Shroud of Turin part 1

THE SHROUD OF TURIN

 

An Image of Doubt

 

 

Gary Kent

 

 

 

A scientific super hoax, a fraud of the first magnitude, that's the only way to describe it. This is not so much a story of foolish misdeeds and misinterpretations regarding the "scientific" investigation of the Shroud of Turin. It is also meant as an offering of an archetype, a prime example of how gets established such a phony nonsense of a hyper-lie, such an ugly, gnarled, non-science paradigm. It must be that the minds of so very many bored people absolutely need to believe, they truly crave this kind of extreme pseudoscience claptrap.

 

Government officials and police have to fight drug abuse. Scientists and journalists have a hard job too. They must tenaciously fight cases of well organized, well financed, pseudo logical, ostensibly learned semi-scientific nonsense whenever they find it. If we do our jobs well then our fellow citizens, students and readers will help because nobody really likes to be addictively doped or duped.

 

This is an urgent matter of leadership and confidence, competence too.

 

After all, science is not a democracy. Not all scientists are created equal in talent or proficiency. Not all scientific techniques, not even high-tech ones, are of equal reliability or of equal import when called upon to settle particular special technical questions.

 

Perhaps the growth of government has conditioned us to accept the drivel put forth by overwhelming battalions of commissioners and committeemen. Panels of so-called experts, these commissions and committees often govern themselves by some form of parliamentary procedure. Democratic ideals are bandied about much as the whip-like sticks that chimpanzees love to wave, thrust and parry at each other when not using them to zip termites from deep within some cozy little vermin nest.

 

Committees who tout their own existence as Blue Ribbon Commissions who beget themselves and who then select their own members are particularly suspect. Where the scientist members jockey for advantageous commercial, social and political positions we must give pause. When is paramount the protection of their own fragile God given "rights", robust skepticism must prevail on our part.

 

Time after time, commission reports and the thick proceedings of technical committees are justly buried in brittle dry archives deep under dingy desiccated dust and dank darkness. Participating scientists pray that their consensus bound koo-koo conclusions will become forgotten myths. Fit only for oblivion, the errors of popular democratic scientism are really a pervasive kind of pseudointellectual faux science. These reports are still piling up in the basements of public, private and government libraries all around the world.

 

One of the most deserving candidates for permanent future obscurity is the report of the Shroud of Turin Research Project. The STURP commission, as it is sometimes called, operated under very fair, civil and democratic procedures throughout its existence. It was all so neat and tidy according to the letter of understanding that all members signed as a prerequisite for participation.

 

STURP was designed and constructed by techie type Shroud enthusiasts expressly in order to conclusively authenticate the cloth that is purportedly the burial wrap of Jesus Christ. Supposedly, it bears a front and back body image of the crucified Messiah.

 It first became known to anyone of whom we are aware in 1437 when Charles de Charney exhibited it in a small church in Lirey, France. Denied by the contemporary bishop of the area as well as by his successor, the Shroud eventually outlived authorized strictures requiring that it be officially portrayed only as a mere "likeness".

 Once the pastoral dicta were forgotten over decades, the miraculous claims about the Shroud were again touted. The touts were turned to ticket money, of course. So the Shroud legend began as a sort of ecclesiastically questionable church-carnival or holy festival side show.

 STURP, in its quest for democratic ideals, completely neglected these facts and focused instead on the narrow semi-scientific Holy Grail of consensus by committee.

 
But democracy in STURP has meant only that minority views were perforce to remain subservient to the bully rule of crass conformity and the tyranny of the majority. No minority report was allowed, no dissenting opinion was promulgated.

 

The STURP commission sacrificed truth for frail human notions of consistency in order that falsehood could be parlayed into a christologically golden conclusion. Yet the bias and preordained final desire of the STURP commission to theologically justify its existence has escaped notice by the press. Few journalists= pointed critical analyses have appeared though more than three decades have elapsed.

Shroud of Turin part 2

Shroud of Turin  part 2

 

Only Dr. Walter C. McCrone's book, Judgment Day for the Turin Shroud, Microscope Publications, 1997, goes straight to the point. It details how he discovered artist's pigment on the Shroud of Turin image areas and "blood" stains sufficient to account for all the image's intensity. His much earlier published papers giving all the technical wrinkles of his findings were later corroborated by radiocarbon dating of the Shroud.

