Better Posting on Barrie Schwortz Appearing on "Mysterious Realms"
Joe Marino nets it out and fills in the gaps. He improves on my earlier posting from my iPhone while sitting in my car:
Barrie will be a guest tonight on a program called "Mysterious Realms," hosted by Dr. John DeSalvo, who was a consultant to STURP in the early 80s and who is also part of Association of Scientists and Scholars International for the Shroud of Turin, Inc. (ASSIST), for which Paul Maloney is the General Projects Director. It’s always nice to have an interviewer who is knowledgeable about the Shroud, and John certainly is.
The program can be listened to live between 9-11 p.m. Eastern at www.drjohnradio.com. If you are unable to listen to it live, it will available in archives within a day or so.
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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 will definately be tuning into this tonight, whilst simultaneously viewing the Jays/Redsox game ;-)
Thanks for the notice, and just wondering why through all my reading, I have never heard or Dr John DeSalvo? Anyways again thanks for the timely notification.
R