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A woman sees Jesus in iron, sharing a personal pareidolia interpretation that signifies hope. Is it a nice story or mere happenstance?

Written byPhil Plait
| 1 min read
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Sigh. OK, so a woman in Massachusetts thinks she sees Jesus in her iron. If she wants to believe that, it's fine. It should come as no surprise to anyone that I think she is mistaken, and that this is simply a random happenstance, and that it's so ill-formed and fuzzy that it could be anyone with long hair, and actually looks more like a woman to me, or someone in a straight jacket, and that none of this matters because it's simply pareidolia anyway. But I have to give her a bit of credit. She says, "I’m not telling anybody they’re going to be cured or anything if they look at my iron. It’s just a nice story to share," and that the iron "... was my sign that things will be good." If she wants to interpret this personally, that's her right, and I'm glad she's not trying to foist this on others (and I can't assume that by having a newspaper cover the story, she's actively promoting it; we don't know how the paper found out, we don't know how or if she pursued this, and she doesn't appear to be trying to profit from this). Still, I can hope for a world where someday people won't think that an omnipotent and omniscient God would purposely appear to them as a polymerized chain of organic molecules on a laundry appliance. Or a fried sandwich. I'd think He would have better things to do. But that's just me.

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