Where is the Virgin Mary Today? Pareidolia: Seeing Religious Faces Everywhere
Saturday February 9, 2008
Sometimes it seems that every other week, someone is claiming to see images of religious figures (Mary and Jesus are the most common) on walls, in windows, or in their breakfast foods. What prompts these visions? Why would Jesus or Mary wish to make an appearance on someone's toast some morning? There's a curious disconnect with such incidents because the people can believe in them fervently, but religious authorities and institutions tend to be much more skeptical and critical. What's really going on here?
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I don’t know, but I keep seeing the FSM absolutely EVERYWHERE! Especially at dinner time.
Didn’t you see the “Atheist sees big bang in toast?”
The fencepost in Sydney was actually the long white top of the railing of the beachfront at Coogee. It’s in a very public place. It snakes and turns with the lie of the land, but some religious nut noticed that you could discern an image of Mary, not as a face, but as a shawl-covered woman’s head in bowed position from a certain angle. It was immediately recognized as nonsense by most people, but soon there gathered a bevy of middle-aged women of mainly European descent, who made a shrine of this part of the beachside suburb, and who were starting to become a public niusance. After about a week of the gathering throng, some people in the middle of the night vandalized the fence. Were they teens? Were they uni students? Anarchists? Atheist activists? Who knows. In any case, by this illegal act, they put an end to the religious pilgrimage. Problem solved.
Consider also that no one really knows what the real Jesus and his mother (assuming that they were real persons) actually looked like. If God wanted to plaster their faces in rust and oil stains and pancakes, wouldn’t he use their real faces? In that case, would anyone recognize them?
This is so obviously a matter of folks with a tenuous grasp of reality projecting their ideas, derived from conventional religious iconography, into Rorschach-blot-like objects that it’s rather ludicrous. I think that’s why most official Christian religious bodies keep their distance from them. They get enough ridicule from sane people as it is.
By the way, whatever happened to the bleeding statues of Jesus and crying statues of Mary? We haven’t heard much about them recently.
I just saw Lucky the Leprechaun in a cereal bowl the other day. Doesn’t this mean I’m entitled to his pot of gold?
I have a wooden cabinet door in my house, the grain in this door forms a Rorschach-blot-like shape that resembles the face of Christ. Now even when I was a Christian believer (and believe me, I am no longer), I knew better. I knew that even if Christ did exist he would have better things to do than to put his image into a dead tree.
Having a total lack of artistic imagination, I was never able to see these images,so I was limited to looking for Jesus’ name in my alphabet soup.
Let’s say one manages to see and catch the Invisible Pink Unicorn…doesn’t this entitle a wish or some gift? Immortality? Endless wealth?
I like finding faces and other living things in the squiggles on my bathroom tiles. It’s fun finding the patterns. I would never think they are real things.
I’ve searched on walls, spackled ceilings, tree barks, french toast, stained shower walls, and have never found any sort of image other than bikini-clad women.