How I Became a Christian... Not.

Yesterday, I made an absolute burnt offering of a slice of bread which stayed in the toaster a few moments too long. I was about to toss it into the bin when I glimpsed the Face - that familiar, popular, bearded, iconic face. It leapt out at me so keenly that I nearly convinced myself that the stippled tracings I saw on the piece of burnt bread cohered into that stock face of Jesus. It was Sunday morning, and I could very well have gone on to zap a secular, carefully and thoughtfully constructed edifice of Reason and Irreligion, christianise myself there and then, make a 'spiritual' sea change, embrace God and his dearly beloved son and doppelganger, Jesus.
Let's pursue the counterfactual. It was indeed Sunday morning, and, alas, I saw the face of Jesus of Nazareth charcoaled across one side of the slice of carbonised bread. A voice descended from heaven and told me to stop being a bullheaded Saul and become Paul, Jesus of Nazareth's chief bullshitter, to stop being a scapegrace and enter into God's grace-scape, to stop being an unbelieving asshole and become part of the flock of Christian sheep. Amazingly, the voice had an effect - affect, more like - and I began to speak in tongues, sing and dance, glorifying and jitterbugging for Jehovah. Drunk with rapture, I sauntered off to a church, the nearest evangelical ark, to confess my sins and profess faith and born-again belief. Everyone was happy for me, and I became an effigy of the lapsed atheist, a lost rogue ant who found his way back to the teeming anthill. After all, it was only last week that someone I had not seen for years, aghast at how irreligiously unregenerate I still was, again forecast how I would truly become not just a Christian but a pastor. Tandem with this prediction, I made a beeline for pastorate after becoming a Christian. And miracle of miracles, within 24 hours, I became a 'Man of God,' ordained and all that. Praise be!
But it didn't exactly happen that way. The burnt toast with the cloudy outline of something that I couldn't very well persuade myself was a face that did not have that effect. And it could not. But let's proceed with the assumption that I discerned a face, and apparently the face of Jesus. Which Jesus? That of the Nazarene, who may or may not have lived in a place called Judea 2000 years ago? As we all know now, the received Jesus physiognomy could very well have been that of Cesare Borgia or that of Max Von Sydow or Robert Powell, whose lean, handsome, if hippieish, face still graces the walls and altars of evangelical churches. I knew that even if any image was singed on the incinerated slice of bread, it would be anything but that of a man from 2000 years ago or anyone from any time. It might well be a small, charred, nondescript surface whose random ridges and lines vaguely described a hairy face.
Which brings to mind a particular Jesus' optical illusion. You stare at some Rorschach-esque images for a minute or so, and when you lift up your head and focus on any wall around you, you see Jesus. I knew a Christian person who took this optical mindfuck so seriously that she thought Jesus had indeed popped up on her wall, who weaved the sign of the cross and breathed a momentary Jesus-themed prayer, who thought the illusion shouldn't be repeated often as it might offend Jesus and God, that it might amount to blasphemy, like calling the name of the Lord in vain. And thereby hangs the whole sorry tale of religion.
However, just as there isn't any Jesus on the wall and it's all fancy, there can't have been any Jesus face etched on burnt toast. When you say you see Jesus on the sea-lapped sands of a beach, or in a frothy cup of cappuccino, or in the areolae of your girlfriend's tits, you have only seen what your mind trickily tells your eyes to see. It's pareidolia, a relatively recent subcategory of apophenia - the tendency in humans to see patterns and meanings in random objects, in smoke and clouds.