Shroud Congresses – Places where fantasies are peddled?
Colin Berry writes in his blog:
As promised on The Other Site, I shall no longer mince my words . . .
Yawn (heard similar threats from Colin). So here we go:
. . . This retired science bod grows ever more appalled by the pseudo-science being peddled to support the authenticity of the Shroud as the cloth that was used to wrap the crucified Christ.
The latest egregious example is from the same paper that was the subject of my previous posting, the one by Barbara Faccini and Giulio Fanti (“F&F”)at the International Workshop on the Scientific Approach(sic) on the Acheiropoietos Images (May 2010) .
I pretty much agree.
Their paper makes an extraordinary claim in the Introduction, repeated in the Conclusions, namely that one can discern a time sequence of events by examining the bloodstains on the Shroud – the latter including the scourge marks. They claim that there was a caning first with flexible rods (Type 2 implement) followed by scourging with the Roman flagrum (Type 1) followed by some limited beating of the legs (Type 3) followed finally by the major stains from the nail wounds in the wrists, the spear in the side etc,
I pretty much agree with that, too. But now Colin gets nutty.
Since when has it been the role of allegedly scientific congresses to peddle fantasies that are unsupported by data? Those two authors do a disservice to science (but I note that the second is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering, so may not be too bothered about the sensibilities of scientists such as myself).
You couldn’t make it up. Well, you could and you probably do – frequently - if you are a Shroudie so-called scientist. Yup, someone was clearly intent on getting a rapturous round of applause at the end of delivering that paper to fellow Shroudies at their so-called ” International Workshop on the Scientific(sic) Approach”.
Has Colin ever been to a shroud congress? In many cases, papers such as he mentions are met with tough questioning. (One of the purposes of this blog is to pose more questions.) Many congresses or conferences have been closed to the public. More recently, they are open: not to peddle fantasies but to expose ideas and allow opinion to flow. As for a rapturous round of applause? Was he there? As Colin does frequently, it is so much easier to belittle than deal with real substantive criticism.
PS: Dan Porter is free as usual to flag up this paper on his shroudofturin site, but I shall no longer be responding to questions there.
Yawn (heard these threats from Colin before, as well).
Ego trip: Shroudie Congresses – places where fantasies are peddled
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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
Take care: excessive yawning can be a symptom of several maladies, including epilepsy, progressive supranuclear palsy, brain tumors, anxiety, heart attack, encephalitis and multiple sclerosis. Excessive yawning may also be the side effect of a medication you are currently taking, including antidepressants and medications for Parkinson’s Disease.
Yawn.
Dan Porter (Dictated to Siri on iPhone)
Yawn
A yawing old oilscience boiled eel! A must see! What about the tsetse fly desease and a pain in the eelneck?
Yawn…
Don’t you stressed too much reading each other, bodies!
Typo correction “stress” (do hope my typo correction don’t add too much to your respective yawing symptom…)
My current post has what I believe to be the first 3D-enhanced pictures of “scourge marks”, Dan, obtained from a combination of 2002 Durante HD images, Shroud Scope and ImageJ software…
Scores? Indentations? Furrows? Wounds? Puckered edges?
Move along folks, yawn, nothing to see here…
Hope old oilscienceboiled eel’s chronic yawings will clear up his oldbod sight-and-brain… Do take a deep breath.
Do you not recognize an internet troll when you see one Dan? GRO, for the sake of the site…
I was going to write: “He’ll be back, the Hound of Heaven won’t give up, even on Colin.” But too late! He got here already!
The ALL BLACK charitable soul is back…
I can see an imaginary archeaological bloodpattern analyst when I see one…
typo error: “I can recognise an archaeological blood pattern imaginary analyst when I see one.”
Get behind me MePHisto! And who did the ALL BLACKS beat to win the World Cup? Hah! coq-a-doodle ohdear …
Very good pun on me (MePHisto), I do appreciate it…too bad you just can appreciate my sense of ALL BLACK humour….
I JUST LOVE the idea of CB wanting to GRO me and not being able to!
“Children” of God…
It would seem to me that Colin, who can tell truth from fiction in his review of f&f, would be able to differentiate between real scientific study (most of the documents on Shroud.com, for example), from this kind of stuff, of which you mainly agree. Yet Colin, who claimed he would not be responding, has done so in a way that really removes all his credibility. Guess I’ll have to talk to Shroud Researchers I know and pass this by.
What I said was Andy Weiss was that I would no longer be responding to questions here. In case you had not noticed there is a difference between “not be responding” and “no longer be responding to questions”. That you should seize on a comment of mine, distort it, and then attempt to use it as a blanket condemnation of my “credibility” if of course symptomatic of what passes for debate on this site, and why responding to questions here is simply to lay oneself open to the kind of genteel smear tactics employed here.
This retired science bod has simply had enough of the ad hom attacks, most if not all attempting in one fashion or another to impugn my personal integrity.