So if some guy really did die and come back to life…

…wouldn’t it be kind of a big deal?

Speculative exercise – guy actually comes back to life after getting executed, what would happen?

Like, I suppose the government would try to crack down, kill anyone who saw it or thought that it had happened. You can’t have executed people coming back to life – it makes the government look bad. But the truth would get out, eventually. And then it really would be a big deal, because people tend not to come back to life, generally speaking. A guy comes back to life, people would find out everything they could about him, maybe preserve the writings of his friends and associates, try to find out everything the guy said. The anniversary of the day he came back to life would be a major holiday – people would have parties, call it the “Festival of the Guy Who Came Back To Life”, something like that. It would probably be a major event in world history (since people don’t just come back to life every day), set off a movement that would last for centuries and eventually splinter into competing groups, as people argued over why the guy came back to life and what it means for day-to-day life. Traditions that had nothing to do with the guy who came back to life would accrete around the holiday (like eating certain foods, or buying certain plants, that kind of thing). Eventually you’d have people arguing that space aliens did it, or it was a mass hallucination, or that the guy was actually a metaphor for something. Nevertheless, the bald fact would remain – the guy came back to life, and all this happened as a consequence.

You know, this reminds me of something, but I can’t seem to place it.

And on an entirely unrelated note, happy Easter!

-JM