Whatever gods may be

I am not a religious man.

I would go so far as to say that I am a confirmed atheist. Militant even. But occasionally, spiritually uplifting events cause me to examine my point of view. One of those spiritually uplifting events happened this morning and I want to tell you about it.

I have from time to time been appropriately amused by stories of Jesus appearing on a burnt tortilla or, or a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary appearing on some grilled cheese. The phenomenon is a well documented one, known as pareidolia. It's basically the human inclination of recognising patterns in random events. The unconquerable soul that is the brain will grasp whatever is available for amusement and, well, amuse itself. It's the same phenomenon that makes us hear the words "Paul is dead" when we play the song backwards. It's the same phenomenon that causes us to believe that the poker machine is about to pay out bigtime because of a certain pattern of small payouts. There's no pattern, it's random.

The willingness to find patterns where there are none is what often makes clouds so amusing. The enjoyment of staring at clouds and finding shapes is so widespread that it has even been featured in a peanuts cartoon. Charlie Brown, Lucy and Schroeder are all staring at the sky and Charlie Brown observes that the clouds often have interesting shapes. "Yes," says Schroeder, "Over to the right, I can see an almost perfect representation of the south-west coast of Peru. What can you see Charlie Brown?"

"Well I was going to say I can see a horsey, but I think I won't bother now." says Charlie Brown.

But once again I have been distracted. I was telling you about the spiritually uplifting experience that I had this morning.

This morning I woke up at about 4am. This was largely because I had gone to bed rather early the night before. My weekend had consisted of two rather heavy bouts of drinking. The first on Friday evening with work colleagues and the second on Saturday afternoon to celebrate the 50th birthday of an old friend. By the time Sunday afternoon rolled around, I was rather worse for wear and retired for the evening by about 7:30pm. Shortly afterward I was sleeping blissfully and hence you find me, at 4am, staring at the curtains that cover the doors opposite my bed.

It was at this time that I was reminded of the phenomenon of pareidolia, for after a minute or two of staring at the curtain, my brain managed to conjure a face to stare back at me. It was clearly a female face, although it didn't appear to be the Blessed Virgin Mary (or BVM as she is often called) for it was a rather full-lipped female face with eyes that featured the epicanthal fold characteristic of most people of asian descent. It was remarkably detailed, but I should warn before we go on that this was not the spiritually uplifting experience that I spoke of earlier. I'm getting to that.

My initial reaction was one of a sort of detached, intellectual amusement along with a certain measure of relief that the boredom had been slightly alleviated. I have read about and even experienced the phenomenon many times and I never fail to be amused by the tricks that my own brain can play.

Eventually I became sufficiently bored that I turned on the radio where I found the BBC world news was reporting on a police raid that had been conducted in Belgium. My recent thought of the Blessed Virgin Mary notwithstanding, I was more than a little pleased to learn that the raid had been conducted on the Catholic Church.

The pope, apparently is outraged. I struggle to understand how he can manage this because the Belgian Catholic Church appears to be staffed by the most notorious collection of kiddy-fiddlers yet uncovered. One of the more monstrous of these rock-spiders, one Roger Vangheluwe, has admitted to abusing young boys even after being ordained as a bishop! But apparently the pope, that guardian of moral decency, had managed to get himself worked into such a state that he had one of his flunkies call in the Belgian Ambassador and hand him "a formal protest note."

As thrilling as this news was, it was not the source of the spiritually uplifting experience that I spoke of earlier. That came just a few minutes later.

BBC reports are generally introduced by an announcer giving the name of the reporter and the topic, then at the end of the report, the same BBC announcer will solemnly sign off with the name of the reporter and the location of the report. So we get an introduction that might say "Ingrid Feldman reports on the recent death of parrots in Norway" followed by a signing off that will simply be "Ingrid Feldman in Norway"

In the case of the report on the raid of the bishops, I didn't hear the opening announcement. While that was being made, I was staring at a mysterious face in my curtains. I did hear the closing announcement and it was this that as the source of my spiritually uplifting experience. I don't suppose it can be held out as proof of and gods, but if we posit their existence, then it is proof that whatever gods may be, they certainly have a sense of humour. The sign off was;

"David Willie, Belgium"

Chikenz points today will be obvious if you can spot them.