If You Can’t Dazzle Them with Brilliance . . .

Someone once asked me why, with all the known facts about the shroud, some people cannot be convinced it is real. I reminded him that I am not 100% convinced. Given all the evidence that I know about, and having given the matter a great deal of thought, I believe it is real. But, for all that, I wonder what facts, both scientific and historical remain undiscovered? I wonder how well are each of us able to overcome the tug of religious worldview – in some cases as in the comment below, real prejudice – in evaluating what is before us? I wonder, sometimes, how well do we use logic and scientific methods to analyze the information we have.

I’m not going to say much about a comment, shown below, that was posted to this blog by someone named Jo at 6:20 pm last evening. Every sentence is illogical or contains factual errors. It is quite extraordinary: 

Leonardo da Vinci was illumanti, he forged the Turin cloth for the Catholic church so they could continue to treat Christs followers as idiots. I saw a documentary where the photographic techniques he used were duplicated, he used the body from the morgue (he quite often used to get bodies for dissecting). He used his own face – this has been proved because the spaces between eyes, nose etc & other features of the face are like finger prints & can’t be forged. Now that these facts have been discovered the Catholic church has locked the Turin cloth away & won’t let anyone exam it. The implications of this is that every image you see of Jesus Christ in statues & paintings all over the world in religious institutions & churches are actually images of Leonardo da Vinci. So people ar e using his image in their prayers etc. Satanists like to make Christians untruthful even if they are not aware of it – it gives them energy. The Last Supper is also a da Vinci picture which they are now analyzing & saying that there are clues in it to say that Jesus & Mary Magdalene had a child. They are trying to make the da Vinci code bullshit a reality. This is a set up to declare that the antichrist (Prince William) is actually a descendant of Jesus! The Mona Lisa is also a self portrait of Da Vinci – now you know why she has that smirk on her face, Da Vinci must have thought he was so smart. The Catholic church has been planning this for hundreds of years. I have a saying for satanists "If they can’t beat it they take it over" & this is exactly what happened with the Catholic church. Read how the Catholic church was 1st formed in Rome & don’t believe any of there bullshit.

Let’s look at one sentence, just for the fun of it. Jo wrote: “He used his own face – this has been proved because the spaces between eyes, nose etc & other features of the face are like finger prints & can’t be forged.”

Suppose Leonardo used a photographic technique. To some extent, because of the focal length of a lens and because different parts of the body are at different angles to the center of the lens, a photograph is a distorted representation. Without specifications – did Leonardo provide any – there is no way to know how to match a photograph to a face with the precision needed to identify an individual in the manner Jo talks about. And what face is it that we are comparing it to? According to the documentary Jo cites, it was a self portrait drawing of Leonardo. Leonardo is well known for his belief in ideal body proportions. Many scholars believe he altered the faces he drew and painted to fit those proportions. Did he do so with his own face? Many scholars think so. We have no way of knowing. Oh, and where does Jo come up with the “fact” that space between the eyes, nose . . . are like fingerprints and can’t be forged. Can she provide a single reference from a reputable forensic text?

The best response to Jo’s comment is to borrow the last word in it: bullshit.

Comment is to be found at Leonardo da Vinci Forged the Shroud of Turin?