Shroud of Turin Relationship to NDE and OBE?
Very interesting posting by John Klotz in his blog, Living Free. He writes:
Salon.com, the Internet equivalent of MSNBC has a lengthy article by a author of a book to be released next week entitled “Brain Wars.” It’s about Out-of-Body Experiences (OBE) and Near Death Experiences (NDE)http://www.salon.com/2012/04/21/near_death_explained/singleton
It is my position that the Shroud has a direct relationship to the issues raised.
You should probably take the time to read the article John points to.
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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
I have a deep interest in NDEs. I had a short piece published in the recent edition of the Journal of Near Death Studies and am working on another piece for that journal. This article was surprisingly well done, in my view, and I’m glad to know about the book it came from.
Is there a relationship between the Shroud and NDEs? I think that is certainly possible. It’s what I have intuitively felt. There is a fascinating case of a woman named Anita Moorjani (her book, Dying to Be Me, was released last month and is doing very well on Amazon). After a long battle, she “died” from stage 4 lymphoma, her body riddled with tumors the size of lemons. While on the other side (her description), she was shown that she had been living in fear, while she was meant to live in love. She was told that, now that she had realized that, if she chose to go back, her body would adjust to her new love-based way of being, and would heal quite quickly. This, miraculously, turned out to be true.
What is particularly interesting from the standpoint of the Shroud is that she was also told that, depending on her choice to return to her body or not, test results would yield different verdicts. If she chose to stay, the results would show she died from her cancer. If she returned to her body, the results would show a cancer on the retreat.
The really mind-bending thing is that this test had already been done; however, the results were not yet in. When she did return to her body, it happened exactly as she was told it would.
Taken at face value, her story is one in which some kind of spiritual influence came from (through?) her disembodied mind to her “dead” body, transforming that body and, what’s more, leaving an (apparently back-dated) imprint on a medical test.
The obvious implication is that the Shroud could have been the result of a similar kind of phenomenon (though without the “back-dating” element); only, in the Shroud’s case, this phenomenon would have been taken to a much greater extreme, so that, rather than the body being healed, over weeks, of what killed it, the body would have been instantly transformed into some other order of being. So maybe the Shroud was produced by the same sort of thing as we see with Anita Moorjani, only in this case, the spiritual influx would have been far greater.
Of course, everyone is free to express himself but, honestly, I think that there are not scientific grounds to support all the logical sequence mentioned here. Call it speculations and possibilities about quantum level physics conciousness, NDE and the Shroud. But please, don´t call it science when at the current stage of currently admitted science, there are no grounds to support such a connection. Unfortunately, every now and then, someone tries to build unexisting links between the 2nd principle of thermodynamic, modern physics…………..and the Shroud. In my view, this only helps to keep serious analysis and researchers belonging to science mainstream, far from the Shroud. Please, ask yourselves the following question: are you contributing to convince Shroud owners to do open and independent research, attract high-level scientists and so move forward in current knowledege?
“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Hamlet I v.
Or if you prefer: “Man does not live by bread alone … ” Matt 4:4, Deut 8:3.
I doubt if any scientific discipline ever had a single fundamental idea that had not appeared in the genre of Science Fiction first. Speculation is the food of Science. It would be a very boring existence and a rather boring Blog site, if there were only room for rigorous science, and none for other aspects of human experience.
Even scientists such as John Klotz and even Gabriel are entitled to their speculations.
Your absolutely right in your scientific dicipline statement, in actuality if people had not delved further with thier speculations, where would we be today? No planes maybe, no cell phones, etc; People should watch some Michio Kaku videos, he’s an enlightened physicist.
You tube; Mikio Kaku: SCI FI or SCI FACT, Part 1 is a good one. ;-)
Ron
He’s quite funny too!
I enjoyed Michio Kaku’s book on Parallel Universes, and ended up writing an article on Goldilock Zones for my parish magazine – I later discovered that the article had influenced a recreant reader to redeem his spiritual outlook.
We can’t know yet whether Parallel Universes have any sort of reality or not, but it helped me as a stepping stone to my own insight on the omni-present Godhead and the reality of the communion of saints.
Ernst Mach was a physicist of the old school was successful and influential but had no time for speculation. As late as 1895 he was denying the existence of atoms, despite chemists using them on an empirical basis for 100 years. His influence with the establishment led the visionary Ludwig Boltzmann to commit suicide. Within 10 years Einstein had proved the existence of atoms from Brownian movement calculations. Mach is now merely a cipher in the history of science, but Boltzmann is seen as an early pioneer in quantum mechanics. [Check "Boltzmann's Atom" by David Lindley, 'Free Press' - Simon & Schuster 2001]