Canadians are acting badly again, and here I’m referring to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, who should know better. From the CBC, we have a story about a Holy Potato. The text is indented, and the figure captions are from the website.
A cook was cutting potatoes at a Quebec seniors’ residence when he decided to slice one lengthwise instead of across, as he usually did.
What he saw inside is being called a sign of a divine presence in the building.
“He saw it was a cross and he said, ‘It’s a sign,'” said Émilien Morin, president of the residents’ committee at Le Mieux Vivre Residence in Grande-Rivière.
“He thought it meant ‘I’m here’ — a religious sign.”
The sacred spud was discovered Aug. 22 at the Gaspé Peninsula residence by cook Alain Lévesque.
“He couldn’t believe it,” Morin said.
I love the figure caption above (my emphasis). But wait—there’s more!
Morin said the residents are devout Catholics and sought a way to preserve the potato.
Jeannette Moreau, a residents’ committee member, is currently housing the potato in her apartment as it dries.
Morin says the potato-drying process could take up to a month, adding that the spud has started to darken but the sign of the cross at its centre is still highly visible.
He doesn’t want people to visit the vegetable until it’s fully dried and ready to be displayed in a custom-made display case.
Morin said the potato will be on display in the dining room where all residents can enjoy being near it.
“It makes them feel safe,” Morin said.
Now here’s the bad part in an otherwise amusing article (amusing for nonbelievers, that is): the ending of the article:
Seriously, CBC? “Might be a sign from above?” “Divine?” Given that they have a naturalistic explanation, why on earth would they raise the possibility that God made these markings? Who’s in charge of this article?
I sent this to friends in Montreal, who said the only thing to be done with this spud is make Holy Poutine, which could be offered to Québécois as a kind of communion.
Here’s another Jesus potato, along with 21 other images of Jesus in food from BuzzFeed, including my favorite, a Jesus banana:
Someone call Ray Comfort: his apology for the banana video was premature!
h/t: Snowy Owl
Sensus Tuberitatis
Now I have coffee on the keyboard….. 🙂
The banana image looks more like Hugh Glass, the main character in “The Revenant”. Hugh sort of came back from the dead too…
I’m pretty sure this story was accidentally picked up by the CBC. It likely originated at The Onion.
I also noticed with a little more drying the spud will begin to resemble the view under the tail of a dog.
Maybe I ask too much from a god but seriously, if the best your god can do is make a sign in a potato then really, you need a better god. A flaming cross 10 miles high with no detectable source of fuel and impervious to all attempts to extinguish it either by man or nature. Now that would be a sign.
You might want to rethink your choice of symbols there.
I wonder if there’s a difference in humour or misapprehended sarcasm but the statement “this could be a sign from above or…” looks to me like fairly standard device of derision. As in “this might be some kind of magikal miracle or it might be down to this well known and understood natural cause…” There’s probably a technical term to describe it.
There is a term. It’s called “The Canadian Sense of Humour.”
I thought it was probably derision too, though it’s not very well delivered. It could have been written better to make it clearer. Or I suppose the writer could have wanted to keep her motives ambiguous so as not to upset the religies and be seen to be mocking them.
Yes, it’s is completely derisive. I’ve spoken a similar sentence to Catholic relatives believing in numerology. “It could be your dead mother communicating to you, or it could be your brain applying patterns where there are none.”
That got me in a lot of trouble with the religious cousins who attacked me fiercely.
Like being savaged by a dead sheep (old British political insult).
Ha ha. Oh dear. How sad. Never mind. 😀
Ha ha! It was so bad. I told my dad and he was livid. My one cousin basically told me she was glad she wasn’t smart like me because then she would have no feelings then she ended it with “love ya”. Kinda getting mixed messages.
Am I allowed to say this about your family? What a bitch. The classic, “I’ll pray for you.”
You seem to have a lot of people like this in your life. I can’t help but wonder if some of the migraines are caused by having to deal with them! 🙁
Don’t worry. I never had much to do with that side of my family and happily they are not biological relatives because my dad was adopted. I really only interact with my parents and aunt in California.
