Saints, and scholars—and maybe a pagan or seven

So Australian Mary MacKillop has been declared a “saint” by the Pope in Rome for her “submission to the will of God.”  [VIDEO]

A farce built on a fatuity. A submission of a self to a shaggy dog story.  A veneration of nonsense over fact, and of sacrifice over self-interest.

Every time I hear of someone being declared a “saint” I think “how stupid”—since every saint must be recorded has having committed two “miracles,” a fatuous fiction that the “saint”  has the ability (somehow) to suspend or to alter the laws of reality.

I think “how wrong”—how wrong that the only life one human being will ever have has been devoted to denying their chance at happiness on this earth in the vague hope of buying themselves some happiness in another.

And I wonder “by what authority?”—since neither Jesus nor any of his disciples ever mentioned “sainthood” at all.

Which is why, at the same time, I smile quietly to myself. I smile quietly to myself because the whole institution of “sainthood” is just a throwback to the very pagan religions that Christianity claims to have usurped, and to the very idols the pagans worshipped.

Every new saint is a victory for the pagans.

You see, rather than force the good pagan folk of two-thousand years ago to abandon their golden calves, statues of Horus and keepsakes of Venus (as the rules of new religion actually demanded), the second and third century Christians instead began designating “saints” to supplant them all, which in some cases meant building new churches over the very sites the pagans venerated (S. Maria Maggiore, on the site of a temple to the goddess Cybele, is one celebrated example), inventing Christian holidays to supplant the time-honoured pagan ones (an abstemious Christmas most-famously taking over from the far more salacious Saturnalia), and in virtually every case it meant slicing body parts off the new saints to perform the same tasks a superstitious pagan’s rabbit’s foot was called to do.

As barbarous as it was nonsensical.

A “saint” makes about as much sense now as a rabbit’s foot or a horoscope ever did. Which is why the celebrations for this new “saint”—like the celebrations of every “saint”—are as farcical as celebrating the purchase of a new good luck charm.