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

[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...