My one cousin basically told me she was glad she wasn’t smart like me because then she would have no feelings
Oh my gosh, people who believe things like this are tragically hilarious. It’s a fascinating brand of incompetency, so absurdly off it’s hard to credit and yet immensely saddening when you consider what a waste of earnestness it is.
I’m increasingly of the opinion that this is how humans evolved to think. There’s some algorithm in the head that roughly goes “if I understand it immediately and intuitively, it’s human and warm and naturally good; if I don’t, it’s inhuman and cold and artificial and therefore bad.” Luddites and anti-intellectuals are just the tip of the iceberg.
It’s particularly amusing and tragically ironic when you remember that our instincts and intuitions were all programmed by darwinian natural selection, basically as part of the overall survival-and-reproduction machine. Whereas “smart” people usually have to pick up counterintuitive knowledge and understanding culturally and with some effort. And yet we’re supposed to be the stereotypical robots.
And when they use the “heart over head” stuff on you, oh how hilarious it is when you know a bit of basic anatomy. 😀
As the cliche goes, you don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Yeah I laughed pretty hard for all the reasons you list. This is why I’d rather be here than on FB.
It’s funnier this way. You can tell by the time the writer puts into the naturalistic explanation vs. the divine one. Subtle and funny. If the writer wanted to push religion, no mention of the natural explanation would be there.
I absolutely agree. It seems quite obvious to me, reading it, that the reporter was being sceptical.
cr
Good point!
I’ve never understood why the sudden appearance of a gruesome torture device should be taken by superstitious people as a good portent. But maybe I’m in a good mood today — I can only hope they really enjoy being close to that potato as often and for as long as they want.
And here they’d been carefully monitoring their toast all these years. Gawd works in mysterious ways!
It’s extraordinary, after all the billions of bad spuds that have been sliced over time this is the first to show two pickaxes.
Holy Carbohydrates. Be it Kennebec or Russet.
I recall Mitchell and Webb finding something similarly remarkable inside a watermelon.
Hands off poor old Alain Levesque! Don’t bash the Bishop!
This is appalling and truly embarrassing for any subject with scholarly ambition. What would we make of Einstein had he ‘evidenced’ his reasoning with sliced vegetables and fruit spots?
If you search this you’ll never be able to get it out of your head – you’ve been warned!
Google search phrase: “dog bottom jesus”
I maybe mistaken, but the ‘maybe a sign from above or… ‘ appeared just rethorical to me.
Like “the sun maybe drawn by a Apollo’s chariot or..’
It’s pretty arrogant really to believe that you’re so special that God chose you to slice the spud to reveal Himself.
Was the Irish Potato Famine His practice run, or was He just enjoying meting out a bit of suffering on the innocent, as usual?
Seems more like the newly sainted mother.
I wonder how many fungus riddled potatoes in Ireland were blessed with cracks like these? Probably quite a few. Wouldn’t it seem as though God was mocking them as they starved?
Yes! He obviously wanted them to starve or he wouldn’t have let them plant a breed of potatoes that doesn’t like the wet in the first place. Perhaps if they were all Protestants and buckled down under the English king things would have been different. 😀
Blight doesn’t look like that. Blight generally is darkening and then rotting. This looks like the cells in the centre died back and it’s a globular structure. If the potato had been cut a different way the shape would’ve been different. http://www.dochara.com/the-irish/food-history/the-irish-potato-famine-1846-1850/
Ireland had plenty of food during this time it was only the potato that failed. The rest was being sold to pay rent to absentee landlords…sorry to sound angry but I’m Irish and I’ve a chip on my shoulder about this 😉
Slice ANY apple horizontally and you will get a set of 5 seeds forming a pentagram, a clear sign (:)) of its Satanic nature as used by the serpent in the garden.
