God vandalises another vegetable

If you thought God had outgrown his habit of “tagging” fruit and vegetables, this aubergine from Delaware may disappoint you.

Felicia Teske of Boothwyn was preparing eggplant parmigiana when she noticed one of the slices bore the word “GiD” in seeds, which was close enough to “God” to impress her.

Felicia told Action News that she had recently had relatives pass away, so it was comforting to find a word that looked a bit like “God” in a piece of her dinner.

God clearly enjoys scribbling his various names on the insides of fruit and vegetables. It never fails to impress his followers, who are apparently undisturbed by the fact that the divine handwriting style remains constantly at the level of a below-average five year old.

Update (August 16). There appears to be an infestation of pareidolia among Delawarian eggplants. Two days after “GID” appeared, Delaware resident and delicatessen worker Vincenza Martino sliced open a white eggplant and saw angels formed out of seeds.

Martino, who had just seen the report about the Teske’s eggplant, declared: “I feel blessed … God is sending me a sign.”

She gave a bit of the eggplant to a customer whose wife was “very sick in hospital.” The man cried as he left.

Vinny’s Deli, where Martino works, is adorned with pictures of Pope Benedict XVI, and past pontiffs. Martino says she works seven mornings a week, and can’t make it to church. But she says the deli is like her holy place.

“God is here, like he’s in the church,” blathered the delusional counterhand. “A lot of bad things happen in this country, and we have to believe, and pray. God is here to help to help everybody.”

She failed to explain precisely how people are likely be helped by a god who likes doing silly things with aubergines and the like.

While the Teske’s are now hoping to make a killing on eBay with their “miracle” aubergine., Martino didn’t say what she plans to do with the remainder of her eggplant.

A Freethinker reader, Albert Adler, has this to say about “miracles” like these:

I would raise the following queries concerning the alleged manifestation of “holy” figures (such as Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and no doubt Uncle Tom Cobleigh, and all) on a variety of unlikely artifacts,:

1.You would think any self-respecting “Holy One” would have more taste, if not sense, than to consent to appearing in such a very suspect and inappropriate manner! Perhaps their next appearance will be in a cow-pat! Is it not odd that these marvellously persisting if elusive spirits, floating no doubt between heaven and earth, should choose to make themselves known by such a very unlikely manifestation when it was open to them, to have put in an appearance in a far more public and even publically advertised manner?

2. To what extent have the artifacts in question been “assisted” into a resemblance of sorts to the “holy figures”, whether in their material “embodiment” or in the photographic record alleged to have been made of them?

3. Surely it is more than a little odd that the persons - if they ever actually existed who are, allegedly, so manifested, were never known to have been recorded by their contemporaries in either a visual or even a literary depiction. (Of course, that has not prevented artists of a much later period from depicting their features - informed, no doubt, by divine inspiration. And in the case of Mohammad even this was forbidden which didn’t stop his devotees from “recognising” him in cartoon form!) So the “discoverers” of these miraculous epiphanies can claim no more than that what they encountered – or produced – was a likeness to a completely invented appearance, sanctioned at most only by very belated artistic tradition.

I think a final word on these “miracles” may be found in Richard Dawkins’ Climbing Mount Improbable where he writes (on page 2):

The Natural History Museum in London has a quirky collection of stones that chance to resemble familiar objects: a boot, a hand, a baby’s skull, a duck, a fish. They were sent in by people who genuinely suspected that the resemblance might mean something. But ordinary stones weather into such a welter of shapes, it is not surprising if occasionally we find one that calls to mind a boot, or a duck. Out of all the stones that people notice as they walk about, the museum has preserved the ones that they pick up and keep as curiosities. Thousands of stones remain uncollected because they are just stones. The coincidences of resemblance in this museum collection are meaningless, though amusing. The same is true when we think we see faces, or animal shapes, in clouds or cliff profiles. The resemblances are accidents.