 

Visit  http://www.mcri.org/home/section/63-64/the-shroud-of-turin .

 

This very old and reliable, fundamentally electronic technique proved, within a margin of a few years, that the Shroud originated in the 14th century, just as McCrone (RIP), the world's best light microscopist, had deduced. The light microscope had once more proven to be more accurate, immediate and precise than the best "black box" high-tech methods.

 

Anyway, radiocarbon dating certainly does not make the work of McCrone moot nor does it close the account on the Shroud. McCrone, by his book, establishes that Shroud reverence continues to stray into fraudulent unscientific story-telling and basement level bawdy myth. This is despite conclusive proof against the Shroud.

 

While the Shroud and STURP were still making news in 1978 and '79, only a sense for the sensational in synergy with a compelling need for the correct political posture explains the virtual abdication of the press' role as a skeptical investigator. To question the Shroud was to offend Catholics and to depreciate Christianity. In a case like this, good investigative reporting is not a part of the best formula to promote strong newspaper and periodical sales in heavily Christian western countries.

 

Jesus might never approve. The Islamic world just may differ slightly. Let's let Walter McCrone's book make Shroud news again, now, so he can finally set the STURP record straight.

 

STURP lied. STURP made pompously momentous deliberate false claims. STURP was a cruel farcical cap to a 640 year old joke.

 

That the chemical and physical methods used to study the Shroud were being hailed as the best modern technology has to offer is disturbing enough. STURP's preposterous final claim that there is no credible evidence against the Shroud adds to the deficit. That such garbage, unrecognized as it is as bad science, if not pseudoscience, argues so well in the media for the Shroud's authenticity and is believed by the ordinary man-on-the-street, is a monumental setback for science itself, at least for science in the West.

 

Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic scientists laughed their heads off, opining "What a goof troop those impostors must be!" when they saw STURP studies published in famous western journals. The judgement of God may never be known for sure, but it has never been moral or right to lie for Christ any more than it has ever been so to kill for Jesus, the Crusades notwithstanding.

 

When news arrived that STURP proceedings were being attended by a fundamentalist Catholic cult of "Jesus freaks" some observers were perturbed. But when some STURP members took to wearing large wooden crosses around their necks perturbation degenerated to consternation. It was clear that only one conclusion was possible from this evangelical canonization commission.

 

It's too bad there cannot be a church trial of the Shroud as is done to elevate a personage to sainthood.

 

STURP conducted no such trial, that's for sure. There was no devil's advocate. No one in the STURP group was allowed to effectively argue the case against authenticity. No one in STURP really critically evaluated the results that were being obtained in favor of the Shroud. The one man who might have exposed this intellectual crime against humanity had been sequestered, isolated, silenced and all but excommunicated.

 

It is all classical high balderdash. The manner in which this fraud was propagated is documented by McCrone and much earlier by Skeptical Inquirer authors. McCrone administers the coup de grace. A discussion here of the SI authors’ critical analysis and McCrone's own independent scientific investigation of the Shroud must wait. For now, let's just say that McCrone's microscopical examination of Shroud samples was the only fitting, apt and well calibrated instrumental technique that was ever performed by both a courageous and truly objective investigator.

 

In a way, this author wishes to congratulate Dr. Walter C. McCrone publicly for his devotion to Science with a capital "S".

 

For McCrone was really a true scientist. (He died in 2002.) He both acknowledged and compensated for his biases. His marshaling of massive evidence against Shroud authenticity should have been the only data that was deemed admissible by STURP. Instead, it was crassly thrown out, arrogantly dismissed, haughtily rejected and a crass attempt was made to entomb it forever.

 

The initial premise used by STURP was that the Shroud is genuine. The negation of the premise is that "the Shroud is not genuine, it is not the true burial cloth of Christ, it is the work of an artist". On the surface, this implies to some that if it isn't the result of a real miracle, virtually the only alternative is that it is a work of art.