http://i.stack.imgur.com/Cv9dq.jpg
More seriously unintentional cross signs are fairly likely to occur in nature or in drawings. The Ground Zero cross is a tad more auspicious (by a miniscule margin) than the potato one
http://www.catholicplanet.com/graphics/groundzerocross.jpg
Neither Stanley Kubrick nor Arthur C. Clarke intentionally put the sign of the cross in the shot in “2001: A Space Odyssey” just before David Bowman enters the StarGate, but it certainly seems to be there,
(Clarke is an atheist, and Kubrick an agnostic).
http://www.collativelearning.com/PICS%20FOR%20WEBSITE/moons%20planets/jupiter06.jpg
(Removing imbedding on last shot to see if this helps it go through)
Slice ANY apple horizontally and you will get a set of 5 seeds forming a pentagram, a clear sign (:)) of its Satanic nature as used by the serpent in the garden.
http://i.stack.imgur.com/Cv9dq.jpg
More seriously unintentional cross signs are fairly likely to occur in nature or in drawings. The Ground Zero cross is a tad more auspicious (by a miniscule margin) than the potato one
http://www.catholicplanet.com/graphics/groundzerocross.jpg
Neither Stanley Kubrick nor Arthur C. Clarke intentionally put the sign of the cross in the shot in “2001: A Space Odyssey” just before David Bowman enters the StarGate, but it certainly seems to be there,
(Clarke is an atheist, and Kubrick an agnostic).
http://www.collativelearning.com/PICS%20FOR%20WEBSITE/moons%20planets/jupiter06.jpg
The Spudmata?
🙂
cr
Monsieur Levesque has a lively sense of favors to come – financial in nature, seems like.
I wonder if a modern potato “relic”, sign from above, has a value and donating it to a church could achieve a tax deduction?
My Ceiling Cat – any hope for our species??
The insane surf the web all around us. Social media is the medium of their expression, They are no longer content with soap-boxes on a street corner. Wacko’s with potatoes, or pizza slices, or tortilla’s, or rusty hot water heaters see Hey-suess everywhere, on a fried egg, a piece of french toast, even pancake in a skillet. Last week I saw a guy who lived down the block. changing the oil in an old junker he owned, suddenly he jumped up, banging head and cutting his cheek on the bottom of the car, I said, man, are you all right? He replied, don’t worry about me, I’m fine, but look, under my car, the puddle of water under the oil pan, the oil floating on the water is showing the cross of hey-suess—oh my god—hey-suess is a coming—he’s a coming right now—get knee bound with me Brother and pray, pray for your soul, he’s a coming for sure—I walked away. Sorry, I just made that up—couldn’t help myself.
Well, over the years I must have seen dozens of these miraculous apparitions, many of them courtesy of PCC(E)’s eagle-eyed powers of observation. I don’t think I have ever seen any follow-up account of the miraculous healings, stunning revelations or mass conversions that these uncanny objects ought to have heralded. Can it be that they have had absolutely f***-all impact in the real world? Or have I missed something?
A friend of mine once sliced open an eggplant and found the seeds spelled out OM.
OMG.
It is a rotting cross, things are dying from the inside out, that’s a bad sign from the god of spuds!
On a slight tangent…. Justin Trudeau, now in China on a state visit, is known to the Chinese as “Little Potato”. The Chinese word for potato sounds like “trudeau” without the “r”.
Justin’s father Pierre is well-remembered by the Chinese.
Was PET the big potato? Yes, the Chinese liked PET. So did the Russians to a certain extent. It’s probably why the Americans considered him a possible communist and had him under surveillance. He put up bullet proof glass in his office since the American embassy was near, and according to Brian Mulroney, thought the Americans were going to shoot him.
Two questions:
– don’t these sightings prove that Jesus is the One True Way? How often do we see miraculous edible images of Mohammed?
– if I do find an image of Mohammed in my Cheerios, may I be accused of blasphemy?
God is such a crappy artist, he should stay with creating galaxies and life, and leave crappy looking crosses inside potatoes alone.
