merrychristmas




image The two paragraphs below, pertaining to the Shroud of Turin, were delivered as part of a debate speech by David J. Helfand, chair of the Department of Astronomy at Columbia University and co-director of the Columbia Astrophysics Laboratory during a speech at Columbia. The number of errors of fact, both historical and scientific is extraordinary for such an esteemed scientist.

How many mistakes can you find?

The Shroud of Turin project began in the late 1970s when a group of scientists and engineers, a large fraction of whom came from the Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons Laboratory (which I find a frightening thought), lugged millions of pounds of equipment over to Turin and were granted unlimited access to the shroud in order to perform scientific experiments on it to prove that it was the burial shroud of Christ. And indeed, the first experiments, all released through press releases and not scientific journals, were very encouraging. There was iron in the blood on the places where the nails had gone through the hands. The image on the cloth was not possible to produce prior to the age of photography and on and on.

Finally, ten years later, when the church relented and allowed two square centimeters of the cloth to be shipped off to two independent laboratories for double-blind tests of the age dating of the shroud, the age in both cases came back at about 650 plus or minus 20 years, or roughly, 1351 when historians had already shown that the Avignon Pope had excommunicated a French bishop for displaying a fraudulent burial cloth of Christ, "very cleverly painted." My question is, suppose the Carbon-14 data on the shroud had come back differently. Suppose it had come back with a date of A. D. 26. Would then Prof. McGrath or anyone else have said, "Oh, but science has nothing to do with religion, so we won’t take that data into account?"

Stay tuned. A copy of History Channel’s “The Real Face of Jesus?” DVD to the winner. Answer by comments or email to drporter@optonline.net. I’ll get back to you in the same way, if you win, to get a shipping address from you privately.


Crossposting from Shroud of Turin Blog:

Divine Remedy is an excellent blog. It forces us to think. From today’s post:

The Shroud, unlike anything else, is the manifestation of the fusion of the external and internal search engines. It mysteriously lures us towards its vortex-like pathway to God. No human mind in our world has been able to crack the code and access all the necessary information about how the image was formed or how it could be reproduced. The Shroud helps us to appreciate the layers upon layers of complexity and simplicity of our cosmos and the omniscience of God.

When we take everything we know, of Christ’s life, of the Gospels, of the Bible, of the sciences, of religion, of history, of physics we fall down the rabbit hole into the image on the Shroud, searching for God through the light of the Resurrection of Christ.

Read some of the other posts. They are very thought provoking. Search Engines for God « Shroud of Turin Blog


imageIn May of this year, Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic, wrote these blurbs, as part of a larger essay, in his Daily Dish blog. These few, extracted and collected, are something to think about as we struggle to understand the mystery of the Shroud of Turin. For me, they are keepers. They help to keep the ghosts of old catechism at bay. For those unfamiliar with Andrew Sullivan, he is British; lives and writes in the United States, mostly about politics; is somewhat conservative and is a very outspoken Roman Catholic.

. . . No modern Christian, it seems to me, can claim the literal inerrancy of the Bible without abandoning logos. No educated Christian today can deny that the scriptures we have – copies of translations of copies of copies of oral histories – are internally and collectively inconsistent, written by many authors, constructed in specific historical contexts, reflecting human biases, and supplemented by several other gospels that at the time claimed just as much authority as those gospels eventually selected by flawed men centuries later.

. . . There is no single authoritative text, written by one God, word for word true. There is a much more complicated series of writings designed by many men, doubtless under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, that help us see some form of the figure Jesus through languages and texts and memories. I think the character and message of Jesus are searingly clear and distinctive even taking into account that daunting veil through which we are asked to see.

. . . So we are left in search of this Jesus with a fast-burning candle in a constantly receding cave where we know that at some point, the darkness will envelop us entirely. We will catch Him at times; He will elude us at others. We will have to listen to many words he may have spoken before we can each discern the words he may have meant; we will have to keep our eyes and ears open for science’s revelations about the world, while understanding that science is just one way of understanding the world and that poetry, history, and practical perspectives have things to tell us as well. The cathedral at Chartres; the long story of Christian debate and theology; the rituals and daily practices that help us stay trained to intuit the divine we cannot understand and the divine we do not always see in every face around us: these too tell us things that go beyond fact, archeology and hermeneutics.

Yes, this intellectual sifting is hard and troubling to faith; yes, it may end with more mystery than clarity. But if our faith is to be true, it must rest on something more than denial of reality. It must rest on being the greatest experience of reality.

Intellectual Sifting: Get Real – A Lesson for Shroud of Turin Studies « Shroud of Turin Blog


Movie like trailer for “The Shroud” by Meloan and Meloan.


From the Shroud of Turin Blog:

From Down Under this bit in the Sydney Morning Herald

Catholic Mike Willesee will not be distracted from his one-man crusade to scientifically prove the existence of Jesus Christ’s DNA in the ”blood” on the Shroud of Turin.

This week’s claims broadcast on the ABC in a documentary which reckons Leonardo da Vinci was behind the shroud, labelled a fake years ago, have had little impact on Willesee, who friends describe as being ”totally obsessed” with his mission.

Willesee is in Los Angeles working on his quest. His glamorous wife, Gordana, a part-time make-up artist and devout Catholic who reignited her much older husband’s faith in the church, is due to join him in coming days.

Indeed, the Willesee home in Centennial Park is testament to the wealthy family’s Catholicism, filled with icons, statues, candles and images of the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ.

Cardinal George Pell has been to the home to conduct Mass in Willesee’s private chapel, said to be as stunning as anything in the Vatican.

Willesee had the chapel fashioned out of marble. It is filled with flowers and candles and is just a hop, skip and a jump from the family kitchen.

And just where is he going to get a sample of Jesus’ DNA for testing?

This doesn’t help much. « Shroud of Turin Blog




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