This is the null hypothesis that STURP used to try and show Shroud authenticity and to convince skeptics of their devotion to the scientific method. By apparently disproving the null hypothesis, by arguing that the Shroud could not be the work of an artist, STURP scientists knew they would never actually have to enunciate that most incredible conclusion. That the Shroud contains a miraculous image of the crucified and resurrected Jesus is laid between the lines. But if taken at face value, this is an inevitable direct conclusion that could be drawn from the STURP report.

Yet, if this conclusion is left to the reader, it is a finding that would be based on false evidence, specious argument and selective admission of facts, to be sure. Still, advantages accrued for STURP. For when structured this way the report largely escaped ridicule and mostly preserved the personal reputations of STURP members: a very happy circumstance for them indeed. They thought they could get away with this kind of a cop-out and still retain the good graces of Shroud fans and the Catholic Church.

Shroud of Turin part 3

Part 3

 

And it seemed so scientific, so very rational and objective too. What a sting. A perfect set-up. We were all the intended marks in a worldwide scam, or else we were the victims of some cretinous bad joke.

 

There is only one word for the kind of imbecility that wraps up its moronic nakedness in the trappings of logic and science. Such twaddle is not properly to be called by any cheap, one syllable, derogatory four letter word, no no no. Perpetrated by scientists as only scientists themselves could possibly do it: it is indeed chemically pure, genuine, effervescent sparkling Pseudo science! With a capital P, it is of the highest order, fashioned by experts, sanctioned by professionals. With a nihil obstat from bishops of this day, all it lacks is an imprimatur from the Pope.

 

The most celebrated act in this paper charade is the image analysis done by scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the Air Force Weapons Test Site in Los Alamos National Laboratory near Albuquerque New Mexico. Scientists there used high quality photographic negatives bearing the image of the Shroud. But this analysis does not in any way show a three dimensional likeness of Christ derived from the Shroud as claimed by STURP. It shows an image of the human model they used to trick the computer image analyzer into interpreting the fuzzy outlines of the "man" in the Shroud as if they came from a 3-D statuesque source. In other words, they implicitly assumed what they were purportedly trying to prove when they calibrated the image analyzer. You can't get a much smaller radius into a circular argument, except maybe by supercomputer.

 

STURP supposed that if the Shroud contained 3-D image information that could be used to regenerate a sort of cathode ray sculpture or electronic BAS-relief of a human form, then that would be proof that the image could not be the work of a minor artist. No such artist, the argument goes, would be able to supply the precise mathematical information "inherent" in the Shroud so as to produce such a striking effect, especially no artist who worked in 14th century ignorance.

 

This is a pronouncement of a well known art critic that had been domesticated by STURP and who had encouraged the project from the start. The reputations of more professional people than just the scientists involved with STURP are on the line here.

Even with the kind of computer enhancement that underlay the digital 3-D output from JPL's unique sophisticated technology, the likeness derived from the Shroud is crude at best. The late artist Walter Sanford has produced images strikingly similar to that on the Shroud by means of a conventional art technique. Belying STURP's claim that no artist could have done it, Mr. Sanford demonstrated to a packed Chicago audience in 1984 that the job is so simple that even a provincial ignoramus from the 14th century could easily have finished the creation in a matter of minutes. After all, the utterly impossible task that such a peasant artisan would have had to do to get the details almost right was to be able to read some version of a bootlegged Bible.

 

Painting rapidly, as an artist would have approached a fresco, Sanford swabbed a large piece of linen mounted like canvas on a frame. The broad strokes and large brush he used produced very distinct eyes, nose, hair and other facial features in exactly the same diffuse manner as the Shroud. This was largely due to his skill, of course, and to the fact that he used a "dry brush" that was only damp, not soaking wet, with the extremely dilute iron earth tempera that the Shroud artist would have had to use.

 

Due to the moisture on the linen, the painting remained manifestly perceptible to the audience and to the artist for many minutes. This was long enough for him to touch-up and add some minute detail. When it dried, the image had the same ethereal, almost invisible quality of the Shroud. The viewer had to stand back quite a distance to perceive it and he also had to avoid looking directly at the feature that he wanted to see. If there were edges in the image painted this way, they were extremely dispersed and impossible to exactly pinpoint by eye.

