Colin Berry: Dan is a despot
So I am a despot, now, according to Colin Berry on his blog.
Every day I get comments like this: “Excellent post. I really enjoyed it. I hope to read more of your insightful work. Keep up the great work.” Hidden in the comment, which really says nothing, is a link to a site selling Rolex watches or some such thing. It is spam.
Other comments float in that are simply links. They say nothing or say something innocuous. If I click on them they are selling something. Most of the time. I don’t have time to look.
Filters do catch some of the spam. But I also spend time every day getting rid of it. It isn’t fun.
Now Colin Berry is not a spammer. I know who he is. He writes a skeptical blog on the shroud. And even though his science is something of a stretch most of the time, he works hard and writes well. I think he deserves our attention. Most of the time quote him and link to articles he writes, without reservation. I sometimes express my opinions and many of you do as well. Colin used to join the discussion. He no longer does so. He only writes comments on his blog, and lately, he has tried seeding links to his blog into this blog.
As well intentioned as he may be, I don’t have the extra time to exit from my own software and go exam comments that he writes on his blog, often as slipped-in additions to extant postings. I’m not going to allow links to material I haven’t read. Reviewing comments on this blog is enough. Reviewing his blog, as well, is too much, particularly when I have to reread his postings over and over to see if he has changed them. He is free to comment any way that he wants to but I’m not going to play along. If he wants to write comments on this blog like everyone else does, I will carry them. Or he can address comments on his blog. But he should not try to use this blog as a link farm. It isn’t good netiquette.
Sorry to be such a despot.
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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
As an IT guy, if that’s being a despot, I guess I’d be just as guilty, if not more so.