Friday, June 6, 2008
Mohammad appears on piece of bark in Chicago?
God, I’m told, moves in mysterious ways. He showed up once 2000 years ago, told everyone to be nice to each other, got nailed to a piece of wood for his troubles (what a way for a carpenter to go – the irony!) and hasn’t made an appearance since. Unless of course you believe the hoards of credulous pundits who have seen God, Jesus, The Virgin Mary etc. appearing live in toasted cheese sandwiches, tree stumps and stained highway overpasses. Catholics have been particularly notorious for Virgin Mary sightings – one of the most famous being ‘Our Lady of the Toasted Cheese Sandwich’ which sold on eBay for $28,000. Muslims have not been as keen as their Christian counterparts to play these games of ‘Spot The Deity’ until very recently. But they’ve gone one better and found the actual name of their god rather than an indistinct figure or face. (Just to go off on a diversion, it seems that people just see what they want to see; Catholics see the Virgin Mary, Christians see Jesus – it’s solely based on context. It’s my theory that if the indistinct image of a bearded man showed up on a wall in Abbott, Texas they would build a shrine to Willie Nelson on the spot. But I digress.) A Muslim man in Chicago has actually found the name Mohammad written on the bark of a tree by insects. Assad Busool heard tree bark hit the ground in his front yard ‘as though God was trying to get his attention’ and when he picked it up he saw the name Mohammad carved by termites. "I was astonished," said Busool, 69. “I have a holy tree in my yard." (I’m going to pass on a termites/holy tree gag at the risk of sounding like my parents.) Undeniable proof that the Islamic god exists! (The sacred bark is pictured below so you can see for yourself how miraculous this item is.) Now, we all know that God is pretty good at doing stuff, but how exactly did he go about instructing his invertebrate minions to do his holy bidding? Busool explains all: “They don't know Arabic. To eat the inside of the branch and make that writing, it's guidance from God, of course. The termites were worshiping God". Of course. It turns out, in fact, that the insects ‘worshipping God' were wood borers rather than termites, but who’s going to argue with a man who clearly has a direct line to God via the trees in his front garden? I think the final word should be left to Busool’s wife Ann: “Either we have some very intelligent termites out there or something else is going on”.
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3 comments:
I wonder if all arthopods share this religious conviction?
"Go to the ant thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise," Proverbs 6:6
The miraculous finding of the names of Mohammed and God are pretty common miracles in the Muslim world actually.
A friend of mine once picked up a DVD in a town outside Jakarta called "The Wonders of God" where it showed hundreds of sightings of the phenomenon including huge numbers of barnyard animals that had clearly been written on, obviously photoshopped islands forming a crescent and star, clouds and so on and so on all set to Islamic devotional hymns. It was entertaining for a while...
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