When I see how easily people are convinced by this nonsense, I have to wonder how many religious stories started with some equally absurd event. Are stories of “visions” or “visitations” embellished stories of burn marks on toast?
That’s a fascinating question. Consider this: a person put in a sensory deprived environment will, sooner or later, start to hallucinate things, apparently because the brain expects them so strongly that it starts making guesses.
When I ask myself why someone would be desperate enough to see e.g. Jesus in a foodstuff, I wonder if there’s something similar going on, but on a much more complicated scale. Replace “physical sensory information” with “meaningful personal narrative”, and the two processes – seeing hallucintions in a sensory deprivation box, and seeing meaningful story figures in random blotches – are practically twins.
Maybe the cognitive biases in our thinking and the stories we try to shoehorn the world into are clues as to the nature of our ancestors’ environment? Our sense of personal coincidence, for instance, might make more sense in a village of about 150 people than in a globally connected population of billions, which would result in many examples of being fooled by meaningless coincidences. It’s not so much innumeracy or credulity as just using a very limited tool in places where it doesn’t actually work.
And then we get to the really fascinating psychological stuff about what our hallucinations tell us about ourselves and what we evolved to expect…
Addendum: “Our sense of personal coincidence, for instance, might make more sense in a village of about 150 people”
I can’t remember where it was said, but to anyone wondering what this has to do with our ancestors’ environment, apparently our brains are the right size to handle in detail about 150 people and associated relationships. So we would’ve evolved, presumably, to calibrate our expectations to that number.
The result, of course, is that what’s astronomically unlikely to happen to 150 people in dozens of lifetimes may well be a daily occurrence among billions.
If anyone there really does enjoy being near it then that is rather sad.
“My children and grandchildren haven’t visited for several months; thank goodness there’s a potato down the hall I can look at.”
Cue Samuel Butler’s quote from Erewhon:
“Even a potato in a dark cellar has a certain low cunning about him which serves him in excellent stead. He knows perfectly well what he wants and how to get it. He sees the light coming…”
This one was particularly cunning! It got itself preserved, for now, for posterity.
Holy Spud!
When I see this happened in Quebec I just consider the source, but CBC they should know better.
I’m Canadian. This is embarrassing 🙁
First the Holy Gourd and now a potato? Brian is the messiah!
“Might be a sign from above” seems tongue-in-cheek to me. I don’t think CBC are seriously suggesting it as an option.
Well, the cross shape is just a natural consequence of any circumstance that puts the inside of the potato in uniform tension. It will tend to split along its longer diameter. Then, as the tension persists parallel to long axis, another split will form at right angles.
This is an inherent property of tension fields in a homogeneous medium (like potato).
You realise what this means – the propensity to make the sign of the cross is built into the very fabric of matter. It must be the signature of the Creator! God permeates everything!! All hail the almighty!!!
cr
… having an epiphany
You physics are impeccable, as usual, but does this fully account all manifestations of the creator of the universe? I’m thinking of dog bottoms now.
Well, I’m not a biologist, but I understand the physical form of living things (is that ‘phenotype’?) is determined by their DNA. So there ya go again – G*d has obviously left his trademark etched into the DNA that encodes for dog bottoms.
🙂
cr
Bring me the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch!
“Morin said the potato will be on display in the dining room where all residents can enjoy being near it.
“It makes them feel safe,” Morin said.”
You know, I’ve always tried to be extremely careful about feeling superior to any type of religious believers. The way I figure it, I was born in an atheist family (even my grandparents on both sides were atheists) so I didn’t really have to do any critical thinking to get my “atheist diploma”.
I therefore always try to remind myself that I may have just as easily have ended up being religious if born somewhere else.
But that last sentence really threw me off and I’m now struggling with inappropriate feelings of intellectual superiority.
It makes them feel safe? Really?
It’s a damn potato!