 

What the artist had to keep in mind while producing a Shroud image was that he was in essence making a sort of ersatz contact print or rubbing. Children try rubbings all the time when they press a green leaf from a pretty tree under a piece of paper then wipe a crayon sideways across the sheet. An image of the leaf appears where the raised veins cause the paper to catch the pigment. Only the raised parts contribute to the image. 

Art students sometimes do this with sculptures that can be spared. Graphite or charcoal is used to coat the piece and then paper is smoothed over it. An image gets transferred to the paper, roughly duplicating the intentions of the sculptor in two dimensions. But the product of a rubbing is not a mathematical projection of the sculpted form onto a 2-D plane as the Shroud image seems to be. A true rubbing necessarily rolls the paper around the object, producing an odd but distinctive cylindrical distortion when the paper in unrolled.

But a genuine projected effect is automatic when an artist naively attempts to simulate a rubbing by free hand painting using a dry brush and very dilute tempera. The idea was to mimic dirty, bloody sweat that was to have "rubbed off" on the Shroud while Christ's body was wrapped in it. Mr. Sanford was a good artist but all he did was attempt to manually replicate what children and art students do mechanically all the time.

By the way, all the other "unique" characteristics of the Shroud are reproduced by this method.

A major problem with the Jet Propulsion Lab team's image analysis effort was that they selected control images or comparison paintings that they knew before hand could not behave like the Shroud does when photographed. These were contrast enhanced photographic negative images, not positive prints. When the image analyzer was applied to the "controls" a Shroud-like smoothly varying simulated 3-D effect was not produced. The Shroud seemed to be unique; unique among the tightly limited standards of comparison that JPL scientists allowed, that is. This falsely reinforced the claim that it was not a painting.

STURP had faith but not felicity. Someday this miscarriage of science will be seen for the travesty that it is. STURP & The Shroud will be synonymous with Piltdown and Lysenko.

Shroud of Turin part 4

Shroud of Turin  part 4

 

Drug abuse corrodes the mind. Pseudoscience is such a drug that some people abuse in order to assuage their lack of faith or to feed their need to believe in something - anything - that transcends their perception of themselves in their own seemingly little lives. The pseudoscientific mind can forget or ignore anything; any fact, any contradiction, any law of nature. The drug abuser ignores all appeals to logic, harking only to weak pathetic arguments in defense of his twisted appetite. The pseudoscientist dismisses history, just as the drug user must live only in the present, interpreting the world through his addiction, seeking only his next fix.

 

History has produced a remarkable antidote for the Shroud addict's habit. In France, in the middle ages, an amazing art genre existed. It was intended to augment religious celebrations and processions. A kind of painting, it was in the form of a wide banner. Made of cloth, it was held up on poles by processional participants for all to see. Called a fronde, it bore a painting of a saint or other religious figure that helped to depict the theme for the holy day. Like giant flags, they added to the festive spirit of the devout worshipers.

 

Frondes were often painted on linen in tempera. The paint was applied by brush very lightly, using a dry-brush technique. This was meant to assist the handlers of the fronde who had to roll it up on a spindle for storage until the next year when it could be unrolled without damage. A thick layer of ordinary paint would crack and flake, but a painting in the manner of the Shroud would be flexible enough to endure repeated unroll and roll-up on a spindle without deleterious effect.

 

Until recently, the Shroud was still kept rolled up on a spindle.

 

A fronde done by a 14th century artist in the manner of Mr. Sanford would image analyze just like the Shroud, as if secret 3-D clues were hidden in the blurred lines of the painting. STURP's pet art critic never considered this from behind the veil of his pseudoscientific euphoria.

 

Even before they volunteered to work on the Shroud problem, members of JPL's image analysis team were bona fide Shroud freaks. They were fine marks for the con-job of narcotic pseudoscience addiction. They say that con men themselves make the best marks. Maybe the most charitable thing that could be said about STURP is that they conned themselves.

