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Comment by svieira | Hacker News Reader

The extra interesting wrinkle here is that each of the Burger Kings in the straight line are associated with an appearance of the Burger King himself explicitly asking for a shrine in the location, while the others are mostly random franchises stuck up by someone who decided they would like a fast food restaurant here and it might as well be a Burger King.

(i. e. Mont Saint Michele the bishop who saw St. Michael originally refused to construct the shrine because he wasn't sure of the veracity of the vision. It was only after he was wounded by St. Michael's sword and the wound refused to heal that he went to establish the shrine. And only then did the wound closed up.)

Make of that what you will.

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The level of credulity displayed here is pretty amusing.

but just to back that up:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skellig_Michael#History

Not a cathedral, No mention of an appearance of St Michael, and the monastery predates the dedication to him (it?) by several centuries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Michael%27s_Mount

Not a cathedral, site predates dedication to michael. No mention of an appearance of michael.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont-Saint-Michel

This one has a story of an appearance, still not a cathedral

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacra_di_San_Michele

Not a cathedral, does have a story about an appearance, but that site significantly predates that appearance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Michele_Arcangelo,_Perugia

Pre christian temple that was converted, not a cathedral

Taxiarchi Michail

Monastary, not a cathedral

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stella_Maris_Monastery

Not even dedicated to michael.

1. Shrines, not cathedrals.

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Michael%27s_Mount#Folklore - "There are popular claims of a tradition that the Archangel Michael appeared before local fishermen on the mount in the 5th century AD.[44] But in fact this is a modern myth. The earliest appearance of it is in a version by John Mirk, copying details of the medieval legend for Mont-Saint-Michel from the Golden Legend.[45] The folk-story was examined and found to be based on a 15th-century misunderstanding by Max Muller."

    > an appearance of the Burger King himself explicitly asking for a shrine in the location

Is this canonically BK lore?

Not _yet_

That's neat! However, if each burger king was so enshrined by king burger, then there would again be nothing interesting. So, were these the only sites that were selected in that way?

Second, is this a post-hoc story we told about the shrines (perhaps to avoid destruction / re-purposing by a greedy local lord?)

Put another way, if there are 10,000 shrines to this one saint around Europe, the probability that 7 will randomly be in a straight line on the Mercator projection is a lot higher than if there are <10.

10^-8 compared to -16?

I don't think it's that low. The number of coincidences will rise exponentially with the number of churches. You also have to account for the fact that there are something like 1000 prominent Catholic saints, and 10's of usable map projections, etc.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alignments_of_random_points for a thorough treatment of this topic, with citations to the published literature.

> are associated with an appearance of the Burger King himself explicitly asking for a shrine in the location

...According to the guy trying to sell you a big mac or whatever they are called there.

Whoppers. And yes, they are trying to sell you a whopper of a tale.

Judging from the ingredients, the Big King is more comparable.

Your information is out of date. EU recently reaffirmed the Irish ruling, so we can expect this to spread:

https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/food-and-drink/lik...

Royal with cheese

Another 'e' is required in this sentence.

Anothere 'e' is required in this sentence.

Do you want fries with that?

I mean… it’s fake, obviously. Seeing visions of dead saints and being wounded and unable to heal until a shrine was built is all made up. None of that is real, that’s medieval superstition.

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