Blasphemous? Insightful?

More and more, I am seeing the Shroud of Turin being injected into skeptical writing. Here is Badger, an Australian living in Austria:

Does it ever strike Christians or God-followers of any description as strange that not one – not a single solitary God – has ever had the courage to show him or herself  to his or her adoring flock anyplace – ever. Not a glimpse. Not a glance. Not a fleeting shadow. These Gods are so shy.

. . . And to attempt to demolish the impeccable mind of Hawking* these nitwits [=Christians] quote the Bible. Line by line. Verse by verse.

And I regret to say – they are preyed upon by rather more intelligent non-believers who goad them with rational arguments and send them into foaming frenzies and prompt them to respond with withering bursts of bible passages and – for some obscure reason – the Shroud of Turin – which is always trotted out as proof of God’s existence. Why not quote the Tooth Fairy?

I don’t think it is possible to prove God’s existence with the Shroud. But if it is what I think it is, God did show himself in a “fleeting shadow.”

* who just told The Guardian:

I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

Badger’s posting is at Vienna for Dummies: Caution: Blasphemous Blog Follows