Typical New York Post Junk
Here is Murdock’s New York Post, tabloid of tabloid, criticizing TIME magazine for being, well, tabloidy:
Just when you thought you’d had enough of Time, deciding that reading it was a chore, the magazine delivers a cover story on — we hate to say it — household chores. With many of us addled by the 11th-hour budget talks, the Greek debt crisis and the infernal heat wave [yes, check today’s Post headlines on the front page pictured above], some will no doubt prefer an article on chores to this magazine’s more traditional summer fare on Martians or the Shroud of Turin.
A quick Google suggests that the last time TIME ran a summer story on the Shroud of Turin was 1976. Yes, 35 years ago. That is their idea of traditional summer fare. There have been stories about the shroud at other times of the year and there was a letter to the editor in June of 2001 that mentioned the shroud. I tried to look up Martians among TIME summer stories but only found references to soil, terrain, NASA exploration, water and things like that. Typical of this tabloid owned by Murdoch’s News Corporation, they just make up stories as they go. I guess it beats phone hacking. Link: Here’s the J.Lo-down – m.NYPOST.com
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Is the Shroud real? Probably.
The Shroud of Turin may be the real burial cloth of Jesus. The carbon dating, once seemingly proving it was a medieval fake, is now widely thought of as suspect and meaningless. Even the famous Atheist Richard Dawkins admits it is controversial. Christopher Ramsey, the director of the Oxford Radiocarbon Laboratory, thinks more testing is needed. So do many other scientists and archeologists. This is because there are significant scientific and non-religious reasons to doubt the validity of the tests. Chemical analysis, all nicely peer-reviewed in scientific journals and subsequently confirmed by numerous chemists, shows that samples tested are chemically unlike the whole cloth. It was probably a mixture of older threads and newer threads woven into the cloth as part of a medieval repair. Recent robust statistical studies add weight to this theory. Philip Ball, the former physical science editor for Nature when the carbon dating results were published, recently wrote: “It’s fair to say that, despite the seemingly definitive tests in 1988, the status of the Shroud of Turin is murkier than ever.” If we wish to be scientific we must admit we do not know how old the cloth is. But if the newer thread is about half of what was tested – and some evidence suggests that – it is possible that the cloth is from the time of Christ.
No one has a good idea how front and back images of a crucified man came to be on the cloth. Yes, it is possible to create images that look similar. But no one has created images that match the chemistry, peculiar superficiality and profoundly mysterious three-dimensional information content of the images on the Shroud. Again, this is all published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
We simply do not have enough reliable information to arrive at a scientifically rigorous conclusion. Years ago, as a skeptic of the Shroud, I came to realize that while I might believe it was a fake, I could not know so from the facts. Now, as someone who believes it is the real burial shroud of Jesus of Nazareth, I similarly realize that a leap of faith over unanswered questions is essential.
My name is Dan Porter. Please email me at DanielRobertPorter@gmail.com
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