No sooner did I post an email from a reader who ever-so-wisely wrote . . .
Unfortunately, and mainly because the shroud is gaining credibility and popularity, people with all manner of surreal beliefs about it are popping up like weeds in the lawn. They spoil the careful work that has been done by so many.
Should you ignore them? You will hurt some feelings. Actually, you will hurt their feelings if you don’t ignore them and if you do. I write book reviews for a small literary journal. If I ignore an author, he complains. When I then write an unfavorable review, he verbally attacks me.
Should you ignore the people of the Urantia cult? Should you ignore the people trying to connect the shroud to little green men (or is it grey men) from outer space? . . . .
. . . Do not ignore them, not if you are honest. . . .
. . . then I get an email from a retired professor of mathematic biology named James Defares:
May I call your attention to my recent book (Amazon ) , entitled God:the science of Christ and the unseen,by James Defares.
The problem of the Shroud is fully discussed in the 600 –page book .
The material of the book is fully available on my website :
www.scienceofgod.eu ,which also contains summaries of each chapter.
So I hopped over to Amazon. There is the book for $24.00, in stock, no less. I can have it tomorrow. No, it’s not available for Kindle. It has been out since October of last year and there isn’t a single review.
So I visit Dr. Defares’ website. He wasn’t kidding when he said there is material available on his site. In fact, I found the entire 600 page book as a pdf file. Since I will be traveling this weekend, I transferred it to Kindle, myself, almost for free. Amazon charged me $0.15. Then I started exploring the website, sort of randomly.
Oh, oh!
According to Sitchin’s chronology the Anunnaki (the inhabitants of Niburu) landed on earth 450,000 years ago to extract gold from the Persian Gulf. Absurd? Still it is a striking fact that the Nobel prize winner Fritz Haber obtained a patent in 1920 to extract gold from the sea, and that the Persian Gulf has the highest gold content of all the oceans. When thousands of years later the gold mining from the sea declines the decision is taken to mine the gold from gold mines in southern Africa.
Coincidence? Much later the Annunaki workers in the gold mines rise in revolt against the harsh conditions. This leads to the decision to produce slaves by genetic manipulation of anthropoids (homo erectus). Thus the first humans came into being: slaves in the gold mines of what is now called South Africa. This tallies with the scientific finding based on DNA that southern Africa is the cradle of modern man.
The theory proposed by Sitchin refers to physical changes of ‘apes’ induced by aliens and does not rule out the belief that man’s spirit, his soul, is created by God. The clay tablets (many thousands have been found) mention that the ‘gods’ impregnated a number of humans. ‘The seed of your Lord, the glorious seed, has been released into my womb’ one text exults.
This agrees with Genesis 6:2 which reads: ‘…the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful and they married any of them they chose’. And again in Genesis 6:4: ‘The Nephilim were on the earth in those days – and also afterwards – when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.’ The heroes of old? The Annunaki astronauts? Just pious myth, or a reference to the ‘gods’ from outer space?
In this way the hybrid new humans came into being, who, according to Dr. Sitchin, ultimately transformed Sumer into an advanced civilization at around 3800 BC.. Sitchin’s outrageous hypothesis kind of ‘synthesizes’ the Darwinian hypothesis and the theological view if we phrase it thus: ‘God created modern man from the ape, assisted by his helpers, the ‘gods’.’ Did this really happen? We’ll never know, but can a greater story be told?
But apparently this scenario is more likely than Darwin’s. Really? I haven’t even looked to see what he says about the shroud. What am I missing? I still need to read Chidambaram Ramesha’s book (which he kindly sent to me) about the Shroud that is somehow connected to a pseudo-scientific speculation called Alchemy Palingenesis (spectral resuscitation of plants out of their ashes).
The lunatic fringe is no longer a fringe. Shroud science is out of control. The lunatics have taken over the asylum.
Any gods able to manipulate genes can certainly manipulate evidence, whether fossil record, historical record, or shroud.
Exactly so. And thus one can never, ever prove of disprove the existence of God, the divinity of Christ or the nature of the shroud’s images.
The Shroud Science Group is the problem. Like a group of medieval monks sworn to silence, it remains a cloistered group debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. No, B&B is wrong. The lunatics are outside of the asylum, publishing sensational garbage. The monks are inside of the asylum and nobody knows about their real scientific endeavors until something gets published in a journal that few people read. SSG should be debating in public. Even the most ludicrous things they say in their secret forum (they say some really ludicrous things) is a thousand times less ludicrous then the junk being published about space aliens running around harvesting souls or creating humans as slave to mine for gold while other humans are forming green and red and violet races of men and women.
Public perceptions about the shroud are doomed unless SSG changes its ways (I am not a member of the group but I do see digests of some of their emails).