Outrageous abuse of terminology

[dsrtao]

A 'megachurch' is commonly defined as a church building in which 2000 people can be expected every Sunday.

A 'gigachurch' is merely 5 times that large.

Objection one: apparently a megachurch is really a 2-kiloperson church.
Objection two: a gigachurch should be a thousand times larger than a megachurch.

Anytime someone says "megachurch", please ask them whether there are a million people going there, or whether they consider each worshipper to be 500 times more important than each of their neighbors.

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Your culture has been subverted.

I knew we should have drawn the line at "mega = 1024*1000".

Hadn't heard "gigachurch". Maybe what we really need is names for 10^x (x≠3y). Hectachurch describes most; myriachurch would describe gigachurches, and has the bonus of being biblical-sounding; can't think of anything for 10^5....

[dsrtao]

Alternatively, perhaps the standard church only has 1/500 of a person going there. That would be... a toe? A small toe?

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Maybe you're counting the number of prayers per annum. A church is one prayer per year; so if each person prays 1-2x per day then a megachurch, with 2000 people x 500 ppy works out fine. Gigachurches obviously teach drastically more efficient ways of praying, so that you can get in 2-500 prayers per day.

Then you can start measuring godpower in available ppy, which is a nice time-based unit like Watts; though miracles may cost a certain ppy in upkeep or just a fixed p, depending on whether they are one-time (Burning Bush) or continuous (Parting the Red Sea probably cost a few kpps). This may also be why Muslims pray multiple times per day, to get their ppy up and keep Allah well-lit.

The funny thing is how useful a measure this sort of thing would be in a D&Dish universe.

[dsrtao]

That provides an explanation for ... google, google... http://www.presidentialprayerteam.org/

Oh dear.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

I think it only works if you pray to deities that exist. (Of course, some would say I have cause and effect reversed, there...)

Now, that would be an interesting option. "Today, you can either vote for your candidate -- or you can pray for him to win. At the end of the day, votes will be tallied." Might cause a major shift in the political situation...

Very Funny

[robertdfeinman.livejournal.com]

During the last election the Republicans sent out a mailing which said in effect "to control crowds, Republicans are to vote on election day and Democrats on the day after".

Using your idea we could have the Dems send out one that says:

"The faithful need not bother to vote in person, your prayers will be recorded instead". Should be a big winner.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

In a universe like that, the first religion to invent the equivalent of the Tibetan Prayer Wheel gains a huge technological advantage.

[dsrtao]

It was either Heinlein (_Magic, Inc_) or Anderson (_Operation Chaos_) who mentioned that nuclear wars (possibly any nuclear bombs at all) were being prevented by Tibetan prayer wheels.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Now I'm envisioning hand-crank semi-automatic "prayer guns", where you feed in a long belt of prayer scrolls, they get pulled into the machine, auto-prayed, and bolts of pray-energy come out the far side...

[dsrtao]

Telecommunications would allow huge stadiums full of the devout to pray at once for the same event, unleashing massive bolts of coherent deity-power that would devastate the world.

In such a universe, an atheist is an idiot.

What would keep the gods from theocalypse? Not much, I think.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

theocalypse

Well, we've got a title now...

[dsrtao]

Maybe this hasn't happened yet because few people are really believing in the same god. Oh, sure, they all call on the same name, but their mental conceptions are too disparate.

Unfortunately, when we get mechanical telepathy as a side effect of brain interfaces and/or upload hacking, people can really share a vision of a god, at which point that one can gain enough power to manifest... is a monolithic theocracy a self-fulfilling prophecy, or are the Chinese experimenting on peasant prisoners fast enough to stop JesusBob from taking over?

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Or maybe most miracles are off-world; we live in a strongly decided area, so the Gods don't war over us. Meanwhile, on Tau Ohio 3, smear campaigns between Thor and YHWH are getting downright nasty ever since that flaming meteor smacked into the Christian Continent...

I guess I'll have to think twice if I'm ever tempted to name a child "Meg" ...

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

*shrug* 'Mega' used to simply mean "big", and here it does again. I've got no problem with that. I mean, I don't expect a megalomaniac to be 100 clones of the band 10,000 Maniacs ...

(OTOH, I hadn't heard "gigachurch" before, and while "giga-" etymologically ought to be able to be used for merely "giant", not just "a billion of", I don't think I'd ever heard it as other than a metric-system prefix or parody thereof, so I'm inclined to agree about "gigachurch" being wrong. Maybe if it were a denomination that had a billion congregations, I'd call that a gigachurch ...)

[liamstliam.livejournal.com]

You are clearly using different values of mega and giga than these folks are.

And you don't frighten me nearly as much as they do.

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

These are the people that can't tell the difference between a scientific hypothesis and a scientific theory, and you expect them to understand the whole powers of ten prefix system?

[siderea]

*snkr* Well put.