 

The bias demonstrated by every STURP research team member is nowhere more blatant than this deliberate stacking of the computer's deck by JPL personnel. But it had to be deliberate. If this author, a low born master of science now elevated to the Science Bishopric, can see it by mere inspection of STURP results, the exalted experts must have known it too. If so, it is as crass an attempt to exploit the emotions of the faithful as any quack doctor's lies to his dying patient.

 

There are other examples showing how STURP scientists selected or contrived defective standards and controls with which to compare measurements on the Shroud. One crucial experiment involved an attempt to determine if the Shroud image could be the result of the presence of red ocher. This common pigment, known since prehistoric times, is an iron earth or hydrated iron oxide that was found on the Shroud surface by previous microscopical examination by Dr. Walter McCrone.

 

Reflectance spectrometric data were obtained. Reflected light wavelength and intensities were analyzed. A single control sample of iron oxide on linen was made. The spectral characteristics of the Shroud and the control together seemed to indicate that much much more red ocher would be needed to produce the image on the Shroud than could be accounted for by microscopical examination. Conclusion: the image is not due to an artist's pigment and must be the result of some unknown (supernatural) phenomenon.

 

The key error, of course, was the sloppy almost unbelievably unprofessional manner in which the control sample was produced. A smudge of dry jeweler's rouge was made on a piece of cloth and this raw daub was intended to approximate the delicate traces that made up the Shroud image! Ink makers and paint formulators and optical physicists know that a pigment must be thoroughly dispersed to efficiently utilize its coloring power. By using a dry smudge, the optical physicist from the Santa Barbara Research Center who made these measurements tilted the result in favor of the desired conclusion for authenticity.

 

The poorly dispersed smudge with its excessive amount of iron oxide indicated that, by comparison, an inordinate amount of pigment would be required to create a Shroud-like image. Since no such extreme amount of iron oxide could be found on the Shroud, not even by McCrone, the Shroud image cannot be due to artist's pigment. This argument is as false as the phony control sample that was incompetently used to conclude it.

 

Some microchemical and micro-optical tests done at Western Connecticut State College and at the New England Institute could never have been legitimately used as evidence of any sort in a court of law. But STURP used them anyway. This says something about their degree of desperation to find enough convincing proof to purvey to the press and lay people. STURP had an agenda, an axe to grind, a miracle to validate.

 

The samples available to the STURP exaltation commission at these laboratories were pitifully few and poor in quality. Besides this limitation, the sticky tape bound surface fibers were examined without blind statistical precaution, unlike the meticulous work of Dr. McCrone. All the fibers were examined but a major claim was based on the observation of a single microscopic crystal upon the application of a microchemical test for blood. The clumsiness of the investigator conveniently destroyed what may have been an artifact before its identity could be verified. Yet on the basis of faulty evidence like this it was concluded that the Shroud image certainly contains blood. No attempt was even made to determine whether it might have been human blood. Just an insignificant detail, no doubt, and of no concern to STURP.

Maybe that would have been too much even for STURP. To claim that a stray microscopic crystal was not only indicative of blood, but had proven to be of human blood origin might have stretched the lie farther than even STURP members could abide. But stretch it they did. One STURP worker got hold of some of the red ocher pigment on the Shroud and typed it, assuming it was indeed blood. Naturally, we would not have heard of it had he not "discovered" that the Shroud's iron oxide gives a type AB test result in his capable hands.

Shroud of Turin part 5

Shroud of Turin  part 5

 

The brilliance of the Shroud's forger has blinded some STURP members, but if they were innocent as accomplices to fraud after the fact, then they were awfully stupid. They were silent as well while their colleagues freely tortured the scientific method.

 

Contrary to STURP'S blatant misstatement of fact, the spectrometric results, in the form of spectrograms of the blood areas of the Shroud, do NOT resemble the spectra of blood. They are not very different from that expected for a mixture of iron earth pigment and cinnabar or vermillion (mercuric sulfide). This pigment has a strong absorption band, or region of the visible spectrum where light of a very specific color is greatly attenuated (upon reflection in this case). The so called Sorét band of hemoglobin in blood absorbs in the same region, but it absorbs much more strongly and over a much narrower range of wavelengths. Only a novice or a charlatan could mistake the difference. A competent metal coordination chemist would spot this error instantly.

