Hello, er can we have your liver...?

Mazille wrote:When my girlfriend and I were in Jerez last summer we stumbled across a vial of JP2's blood in the cathedral there. You know, this whole fascination with relics (parts of long dead people, mostly) is weird enough as it is, but we were wondering how such a relatively new relic came to be in the first place.

I'd wonder more of the underlying logic of relics.

Is the divine (rather than the psychological placebo or contemplative) effect of a relic supposed to be rarity-dependent, or would it work just as well if there was a JP2 relic in every church.
Are the relics supposed to be drawing JP2's finite saintly attention to specific places to make it more likely he intercedes on behalf of people praying there to ask God for help?
If so, does the existence of relics make it less likely that people in general elsewhere can use him as a conduit (if someone destroyed the stolen item in question, would that make most believers slightly better off)?

Would it mean that when some medieval cathedral shared its relics (like giving one of its collection of saint X's finger bones to another church) it was actually being especially generous since it was making its own collection less effective?

I guess one could ask the same about icons.
Are they all given some amount of power from an infinite supply when they are made (in which case, why not make one of every saint for every believer)?
Do they share power from some finite pool, meaning new icons devalue the rest?
Do they get power from some finite pool on being made, in which case what happens when the pool is empty?
Does ceremony and prayer recharge individual relics and/or the whole pool.

And for people who have answers for the above, where do those answers come from?
Was a set of icon operating instructions given to someone to write down, or have the mechanisms been worked out by reverse engineering and experiment?

Or do the people running things not really believe in a divine effect, but one which comes purely from the believer's own mind?

I don't disagree with you on any point, but trying to figure out the metaphysical inticracies of all this mumbo jumbo seems like wasted effort to me. Those who believe it don't understand it, because they made it up as they went along for millenia and those who don't believe it tend not to care. That stuff's basically so far out, trying to highlight the idiocy is like trying to underline green text on green paper with a green marker.

I find it far more amusing to just point out the practicalities of the process.

Must have been vampires

tolman wrote:Are they all given some amount of power from an infinite supply when they are made (in which case, why not make one of every saint for every believer)?

Because...

There are more than 10,000 canonized Roman Catholic saints.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_saints

I know the cafflicks are into mass production, but that would be a bridge too far even for them!

He's not been beatified yet has he? This is presumably an investment theft.

Oh, no, he was beatified in a real hurry. He's probably going to be made a saint this year too.

Scientists Use Acid to Turn Blood Cells into Stem Cells in 30 Minutes

Coincidence? I think not!

Great, we're gonna clone him?

B.B.C. - Papal relic case found but blood-soaked cloth still missing

Eugh!

Onyx8 wrote:Great, we're gonna clone him?

It was probably Nazis. They heard that whatever army carried the vial before it would never be defeated in battle. Then they opened it at a secret U-boat base in the Mediterranean, and then got squished by Industrial Light & Magic's special effects.