicism - same thing among the Orthodox).

> Catholics believe that all mankind is made in the image of God. The saints are just the ones who turned out best and we authoritatively know made it to heaven

There's a number of problems with that explanation, the three most obvious of which are Ss. Michael, Raphael, and Gabriel.

I was speaking of mankind.

But the cults of saints aren't limited to those saints that were ever part of mankind, so a theological rationalization of such cults that only applies to human saints doesn't address the issue.

There seems to be a deep human desire to seek an ethereal, perfect source of physical reality, human consciousness, and moral order - a non-human sort of Ultimate Truth, be it God or Tao or Buddha or Brahma.

And at the same time, there is something in humanity that recoils from such a thing, so we personify this impersonal vastness and power with a pantheon that gives. . . a more comfortable and familiar user experience.

And of course it's not limited to Christianity. Buddhism is non-theistic (in the Western sense), and yet there's a pantheon of Buddhas of past and future eras, tantric meditation deities, emanations, incarnations, benevolent devas, etc. Tibetan Buddhism in particular innovates deeply into this territory.

> most of today's major religions are monotheistic.

While certainly most people are monotheistic, it's really just two religions, and they worship the same god.

Polytheism seems deeply default.

Looking at wikipedia it seems to be 57% mono, 20% poly, 23% null (secular or buddhist).

Sure, but that monotheisic number isn't a large number of religions. It's completely dominated by what are all offshoots of the same religion.

Almost every culture that develops religion independently develops a polytheistic religion. Those almost never morph into monotheistic religions.

The numbers of adherents are just dominated by Christianity and Islam, which are by no coincidence the principle proselytising religions in history. In fact proselytism was historically rarely observed outside of those two religions.

I guess it's easier to proselytise for the one true God than for an assortment.

So what did Saint Isidore suffer to become the patron saint of the Internet? Get trolled?

He seems to have pioneered an early version of Wikipedia

>His fame after his death was based on his Etymologiae, an etymological encyclopedia which assembled extracts of many books from classical antiquity that would have otherwise been lost.

It became so popular that the originals weren’t though highly enough to be copied, and were lost. Wonder if there’s any parallels here.

That time as Christianity was forming itself is so interesting to look at if you were raised in a particular sect - the idea that there is any truly singular deity-preferred way to live seems laughable given how many differences of opinion there was even in the earliest church - frequently the only justification is that because a set of ideas succeeded it must be right, in a sort of might makes right sense.

56k dial-up connection falling back to 9.6kbps due to line noise.

St Sebastian is also the gay saint, boyfriend of Maximian or Diocletian or both. And while I imagine this is not the canonical myth, it is certainly more fabulous.

Saint Nicolas (the historical Turkish man, not Santa) gave money to poor families that would have otherwise been forced to sell their daughters into prostitution. He is thus the patron saint of prostitutes.

'Jesus Evil Green' aka Jesús Malverde, the narco-saint. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jes%C3%BAs_Malverde

Here's the Wikipedia on St. Lawrence: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Lawrence

it was the result of a mistaken transcription, the accidental omission of the letter "p" – "by which the customary and solemn formula for announcing the death of a martyr – passus est ["he suffered," that is, was martyred] – was made to read assus est [he was roasted]."

The real roast is always in the comments. I like to imagine that it wasn't so much a transcription error as it was a bored monk looking for some variety.

>St Lawrence

According to Wikipedia his story is apocryphal.

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