Tree Jesus
Another sighting of the Son 'o Gawd, this time in a tree in Memphis, Tennessee. Raw video of the latest manifestation of a wooden Jesus is available here, and of course a still image is also provided.
No word in the story as to whether it's begun talking to people or possessing anyone.
Who knew that Christ's head was nearly hotdog-shaped? This particular instance of pareidolia looks very much to me like a million other scars on a million other trees I've looked at. Then again, I've spent a lot of time looking at trees because I have spent a lot of time looking for fungi or artifacts of fungal presence. Pareidolia works by making some random but symmetrical object look like something familiar to the viewer. People who spend a lot of their time looking at religious imagery are more likely to see religious imagery in a given object that fits this criterion, like a tortilla, tree scar or cracked glass. It's rather rare that someone who doesn't spend a good deal of time viewing or thinking about such imagery will see it under these circumstances without someone else first pointing it out to them. I suspect that were I to lead a fundamentalist Christian into the forest, he or she would see many such images where I had seen only bark and beetle tracks.
In this instance, the more I look at the "face" of Jesus, the more I notice all the missing details. In a very short time, it stops looking like a face at all and comes to appear as exactly what it is: some scarring in the bark of a tree.
