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 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.

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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