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