A couple weeks ago I heard about a presentation at a local church. Some guy called Russ Breault (unfortunately not pronounced BRO!) was going to talk about the Shroud of Turin and how it was magic. Or something like that.
The Shroud of Turin is a linen cloth with the image of a person on it. Some Catholics claim the cloth was Jesus’s burial shroud and that God Photoshopped a .jpg of Jesus onto it as part of his resurrection.
One of the few cool things about living in this area is that the Center For Inquiry’s (CFI) world headquarters is right here near the North Campus of the University at Buffalo. So even though Buffalo’s a rotting medium-sized rust-belt city, we have a higher percentage of skeptics here. The lead paranormal investigator at CFI is a guy named Joe Nickell and he’s written a book on the Shroud of Turin, concluding that it’s a forgery from the Middle Ages. And it’s not blood on the cloth but paint. Also, it’s French. So take that, Christians.
This paragraph got my attention. It’s sort of convincing, isn’t it, that the Nickellodians are not up to the challenge. Are you listening Jabba?
The funniest independent line of evidence against the shroud’s authenticity is that the “blood” on it is still red. That’s a neat trick seeing how blood stains darken pretty quickly. Much quicker than 2000 years, actually. Of course any hardcore believer could just handwave this and any other line of evidence that contradicts their preconceived notions as part of some supernatural intervention. God made the blood stay red to test our faith. God made the Carbon decay slower to test our faith. That sort of thing.
Was he sleeping during Russ’ talk?