Yet, whenever STURP scientists have to explain discrepancies in their interpretations with the factual record of their own data they retreat into excuses. STURP vies with creation "scientists" for sheer slipperiness this way.

 

Potassium and sodium shows in their X-ray fluorescence spectrograms of genuine blood-on-cloth. Though the spectrograms obtained in Turin when the Shroud was examined in 1978 were of better quality than those of these standards, the absence of these elements (an essential component of blood) in the Shroud spectrometer output is attributed to "instrumental difficulties" and "electronic noise".

 

Or else somebody idiotically washed the Shroud. Like someone today would dry clean the Mona Lisa or scrub down the "Last Supper" with Comet kitchen cleanser.

 

By examination of STURP's own data it must be concluded that there is no blood on the Shroud of Turin. The opposite conclusion can be made only by selective exclusion of evidence in a knowing, deliberate attempt to subvert the truth.

 

The only way this kind of despicable pseudoscience could ever have been published in various reputable scientific journals is by means of cronyism or worse on the part of certain editors. Such an editor can parcel out candidate papers for publication to as many or as few referees as he pleases. He can even serve as a referee himself.

 

Some of the STURP scientists were well known to the editors of certain journals and to each other. If an editor should give papers to referees who did not recuse themselves because they were close friends of the authors in question or because they were associated, however loosely, with the work involved, a green light for publication from such referees would seem not so surprising.

 

Even at its zenith, when STURP scientists where actively engaged in Shroud investigations, the project was not well known outside of the circle of Shroud fans. If an editor were unaware of the existence or of the large scope of STURP, he might accidentally give papers for review to other members of STURP to referee in a sort of fortuitous, intellectually incestuous impromptu love fest. Something like this certainly happened because most of the papers published by STURP people were perfectly unpublishable, the acme of trash.

 

Tyranny thrives on such lapses by otherwise honest men, so let the editors deny it all. But one thing is certain. They certainly bent over backward not to suppress anything.

 

STURP members used their joint power to suppress one particular unpopular "unscholarly" dissenting view and turned a mere conclave of tinkering pseudoscientific weekend crackpots into a massacre of the truth that will live in infamy. STURP represents one of the great world atrocities of irrationality.

 

In order to carry out their program of selective exclusion of pertinent information, the true believers within STURP were required to submit their findings to the approval of the majority. Dr. Walter McCrone's refusal to soften his reasoning and his insistence on an honest presentation of his own results led him to resign from STURP. Their report would not have given any weight to McCrone's work anyway. So he was better off free of STURP. He could, and did, then publish his results independently.

 

Unwarranted, incredibly vicious attacks on McCrone were aimed at his person and his professional veracity. His conclusions were viewed with such alarm and fervor that denunciations were heard that usually are reserved for the destruction of heretics.

Many STURP members regretted inviting McCrone to participate in the first place. He was, after all, the sole representative of non-Shroud advocates to sit on this self-selected panel. When it was formed, a few STURP members thought it would be a good idea to get some expertise from outside their cozy little group. They thought that since the Shroud was surely genuine anyway, such a person would certainly agree with the majority. STURP's opinion had already reached more than a mere consensus of the genuine Shroud, it was dogma.

Shoud of Turin part 6

Shroud of Turin  Part 6

 

Walter McCrone concluded that the Shroud of Turin was a fake long before the Shroud was radiocarbon dated in 1988. This final proof was determined by three different top notch laboratories using blind sample and analysis techniques. Three completely different answers said that the Shroud cloth was not nearly so old as Christianity itself. The Shroud linen, a form of pure cellulose that was easily washed free of contaminants and presented to the radiocarbon assay devices as a pristine analytically pure substance, gave precisely the same result three separate and independent times. The conviction of all the skeptics who already knew of McCrone's work was merely confirmed. The Shroud of Turin came into existence in about the 14th century.

 

But the press did not notice that they and the carbon date workers had been scooped. McCrone's data are even more firm and reliable than the untouchable, invisible black box method that radiocarbon dating employs. There is nothing more solid or more simple and direct than the polarized light microscope McCrone uses.