Nothing safer or less exciting than a potato.
cr
These Catholic elderly probably don’t usually feel very safe. First, they are elderly, which comes with a gradual loss of strength and capability. Second, they are Catholic, which means they have been continually reminded that God made them sick and commanded them to be well. They’ve had their egos kicked around for a very long time. That’s a lot of worry and insecurity over a lifetime. I can see how prayer beads and even funny looking potatoes would tend to sooth their battered souls. You have to have a lot of sympathy for them while at the same time condemning the institution that infects their lives.
Yeah. I see what you mean.
It makes me think of the times I’ve lived or visited catholic countries. When taking a walk in such countries, I amused myself by counting the number of cars that had rosaries dangling from the rear view mirror.
It always seemed as if the cars with rosaries had more bumps and dents in them, than the rest. That’s probably my confirmation bias speaking, but it certainly didn’t seem as if a rosary/cross protected them from being hit while driving.
I even saw a few complete wrecks that had rosaries dangling in the window.
I remember when my obsessive-compulsive disorder forced me to knock on my house wall everytime I left (I still suffer from it, but have less compulsions now).
I wonder if religious people suffer from something similar, the main difference being us OCD sufferers know and admit we are being completely irrational.
These folk though, seem to truly believe they are protected by some magical shield as long as they keep a potato or a rosary with them.
And I bet that if an earthquake suddenly strikes that place, they won’t blame god for it. If however, one of the residents are cured of pneumonia after a doctor visits, it will be the potato, not antibiotics, that will get the glory. :-!
I’d be interested to see the results of a proper survey associating religious icons with dents in cars. It could find an underlying association between religion and poverty.
Yes, my sense is that folks with a touch of OCD would be inclined to gravitate toward ritual. I know a family which seems to carry a gene for OCD which happens to contain many devout Catholics. On the other hand decades of indoctrination in our God-given decrepitude is bound to induce ODC in otherwise normal souls.
I’d also agree that a powerful meme like Catholicism derives much of it’s strength (and cruelty) from it’s clever “God if you win, God if you lose” pattern of deduction.
Many religions rely on inducing a form of OCD in its followers. Catholics already have to pray for forgiveness from a priest every time they have a sinful thought, which is quite similar to how OCD sufferers have to do certain rituals to rid ourselves of painful thoughts.
The difference again being that both myself and all the atheist OCD sufferers I’ve met KNOW that we’re being irrational. We know that washing our hands 20 times or knocking on wood won’t make any difference, but it’s too painful to abstain from it. It’s part of what makes OCD a neurotic disorder, not a psychotic one.
I remember my mostly atheist class daring to ask our psychiatry teacher in medical school what separates religion from other types of delusions. Our teacher had to admit that in the end it all comes down to what is accepted in our culture.
Of course, things like paranoid schizophrenia induce several visible changes in the person too, not only delusions , but when it comes to other delusional disorders it’s all about culture.
If you grow up in Norway and suddenly believe that demons have possessed your body, you’re sick.
If you become a catholic exorcist to drive demons out of others however, you’re considered healthy, because exorcisms are accepted as real by the catholic faith.
“If you grow up in Norway and suddenly believe that demons have possessed your body, you’re sick.
If you become a catholic exorcist to drive demons out of others however, you’re considered healthy, because exorcisms are accepted as real by the catholic faith.”
Good observation. It pretty much an irrefutable argument for atheism.
I think the comparison is superficial. Religious believers are, as far as I can make out, largely ordinary people who are brought up in a cultural milieu that treats such beliefs as normal, or at least as harmless. Since most people seem inclined to believe in something beyond the physical world anyway, regardless of religion, it’s hardly strange that whole cultural edifices are built around those ideas. And while some religions are coercive or make their practitioners obsessive or compulsive, I think there’s still a significant difference in degree. It’s still pretty lightweight compared to the psychological horrors of OCD.
Well, give or take the really monstrous religions, of course…
I think the banana resembles Ken Ham peering between the bars of a jail cell.
Hey a guy can hope!
Always look on the blight side of life.