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With great humility, I am honored to inform you that Eric Crampton of Offsetting Behavior has nominated me for sainthood.
Riffing off yesterday’s Acta Sanctorum post, Eric is asking for your help in making this a reality:
So, here’s the campaign for Saint Steven.
- Any of you who have any kind of illness at all pray to Steven Landsburg for intervention.
- If you do not receive divine Landsburgean intervention, don’t tell me about it.
- If you do receive divine Landsburgean intervention, please leave a record of such in the comments. Preferably with a link to a doctor’s note saying that your recovery was unexpected and pretty remarkable. This should happen in maybe 1% of cases.
- We submit the documented evidence of the successes, while ignoring the failures. Ta-dah! Saint Steven.
My hope is to beat John Paul II’s record of two reported cures, plus the toppling of one Evil Empire, or, at a minimum, the National Endowment for the Arts. Oh, and while I’m at it I have a couple of other worldly improvements in mind. Watch your step, Paul Krugman!
Seems like something Penn and Teller would have dreamed up. I mean that as a complement!
Will you turn Krugman into wine?
It would appear that the requirements are for pot mortem miracles. Also a heroic death is helpful. One definite requirement is to be dead:
“Catholics believe that both types of saints (canonized and acclaimed) are already in Heaven, which is why one of the requirements for the canonization process is proof of miracles performed by the possible saint after his death.”
St. Paul probably takes offense at this post. Mocking a canonized figure is an unkind thing to do.
Oh, I’m talking about the St. Paul who writes for the NYT, not the one on the road to Damascus.
@#3, I prefer St. Pauli Girl http://www.flickr.com/photos/mbell1975/6372649161/
I once thought I knew something about mathematics. Thanks to Steve, I have been cured of that delusion. And I am a doctor, so this is a doctor’s note.
There are some more requirements. You might want to join the Church, get baptized, repent for your sins, lead a virtuous life, spread the Gospels, drop dead, and then try to arrange some miracles after you are dead.
Harold:
It would appear that the requirements are for pot mortem miracles.
Another requirement is that there be at least two such miracles, but my understanding is that this requirement was waved for Pope John XXIII. Given the precedent, I see no reason why the post mortem requirement should not be waived in my case.
#5 – Magnificent jugs! (sorry-couldn’t help myself)
TedLevy (#6): You might want to repost this at Offsetting Behavior to make sure I get full credit for it.
I had an itch earlier today, prayed to Steve, and now it’s gone. Miracle #1.
You and Eric forgot to to request notes from those who don’t pray to Steve and don’t recover.
And you claim to have stats training!!
@Roger 7:
Like St Thomas More?
I only ask because he tortured and burned people for owning Bibles in English, and I wondered if that counted as spreading the Gospels or as leading a virtuous life?
I am not the judge. I would give him a few indulgences for debunking Krugman, but the Vatican has other standards.
Yeah so funny. But let it be known that I am all for lowering the standards for according sainthoods. With more sainthoods in their pockets people will feel the urge to do more good to others. Gross Ethical Product will go through the roof. Call it the sainthood multiplier.
Added by SL: At the risk of trampling on a good joke, I feel obliged to mention, just in case there’s doubt in anyone’s mind, that this was not posted by the prominent journalist Paul Krugman.
In the old days of SNL, Father Guido Sarducci bemoaned the canonization of an American saint, thinking she was not held to a tough-enough standard:
To be made a saint in-a the catholic church, you have to have-a four miracles. That’s-a the rules, you know. It’s-a always been that-a. Four miracles, and-a to prove it. Well, this-a Mother Seton-now they could only prove-a three miracles. But the Pope-he just waved the fourth one. He just waved it! And do you know why? It’s-a because she was American. It’s all-a politics. We got-a some Italian-a people, they got-a forty, fifty, sixty miracles to their name. They can’t-a get in just cause they say there’s already too many Italian saints, and this woman comes along with-a three lousy miracles. I understand that-a two of them was-a card tricks.
To become a Saint you have to be dead.
“To become a Saint you have to be dead.”
Steve is working on that. Patience, patience.
I think referring to the “real” Paul Krugman as a “prominent journalist” justifies sainthood on its own….
I’ll be keeping a spreadsheet of everything I pray for and the outcome. In a year I’ll let you know if prayer has any effect on the outcomes of things I want done or what I want seen.
Ah God and Miracles. Let’s apply the lottery reasoning to the laws of nature. Last week Dudley wins the lottery, and given that he won it, the lottery must have been rigged in his favour. Actually, last week Dudley didn’t win it – someone called Bob did – therefore the lottery must have been rigged in Bob’s favour. As the fallacy shows, it is not rigged, it is just that having found Dudley or Bob to be the winner we know either of them is the person about whom it should be said “Someone had to win it”. Arguably this is the same kind of fallacy presented when someone says that the laws of physics that were just right for us give exhibition to God’s special plan for us. In the same way we commit the lottery fallacy, some set of laws were going to exist, and we happen to have won the lottery of life by being in the right kind of universe.
You see, if you consider this question – “Which scenario is more likely; that humans exist because we happen by chance to be in the right kind of universe, or because God created the right kind of universe?” we find we are unable to make a proper comparison between those probabilities. Suppose you have to have a guess – which should you choose? Given the many kinds of universe, it could be argued that ‘God created the right kind of universe’ is more probable than ‘we happen by chance to be in the right kind of universe’.