 

With the combination of McCrone's irrefutable Shroud discoveries and the incontrovertible results of Church sponsored radiocarbon dating you might think that Shroud reverence and Shroud societies and Shroud Pseudo Science would just dry up and blow away. As McCrone said on many occasions, however, no matter how much damning evidence accumulates against the Shroud, some people will never be convinced. They will always try to invent complicated excuses, elaborate explanations, foolish scenarios, hairbrained theories and air-head accusatory anti-shroud conspiracies in order to maintain their belief.

 

One tidy little story goes something like this: The resurrection was a true phenomenon that had consequences beyond merely raising Jesus from the dead. Tremendous amounts of energy must have been released at the moment that life was restored. His body must have radiated a prodigious torrent of gamma rays, neutrons, x-rays, neutrinos, muons and every other kind of light and subatomic particle. In such a maelstrom of pure energy, anything is possible, even the transformation of elements. No, the Shroud wasn't reduced to ash. But, some carbon-12 was merely transmogrified to carbon-14. 

 

Then radiocarbon dating was done almost 2,000 years later. This analysis determines how much carbon-14 is left in the carbon bearing cellulose once it stopped incorporating this natural radioactive element into its framework since it was last alive. When the flax, in this case, was harvested and turned into linen, Carbon-14 from the atmosphere no longer was being replenished by the processes of green plant respiration. But the purported transformation of carbon-12 into carbon-14 vastly increased the natural store of carbon-14 in the Shroud's cellulose. This made it now appear to be much younger than its true age, once it was dated. The same process was responsible for fixing the image of Christ on the cloth, it is said.

 

The microscopical results of Dr. McCrone were dismissed in much the same way. So much electromagnetic and other energy suffused the Shroud at the moment of resurrection that hemoglobin in red blood cells was transfigured to iron oxide particles while destroying sodium and potassium and obliterating all other carbonaceous fatty and sugary components while leaving proteinaceous traces of real blood (what McCrone says is the tempera vehicle). Some atoms were transformed into mercury and others to sulfur in such a way that mercuric sulfide micro-crystals had to form.

Every time facts are marshaled to debunk the Shroud another ad hoc story is invented to rebut. There is no end to the ingenious creative attempts to alter the truth. It is because some people simply must have miracles in order to believe and because they must believe or their whole emotional system of self esteem and self worth will be crushed.

 

It is just for this reason also that people must have their circuses to pacify them in the big cities. It has been ever thus since cities were conceived. The Chicago Bulls, the Houston Texans, the Los Angeles Dodgers all are roving circuses as important to city life as Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey, the World Soccer Cup or the ancient Coliseum of mighty Rome. So it is that faith sometimes is so weak that it must be bolstered by tangible, miraculous signs for many of the more desperate citizens of the City of God. Some of us are doubting Thomases at heart who want pathetically to believe and to see. We don't realize that the greatest show on earth is happening right inside our own heads and just outside our two dark blinking windows.

 

It's just so sad that so many must fasten onto science frauds with such tenacity that all the negative evidence in the world won't convince them of the lie. It is a great sorrow that the Shroud offers both false religious and scientific succor to nothing but the monstrous maw of eternal emptiness that gnaws at the heart and soul of every thoughtful person.

 

Nonetheless, I believe that surely there is relief in God's Word.

 

It's just too bad that the forces of the shadows sometimes ensnare even the righteous in the grip of this kind of disgusting error. It is not often that the Bible and the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics are darkly combined to produce such a depressing Burlesque show.

 

But isn't this exactly how all pseudoscience persists? The Shroud of Turin Research Project is the most compact and concentrated occurrence of pseudoscience ever. The whole cast and crew and the entire set with all the production's props are still on hand, except for a couple of actors who had to leave early. Not only was this greatest show directed by a well identified and documented coterie of perfectly typecast pseudoscientists, they were actually real professionals when playing their legitimate roles. And the object of this circus act is still locked up in a vault in Turin, Italy. But of course, it has been moved temporarily after the fire that damaged the cathedral recently.

