I’ve been pondering this question for a few days now, but I hesitated to start the thread because I was unsure how best to phrase the title. My intention is not to start a debate on religion or what-would-you-do-as-a-superhero thread, and I could easily see the topic going either way. I hope this topic works.
So here’s how it is:
Imagine you wake up tomorrow morning with specific, finite miraculous powers of unknown provenance. Here are your abilities and their limits:
-
You can heal any injury or illness with a touch of your hand, with the limitation that the more severe the malady, the more it takes out of you. Fixing a hangnail is like crossing the street; fixing a broken leg is like running a mile; healing a cancer that has metastatized body-wide is like climbing Mt. Everest. You daren’t resuscitate dead bodies that could not be revived by medicine because it takes too much of your energy; that is, you could probably do it once, but you’d never survive the attempt.
-
You can transmute objects from one substance to another–water to wine, say–with similar limits as above. In this case, changing one gram of salt to one gram of sugar is child’s play, while 5000 kilograms of matter from one composition is comparable to climbing Mt. Everest.
-
You can command the elements–summoning or dispelling storms, earthquakes, etc.–within a radius of ten miles of yourself. Again, the more spectacular the effect, the more you are drained.
-
You have absolutely no special psychic or spiritual powers whatsoever; you cannot read minds, erase memories, foretell the future, etc. You have no special moral wisdom you not not possess now. The nearest thing you have to clairovoyance is the expanded awareness of the health of living beings; that sense tells you that you are not immortal, that you are aging as quickly now as you were before you were empowered.
-
You have absolutely no idea where these powers came from. No angels blared their trumpets, no radioactive carpenters bit your elbow.
-
You cannot use your powers on yourself to increase your abilities.
With such abilities and average empathy, most people, I think, would feel obliged to put them to good use. Also inevitably, people would begin to ask your advice, request your blessings, etc. Probably somebody would try to start the first church of Polycarp or Anaamika or Skald or whatever.
Would you let that happen? Would you intervene in the church to avoid doctrines being taught in you rname that you disagree with? If you prefer that no movement be set up around you, how would you stop it without giving up your good works?
And so forth.
