Jesus Christ on a Cracker!

This week, there was a story floating around the internet of a sonogram that not only showed the ghostly outline of a fetus but also a collection of blobs that the parents claimed was the outline of a man in a robe with a crown of thorns, i.e. Jesus.

Now, when I look at the image, I see something that resembles a face and perhaps a shirt. I don't see the crown of thorns at all. The man might have a beard and moustache and it looks like his longish hair is covering an eye. To me, this looks more like Jack Black.

The first question that comes to mind is how do you know that this is Jesus? We have no actually images of the man at all. What we have is a couple of millennia of artist renderings of what they thought he should look like. For all you know, Jerry Garcia is looking at the fetus.

What is especially appalling is the lack of awareness in the couple that humans have evolved as pattern-seeking animals to see connections in visual noise, and we see faces where there are really none. There's even a term for it: pareidolia. When I look out my office window, there's a particular tree that to me looks like an angry bird seen in profile opening a beak. There's an empty spot that blue sky peeks through that is in the right place for an eye. That doesn't mean that Big Bird is anything more than a muppet. And needless to say, what one perceives depends upon one's culture.

So, the newspaper, which reports this story as if it really were something we should all marvel at, says that father was "confused" by the image and said "this is distinct - I mean, there's anther face looking at my daughter!" Um, no. There's a collection of white and gray blobs on a black background that you are interpreting to be a face, and specifically a tiny adult Jesus creeping on your unborn child. But instead of thinking that Jesus is some pedophile stalking the fetus, the image gave them hope that the baby was going to be okay. They have been worried because their other two children had birth defects and the second had had a difficult birthing.

This couple claims not to be very religious, but nonetheless, they are taking the Jesus blobs to be some kind of sign from god.

Woah woah woah. Setting aside all the pareidolia, this makes me wonder about the god they believe in. He sent them children with birth defects and made the second pregnancy difficult to where both mother and baby might have died, and NOW he sends them Jesus-the-blob-in-a-sonogram?!?! It is declarations like this that make atheists sarcastic skeptics. For all their declarations of an all-powerful, all-loving god, what you actually get when you ask for some kind of demonstration of said god is images of Jesus and the Virgin Mary on crackers, in grainy images or in the condensation of a freezer door. You get, look at the trees and all the perfect creation. You get, I found my keys or a parking spot near the store I was going. You get, look at this one survivor of an event that killed five hundred people.

So, the god is fine with people starving, suffering horrible illnesses, dying in various painful ways, pedophile priests praying (preying) in his name, and all manner of other distress, but thank goodness he appeared (apparently) in some weird manner on some object so that if you squint just right you see what you think is Jesus! I guess that makes all the suffering and worry this couple has already endured all right in the end because Jesus is watching over their baby in the womb.

(For more questions to ask, see the Friendly Atheist's take.)