But we have the primary material object, we have all but two of the main stars, we have the ancient and modern documents and we even have the witnesses who can attest to this enormous, really global, masquerade's true nature. It is really quite a perfect example of how pseudoscience may be born, lives and grows but never dies.

 

The self-anointed STURP commission has repeatedly ignored facts, discarded data and resorted to unsound "uncontrolled" experiments. As performed by scientists working outside their fields of expertise and then by using techniques or instruments that were unsuited for the technological demands that were cynically made of them, their efforts turned out to be utter mummery.

But few speak out. Science was perverted and redesigned not to determine the nature of the Shroud image but to prove a fully prejudged outright pretension that the Shroud should be authentic. So, few seem to listen to any other voice.

continued

Shroud of Turin, part 7

Shroud of Turin, part 7

 

CONCLUSION

 

So, we hereby declare: every single result published by STURP scientists has been deliberately or incompetently misinterpreted and sometimes contrived. It is outrageous that some of this data were actually published in refereed scientific journals. Further, we say, STURP members, as referees, must have reviewed and approved each other's work. The editors must have been personal friends of certain key participants to allow such callow atrocities to be perpetrated using the weapons of the institutionalized professional press.

 

The story of the Shroud attains excess mythic majesty if left undisturbed to grow and spread. STURP only added to it. But as a nonsense myth, it will never be taken to heart by any significant portion of the human race because of its many smothering flaws.

 

 

Much has been made of the fact that the picture on the cloth represents accurately every biblical account of the crucifixion and resurrection that can possibly apply. This has been pointed to as conclusive proof of authenticity - as if the Bible must not have been available to any artists of the 14th century, especially not to illiterate French artists.

 

These Shroud fans' claims are an insult against France and against the French people. They belittle the bishops and the whole Church of France whose investigations of old have shown that the cloth is a fake. In the light of the testimony of witnesses from the time of its first appearance that it is phony, extraordinary proof of great quality and quantity is needed to reverse this condemnation. This proof is what STURP tried desperately to supply. But at best STURP'S evidence is inconclusive and if other facts are considered, such as Dr. McCrone's discoveries, the mass of evidence weighs more heavily against the Shroud. This even without the radiocarbon dating that corroborates McCrone.

 

Besides this and even besides the theological arguments against the Shroud, legion as they are, there is a certain wonder that the Shroud has got as far as it did for so long. In fact, that the Shroud has survived so long is often referred to as if its longevity (since the 14th century, at least) was further proof of its divine origin.

 

If the Shroud image is not divine, how has it been able to survive so long and why do so many people believe in it? The answer cannot be stated simply. Apart from this episode of High Pseudo science, the Shroud phenomenon can be adequately rationalized by analysis that explicitly takes into account the history, rivalry and politics between France and Italy. The true answer to the mystery of the Shroud of Turin resides most patently in the reasons for Geoffrey de Charney of France's loss and Savoy of Italy's gain. Besides being the greatest art fraud in history and one of the greatest scientific frauds, the Shroud of Turin ranks as one of the world's most battered political footballs.

 

It is more than a mere coincidence that the Shroud legally belongs to the exiled King of Italy and his family and that his House of Savoy stands to gain by the continuing political turmoil in that country. Royals love to meddle even if they don't have anything material to gain. This particular Shroud controversy was deliberately encouraged by King Humberto and his relatives as a means of keeping the royal family in the eye of the Italian public.

 

Careful analysis suggests that Humberto had used some unscrupulous or gullible scientists in Europe and America to maintain himself in a position to influence the course of events inside Italy. He dreamt of engineering a return to the Italian monarchy. In a country that is almost 100% Roman Catholic, the man who can successfully claim to own such a holy relic as a fully authenticated and universally recognized Shroud could parlay his "monopoly of Jesus" into, who knows? Machiavelli would be proud.

 

Just remember that there are a number of angles from which to view the cloth. When examining this case, though it is nothing more than an artist's picture, there is indeed much more to the famous Shroud of Turin than hits the eye. The late singer Dean Martin would agree that it is all ultimately a matter of faith and amore no matter how much the Shroud is likened to a bright, full, romantic rectangular moon or a big, oblong pizza pie.

 

 

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