Science Comedian

You got Jesus in my X-ray

March 10th, 2009

Where in the Bible does it say, when Jesus returns, he will appear as a sil­ver Rorschach blot on a chest X-ray in a small town in Florida?

A few thoughts…

Rey­naldo Fari­nas went to the hos­pi­tal after expe­ri­enc­ing chest pains.

Okay, no sur­prise there. You’d have chest pains, too, if Jesus were unex­pect­edly res­ur­rected inside your chest cav­ity. The human chest cav­ity sim­ply wasn’t designed for such a celes­tial homecoming.

Or was it?

If the Divine Plan is – and always was – to res­ur­rect Jesus inside an evangelical’s chest… well, it seems like rather poor plan­ning, doesn’t it? Not exactly Intel­li­gent Design. In the very least, it might have been help­ful – or polite – to have sent some advance notice, maybe an email – par­tic­u­larly to the per­son who was to receive such a glo­ri­ous but awk­ward visitation.

I like when they show the man on cam­era and the lower-third graphic, the on-screen iden­ti­fier, has his name and a short def­i­n­i­tion – the expla­na­tion for why we’re watch­ing a video clip of him:

“Rey­naldo Fari­nas: Sees Jesus in X-ray.”

How would you like that to be the 4-word sum­ma­tion of your life?

Fari­nas says, “This never hap­pened to me.” I can accept that. In fact, it never hap­pened to anyone.

But per­haps I’m being unfair, too much of a stick­ler for proper gram­mar, because what he likely meant was, “This never hap­pened to me before,” in which case he is express­ing sur­prise that Jesus never pre­vi­ously spon­ta­neously gen­er­ated inside his chest.

They show the X-ray around 25 sec­onds into the video clip…

But I don’t see Jesus. Do you? If any­thing, I just see a Grey, which is far more likely, if you think about it.

An extrater­res­trial inside someone’s chest makes per­fect bio­log­i­cal sense. It requires no res­ur­rec­tion or Sec­ond Com­ing or magic of any kind – it’s sim­ply a nat­ural part of a metamorph’s life cycle – to incu­bate inside a host organ­ism. It’s even part of (sci­ence fic­tion) canon – per­haps most famously in the movie Alien.

So, what we have here is noth­ing super­nat­ural. This vis­i­tor is not from Heaven but merely from Zeta Reti­c­uli. Just a friendly par­a­sitic neigh­bor stop­ping by to gestate.

One fam­ily mem­ber says, “And I was sur­prised. I got goose­bumps and I was like ‘Wow,’ you know? That’s unbelievable.”

Exactly.

But if you’re still curi­ous, here are some sto­ries of other sight­ings of Jesus and his mom – in flap­jacks, lemons, and cheese sand­wiches.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Yarmulke

August 2nd, 2008

I’m a Jew from Texas – a rel­a­tively rare breed, we can’t even prop­a­gate in the wild.

So, before my migra­tion to North­ern Cal­i­for­nia – which is counter to the east­ward migra­tory pat­tern char­ac­ter­is­tic of my kind – a migra­tion which, over time, deposits us in the Sun­shine State like cal­cium car­bon­ate on a sta­lag­mite – I had the oppor­tu­nity to make soci­o­log­i­cal and psy­cho­log­i­cal obser­va­tions of an uncom­mon species.

I hope to some­day pub­lish my find­ings and share with the world these curi­ous and fan­tas­tic tales.

The work­ing title of my book is The Man Who Mis­took His Wife For a Yarmulke.