Seems the folks down in Australia are getting a little of the old holy-image-appears-on-random-object-Christians-start-acting-like-total-whack-jobs fun of their own as of late. So says The Sydney Morning Herald:
Hundreds of believers flocked to the Coogee Beach headland yesterday to witness what they say is an apparition of the Virgin Mary.
Scores more hiked up the cliff path to touch, kiss and pray to the post which over the past few days has been transformed into something of a shrine, with pictures of the virgin, rosary beads and flowers piled around the white-washed fence.
Some wept, others sang, most prayed. As the sunlight reflected off a crook in the fence throughout the afternoon, hundreds claimed they could discern the shape of a veiled figure, and most agreed it was “Our Lady”.
They kissed a fence post?! Do they not realize that dogs tend to urinate on fence posts? I suppose that’s a little better than rubbing their naked asses against it.
This is one of those things about Christians that I just don’t understand. First off, why would Jesus and his Mother spend so much time drawing pictures of themselves into various random objects such as trees, fence posts, office building windows, or whatever other random inanimate object happens to be around at the time when they could do a much better job of letting people know they really exist by, say, materializing in the middle of the Today show set and performing an undeniable miracle such as making Al Roker actually interesting, or at least entertaining, to watch? Huh? Is that too much of a miracle for the King of Kings to pull off? I realize I’m asking a lot here.
No, instead we get nothing but pathetic doodles that have less artistic merit than something produced by a blind epileptic quadriplegic. Artistically speaking, Jesus should stick to turning water into wine and leave the art stuff to the professionals.
Secondly (yeah, I did have more questions), why the hell when one of these shoddy self-portraits appear do all the Christians in the immediate vicinity feel they have to:
A) rush immediately to the site in question
B) touch, rub, kiss, fondle, molest, pray, cry, or faint
C) generally make a nuisance of themselves?
They do that by clogging streets, leaving various “gifts” (someone eventually has to pick that shit up), trampling people’s lawns and just generally not doing anything productive or important despite all the problems they cause by being there. What the fuck is wrong with these people?
When was the last time you heard of a bunch of Jews freaking out because a vague image of some holy figure of their’s showed up on someone’s kreplach? How the last time you heard about a load of Muslims spazzing because one of them saw the face of Mahomet appear in the pattern of the wood grain of some random door someplace? You never hear about that sort of thing.
Occasionally the Hindus will make a big deal out of a statue of one of their various Gods they have supposedly drinking milk, but that’s about the only other religious group I can think of that has anything close to what the Christians are constantly reporting and it’s about a dumb as the idea of Jesus drawing bad pictures of himself everywhere.
Whatever. There are days when I’m feeling particularly evil that I just know there’s a great set of pranks to be pulled using this affinity of Christians to practically wet themselves over this sort of thing. One of these days I may have to see if I can pull it off.
Posted on 03/27/2006 at 07:27 PM 
Posted on 03/03/2007 at 01:14 AM 
That may be as it may, but whether or not Catholics/Protestants/whatever are Christians is a topic more suited to religious forums.
The long and short of it, though, is that most members of the audience couldn’t care less about the apologia being lobbed between Christian denominations.