With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
I'd support the nomination for Saint Popper and would also nominate SaintBronowski.
His outstanding 1993 BBC TV series "The Ascent of Man" contain insights anticipating memetics and with great insights into epistemology, science and tolerance. He deserves credit for his role in the very positive meme.
"When people believe they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave (crouching in the mud at Auschwitz). This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods", Episode 11: "Knowledge or Certainty"
How about Saint Einstein?
Saints are an inspiration, an example and more than a bibliographic entry.
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." -- Isaac Newton
The saint idea is a succesful meme that we can happily appropriate from other churchmemes.
I think it would be a good idea to name certain individuals "prophets" (or some other term, but I like that one) if sacred memes were revealed to them. Saint Darwin was clearly a prophet, as were, say, Einstein, or Newton, or Watson & Crick.
In my view, all prophets are not necessarily saints - Watson was part of the origin of an important meme, but his personality isn't worth emulating. And all saints are not necessarily prophets - it's hard to think of saintly people who weren't the originators of new memes, as they're not usually famous, but Galileo is in that direction. The most famous meme associated with him is the heliocentric universe - the Copernican model. What's admirable about Galileo is that he promoted his meme in the face of religious opposition; but he wasn't the meme's first host. He did come up with many of his own new memes, but none had such fecundity as the one he caught from Copernicus and with which he managed to infect the educated world.
Sainthood could be given to individuals solely based on their status as prophets, but I think that those whose actions we should emulate must be elevated above those with whose memes we should become infected.
So, if revelation doesn't bring sainthood, should Darwin remain a saint? Yes, I think so. Anyone could have thought of natural selection sooner or later (though with the exception of Wallace, no one did), but Saint Darwin's care and restraint in delivering such a dangerous memeplex delicately but forecfully to a hostile populace is admirable.
OK. That all seems fairly sensible. I'm still a little unhappy about the word though because it has a whiff of the implication of the existence (is that spelled with an "a"? i can't be bothered to check.) of divine entities. I was going to suggest "hero" as an alternative, but even that means "demi-god" in origin apparently! I supose the word "church" has just as much a whiff of divinity as "saint", and I'm complaining about that!
The word seems (to me) to keep in line with the rest of the Church's terms, like Saints, Sins, Virtues, etc. - by using the same words that theistic churches use, the CoV actually punctuates its nontheism more clearly. However, I concede that "prophet" is more confusing than most, in that it implies revelation. I'm not creative enough, but maybe someone else should think of other possibilities.
Yea. I see what you mean about the profuion of religious terminology in the CoV. Actually the other reason I disliked the term "saint", which I neglected to mention, was that it could have connotations of superiority over others - as if some people are better and more holy than others. I see now though that the term is appropriate really.
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