Friday, May 21, 2010

Jesus in a lung

"Jesus is in us!" - Jesus is, actually, in the lungs. Her or his, it is unknown at the moment. What is known there is the image from a thoracic spine examination by Christopher Vittore and Kevin Tribble, radiologists in Rockford, Ilinois and clinical assistant professors at University of Illinois College of Medicine. This was performed on an open MRI machine, a General Electric Signa 0.35 Tesla MRI scanner. Don't bother convincing me this is an Photoshop hoax - who cares for hoaxes, anyway? 
 
And to whom we should trust? They preached for centuries Jesus is in our hearts. After that, doing his missionary work along with Mary, he begins to appear unexpectedly on the walls, animal fur, pancakes... I rather prefer the last option, in the lungs. It is closer to the heart. And smokers have a stronger motivation to quit smoking immediately in order not to cast the Lord out of their bodies. Now you have a nice reason to quit smoking because you overslept the Sunday when reverend taught about our bodies being the temple of the Holy Spirit. 
 
The only problem I see is how to worship that lung revelation. When Jesus appears on the wall it isn't difficult to make a chapel out of the house. But what to do with human lungs? How to find the patient that gave us such incredible MRI image? And what if we find him/her? Worship, give our money, listen, touch him/her toward solution of our problems? How mentally burned or intellectually inferior we must be to do such a things? 
 
If we can't solve our problems by means of healthy faith and healthy reasoning, we are in trouble because nothing and no one can help us, not even mysterious patient with Jesus in the lungs, especially not stains on the walls, pancakes and canvases. For a healthy faith there is elementary school - Jesus' words in the gospel of John that says about nourishing true faith anywhere regardless "holy places": "But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him." 
 
And if healthy faith doesn't work for you - Christ's rule about inner spiritual relationship with God - there is a simple psychology.  It is well known that humans have developed brain algorithm which we use to automatically assign meanings to certain patterns we see around us. Newborns in many species learn very quickly to recognize their mother's face among many shapes they see. Thus they are capable of fundamental surviving. Such an algorithm we use afterwards to distinguish good and useful faces from nasty ones that tend to harm us. In the darkness, our mind quickly calculates shapes and movements of the shadows to help us make decision about safe staying or running away from potential predator. Mechanism of patterns we process all the time is "guilty" of seeing the "face" on the Moon, but also for most religious appearances (the other situations based on strange chemicals and states of mind not covered here), so we are capable to se an illusion about Jesus in the lungs out of body tissue on the mentioned MRI image. 
 
Spiritual and intellectual education is enabling us for healthy critical thinking in order not to wander from stain to stain, but to repair walls, eat pancakes and keep our lungs healthy.

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