Your post seems to disregard the self-evident fact that Giblets is Pope already -- and clearly has always been so. The death of the anti-pope John Paul is merely the occasion on which the true Servus Servorum Dei (a title soon to be modified to the more appropriate Dominus Servorum Gibletsi) will emerge from his Avignonian exile. Bow before Giblets!
"Pope Can't Be Faded" should be on a t-shirt, in block letters on the front, with nothing on the back, and I should own said t-shirt.
Last night at my house, we were contemplating how the Vatican would handle it if JPII came back to life as a zombie. Would Cardinal Ratzinger announce, "He's back -- and ten times more powerful!"? Would he still be considered the same person and thus still be pope, or does death automatically end a papacy, such that the zombie JPII would have to be re-elected? And how would he react if he wasn't re-elected?
"A zombie pope sees his papal throne usurped -- and now he's out for blood!"
In Dan Simmons's Hyperion series, people gain the power of ressurection, and, yes, the Pope has to be re-elected after each death. I think we can accept Simmons as an expert on hypothetical Catholic Church by-laws.
Besides, we have to have a succession of popes or the End Times can't come. (though who cares, really. Only Mormons go to Heaven. Why. if only Mormons have it right, the end times depend upon the pope-variable, is one of the mysteries of god. Behold his unfathomableness.)
Compute the odds of the energy requirements of a resurrection being exactly the total output of a nomal main-sequence G2 star.
Discuss your answer.
I recognize all of those words, but is "energy requirements of a resurrection" referring to something? Presumably, the answer (to both my question and the one about the odds) is 42.
The question re zombies is probably answered in the Pope comic book, including the history of the Pope's Devil-proof cape, and chastity pants.
A resurrection, if possible, would require energy. How much?
I don't know. If souls required batteries, would they take AAA or AAAA? Would they require 3 or 4 batteries? Would the batteries last for longer than one month?
textualist, why can't you ever be serious about anything? Jesus.
John,
I think the bigger problem would actually be the memory requirement, seeing as how you'd have to put things back together in the exact place they were, including, I suppose, positions of subatomic particles. Simmons takes a sci-fi shot at how this is done (it requires more memory than there are atoms in the universe), but it's been too long for me to remember his answer.
Michael, the answer is that it's stored in the Void Which Binds, which is some kind of dimensional expression of the Planck distance.
What a great fucking series that is. I read it at least once a year, sometimes twice. Did you read Ilium or Worlds Enough and Time?
Actually it's quite simple to revive a corpse, if you have the ingredients. (I just made a #2, sans pastis because I forgot about it (plus I don't have any, though I bet some peychaud's bitters, which I do have, would work reasonably ok), and it was quite good. A little sweet. I bet bitters would be an admirable corrective.)
Do all craggy Irish islands get their own cardinals? (Also: worth it just for "sweet sistine".)
Walt, awesome, another Simmons fan! I haven't read Worlds, but I read Ilium shortly after it came out. Man, was that book like crack. I read it in like 5 days (good, for me. Alameida I am not.) because of those eternal cliff-hanger chapters.
Hey, where'd my comment go? Anyway, Father Ted Crilly is a fictional character (google him and see).
