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Comment by aj7 | Hacker News Reader

In Israel, virtually every Christian relic is fake. Some are hundreds of years old, but nevertheless fake. This is not a comment on Christianity as a religion. Religions need relics, and if they can’t find them, they are created. This is operating in modern times. I was working as a contractor for Intel Israel. They took everybody on a day trip. To an LDS temple to “see the organ” (what else?). An American LDS church. Needed a place in Israel to “represent.” Now wait 100 years. You wait. I have things to do.

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> Religions need relics, and if they can’t find them, they are created.

I have long believed that being religious primes people to also lose the ability to think critically in other areas of their lives.

> In Israel, virtually every Christian relic is fake.

The Italian Catholics have got a handle on this with many of their relics.

Bits of various saints are in glass boxes all over Italy. Presumably they could be DNA tested?

DNA tested for what, exactly? I guess things like fragmentary remains may not be human, but a full skull is not so easy to confuse for a donkey. Ethnicity would only be useful if the saint in question had origins that would be out of place in Italy or if they had a specific ethnicity(like St Peter's remains not having a Levantine origin).

Yes well there are other things you could do with a DNA genotype than tag ethnicity or confirm it's human. Specifically related to a similarity metric between genotypes (which is how we go about arriving at an ethnicity estimate)

For example

if said saint has any known living relatives (and we are certain of that), then this confirms the veracity of the relic.

if said saint has multiple relics of various body parts, we DNA test each one and examine concordance.

of course a DNA test may QC fail, not enough DNA, too low quality, etc. But if it passes then we potentially have dead to rights a confirmation or refutation of the relic. For this reason I expect the church would be quite recalcitrant to have it tested, because there is a possible outcome that the relic is revealed to be a fake

"Consistency" whatever that might be.

Dave Allen's great joke about the relics concerns a doubter pressing on why there were two skulls of different sizes attributed to Saint Placeholder.

The answer was straightforward enough;

this one is his skull taken from his concecrated tomb in the Abbey of Overthere,

and this was his skull from when he was a child.

Soviets did this in 1918-20, without DNA analysis, of course.

https://ru-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%B0%D0...

Older relics can be tested, but the Catholic church won't really allow it, e.g. San Gennaro's blood in Naples is a flask of red clotted liquid which melts during some ceremonies, and is quite likely not blood at all. But there's a massive community of believers and thus it will not be challenged by the church.

For more modern miracles and relics the church does have a tight grip, and famously one pope threw a whole bag of Christ teeth in the Tiber river, but many older things have been "grandfathered".

Relics are only a way of advertising the religion.

We should ban advertisements of religions. If their gods are so powerful then they shouldn't need advertising. And if you are a believer AND god turns out to be real then banning advertising could lead to the return of Jesus. Win win.

> Relics are only a way of advertising the religion.

I can't follow you here. Relics only have a meaning when you already believe them to be relics and no just random bones. How is that advertising?

No, you don't have to be religious to understand what religious symbols are about.

You can understand them, but there is no point for you, since they don't mean anything to you.

Depends on how much "supporting evidence" you give me.

I don't really think I got your point. All "evidence" that the bones in location X are really those of St. Y, won't have any effect on you, when you don't care about St. Y at all, because you don't believe in that religion.

Imagine you have no religion, but are feeling spiritual and want to find something real. Do you go to the church of a religion that claims it has the actual remains of their saints, or the one that only has pictures and empty walls?

Actually, maybe that's a stupid question as people absolutely do both. But there is an element of "look how great we are because we have a splinter from the holy cross in our church".

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