But there’s good news: the shipping is free

Chris Ray - October 2nd, 2008 in Feature 0 votes Vote Up! Vote Down!

If you type “Jesus face” into Ebay.com’s search engine, you get between 150 and 200 matches. Most of them are perfectly ordinary, normal objects: some lovely jewelry, watches, pendants, things of that sort. But the rest of the items read more like a flea market for the religiously insane.

You know that at least one of the items, whose bid starts at $35,000, is authentic because of a clever disclaimer in its description: “NOT A FRAUD” (the same description also categorizes it as a “CONVERSATION PIECE”). Another way the authenticity of the item is guaranteed is that Jesus once referred to himself as a door, and now someone has referred to a door as Jesus, so that’s airtight. That’s just logic. For those of you seeking to compliment your coffee table with some decorative piece besides your stack of full-color atlases of Australia, take heart: the shipping on the item is free.

Most of you will recall the moldy cheese sandwich whose askance grill-lines were popularly interpreted as being the face of the “Virgin Mary.” Behind the overwhelming kitsch of the whole story is the alarming fact that this divine apparition sold for $28,000 dollars, roughly the price of a good midsize car. Mary, who has since filled out her global tour schedule with appearances in windows, trees, garages, and South Park (though the Pope has declared this latter apparition to be not a miracle), can now be purchased as a curled chunk of stone… for $10,000. But the shipping, again, is free, so you might want to take this one before it has to be re-listed with a UPS fee.

Obviously, close to none of the few people who actually buy these things are doing it out of genuine religious devotion. When Jesus appeared on a cheese sandwich, it was snapped up not by a raving fanatic, but by an online casino seeking to cash in on the phenomenon. A Virgin Mary apparition on the side of a house that burned down, and then left the apparition in the scars on the walls (Virgin Mary loves the world so much, she is willing to demolish somebody’s home to show us her curves?) wasn’t bought for adoration by some zealously irrational Catholic, it was just left up as part of the new home.

But suppose there are people who do actually purchase these items for their devotional value. Such people could potentially be spending a fortune on slabs of wood, broken drywall, and toasted cheese products every year out of a genuinely insane conception of reality. Now I say genuinely insane not necessarily to deprecate religiosity, but I really mean that there is a severe cognitive error made in pursuing the extravagant cost of these items because you think that God is actually burned into your back door.

One metric used to evaluate whether a belief is psychotic is whether or not it comes from the general cultural milieu or not (note that sincerity is not considered here, since one can sincerely believe himself to be a piece of ham and still be a bit off). For example, using ritual magic to act out cannibalism is not psychotic because millions of practicing Christians do it every Sunday. However, actually going out and trying to eat someone in line at the superstore because you think it will give you magic powers is crazy. Eating people for magic’s sake, beyond being both illegal and impolite, is a good indicator of genuine mental disorder because it has no parallel in the general cultural background.

Likewise, there are a lot of people who are willing to huddle around a sprinkler-stain and hope that the dim outline of a person translates into a miraculous cure. This may be stupid, it may convict many of the faithful of being gullible to the point of farce, but it isn’t insane. Why? Because a lot of stupid, farce-worthy people do it. What is insane, however, is taking an object that has no cultural significance whatsoever (the Shrine of Lourdes has cultural staying power; a dog’s asshole does not) and paying the value of a dozen laptops for it. This has no relationship to mainstream religious beliefs, and indicates that you are probably crazy.

Nor does such an investment even parallel the logic of religious beliefs. No religious traditions has any surviving first-hand descriptions of what Jesus’s mother looked like, or what Jesus himself looked like. Nor does it concord with general Christian beliefs to think that the Second Coming will take place on a fishstick. Mainstream Christian belief is obsessed with the death and zombification of a wandering Palestinian schizoaffective exorcist, but has no place for calls to impoverish yourself in order to put you near something that, totally by accident, can fool you into thinking that it bears an anonymous face that you label the face of Jesus, or of Mary.

Obviously, the salient feature here is the expenditure of large sums of money. But then, some people, in their desperation, buy expensive plane tickets to fly their ailing loved ones to healing shrines like Lourdes and de Chimayo, don’t they? This investment can easily run up into the thousands of dollars. Is this insane? Probably not, since it firstly does accord with the cultural practice of people liking to stand near famous/’holy’ places, and secondly, it is mitigated by grief-induced religious mania.

Two conclusions have clearly emerged. If you are the kind of person who peddles overpriced baked portraits on ebay, you are eventually going to be taking advantage of someone who is mentally ill. Just as bad, if you are the curator of a place like Lourdes, then it is literally your day-by-day profession to exploit the helplessness of the grieving and the dying by deceiving them into thinking that some dirty sewer water has even a slim chance of curing their cancer, so long as that dirty sewer water emits from a pipe close enough to a cathedral.

These religious icons are silly. Cheese sandwiches are funny, and when you see one of these things in a museum or a casino at some point in the future, you’ll laugh. But when your customer buys it out of holy terror, or when the venue is visited not by vacationing thrill-seekers but by the terminally ill clinging to desperate promises made by cynical old pulpit-men, then what are you are doing is not a joke any more. It is a crime against humanity.