It was a busy week for God-related news, let’s get right to it. First up from the God Machine is a news item from Federal Way, Washington, where a Seattle suburban school board has banned Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” because of complaints from a local religious activist.
“Condoms don’t belong in school, and neither does Al Gore. He’s not a schoolteacher,” said Frosty Hardison, a parent of seven children who doesn’t want the film shown at all.
“The information that’s being presented is a very cockeyed view of what the truth is,” Hardison told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “The Bible says that in the end times everything will burn up, but that perspective isn’t in the DVD.”
Hardison reportedly hasn’t seen the film, but asked the school board to ban it anyway. What’s worse, school board members, none of whom have seen the movie, agreed.
I can’t help but wonder how many textbooks in Federal Way also fail to include the Biblical perspective on matters of science. Are they next on the chopping block?
Next up is a disconcerting story from Morton, Texas, about some local folks who believe they’ve seen the “Virgin Mary” made of ice drippings inside a freezer at a grocery store. (thanks to Rege for the tip)
It started as one drip from the ceiling of a freezer at Morton Thrifty Foods grocery store. Now it has become quite the sanctuary for a lot of Catholic believers. “I wanted to cry when I saw it,” said Stephan Santos, who was visiting the ice formation. “My mom has all saints in her house. But this one just got to me.”
Store employee Alma Avalos first spotted the formation in the back freezer of her store, noticing what had been a few drops of water from the ceiling that had frozen. “I went in there, and it started forming like some kind of ice, and then Friday I went in there, and it was shaped like that,” Avalos said.
As more and more people heard about the “Virgin Mary,” they started coming in droves to see her, and the grocery store moved her into a freezer in the frozen foods section.
Some have had their prayers answered after visiting the ice statue. “I had a lump in my breast, and yesterday, when I went home, it disappeared. I don’t have it no more,” said one woman.
Where to begin. First, I wish the local media wouldn’t report uncritically that “some have had their prayers answered after visiting” the ice blob. It’s just irresponsible. Second, the one thing that’s always struck me as odd in seeing religious imagery in trees, warped glass, grilled-cheese sandwiches, and chocolate blobs is that they’re depictions of depictions. No one knows what Mary looked like, of course, but people have seen artists’ renderings of what they imagined she looked like.
With this in mind, are these “signs” from God or signs from 16th century painters?
For that matter, if Mary, or Jesus, or whomever, really wanted to offer believers a sign, couldn’t they come up with a slightly less oblique method? (The local CBS affiliate has posted a picture of the ice drippings) And if it is a sign, what is it a sign of? That we’re supposed to use more ice? Or less?
The LA Times recently had a piece on this phenomenon. It even has a name: pareidolia, the perception of patterns where none are intended. And according to Stewart Guthrie, one of a handful of professors who have studied it, such perceptions are part of the way human beings are “hard-wired.” Guthrie explained, “It’s really part of our basic perceptual and cognitive situation…. It has to do with all kinds of misapprehensions that there is something human-like in one’s environment, when really there’s not.”
And finally this week, my friends at Right Wing Watch noted this week that everyone’s favorite TV preacher, Pat Robertson, is losing his like-minded friends at an increasingly fast clip.
It’s downright embarrassing,” said Todd Spitzer, pastor at Regeneration in Oakland and Dolores Park Church in San Francisco. “When he makes these statements and ties God’s name to it, he’s like the self-proclaimed spokesman for God and evangelical Christianity. It’s an obstacle to us when we want to present a reasonable faith.”
The more outrageous or quirky the comment, the quicker it zips into newspapers and television news programs and floods the Web. The result, evangelical ministers say, is that sincere believers get tarnished in the process.
The Bay Area, despite perceptions to the contrary, has dozens of evangelical churches, including many of the region’s largest. Evangelical ministers said they are constantly battling stereotypes of evangelicals as uncritical thinkers who are “marching lockstep to some leader.” They said Robertson’s comments only strengthen those misperceptions.
The sooner Robertson loses his allies, the better.