Agnosticism, Atheism, Bible Study, Christianity, Culture, Faith, God, Religion

Frustration

Nate

Sigh…

So here’s what’s been going on lately. Most of you who read this blog already know that when my wife and I left Christianity, it wrecked most of our family relationships. My wife’s parents and siblings, as well as my own, felt that they could no longer interact with us socially after our deconversion. We were no longer invited to any family functions, and our communication with them all but disappeared. We would speak if it was about religious issues, or if there were logistic issues that needed to be worked out in letting them see our kids, etc.

Over the years, things have gotten a little better, especially with my wife’s parents. Things are by no means back to normal, but at least our infrequent interactions have become more civil and more comfortable. A few weeks ago, I even had a phone conversation with my father that lasted about half an hour and had no references to religion whatsoever. It was nice.

Nevertheless, the awkwardness is still there, just under the surface. And we’re still blacklisted from all the family functions.

Throughout this time, I’ve occasionally reached out to my side of the family with phone calls, letters, facebook messages, etc, in an effort to discuss the issues that divide us. I don’t get much response. I’ve always been puzzled by that, since I know they think I’m completely wrong. If their position is right, why aren’t they willing to discuss it?

In the last five years, I’ve also been sent books and articles and even been asked to speak to certain individuals, and I’ve complied with every request. Why not? How could more information hurt? But when I’ve suggested certain books to them, or written letters, they aren’t read. When I finally realized that my problems with Christianity weren’t going to be resolved, I wrote a 57-page paper to my family and close friends, explaining why I could no longer call myself a Christian. As far as I know, none of them ever read the whole thing. And sure, 57 pages is quite a commitment. But they say this is the most important subject in their lives…

This past week, the topic has started to come back around. A local church kicked off a new series on Monday entitled “Can We Believe the Bible?” It’s being led by an evangelist/professor/apologist that was kind enough to take time to correspond with me for several weeks in the summer of 2010. I’ve never met him in person, but a mutual friend connected us, since he was someone who was knowledgeable about the kinds of questions I was asking. Obviously, we didn’t wind up on the same page.

can we trust the bible?

My wife’s parents invited us to attend the series, but it happens to be at a time that I’m coaching my oldest daughter’s soccer team. So unless we get rained out at some point, there’s no way we can attend. However, we did tell them that if practice is ever cancelled, we’ll go. I also contacted the church and asked if the sermons (if that’s the right word?) will be recorded, and they said that they should be.

Monday night, the weather was fine, so we weren’t able to attend. And so far, the recording isn’t available on their website. However, they do have a recording of Sunday night’s service available, which is entitled “Question & Answer Night.” I just finished listening to it, and that’s where the bulk of my frustration comes from.

It’s essentially a prep for the series that kicked off Monday night. They’re discussing why such a study is important, as well as the kinds of things they plan to cover. What’s so frustrating to me is that I don’t understand the mindset of evangelists like this. I mean, they’ve studied enough to know what the major objections to fundamentalist Christianity are, yet they continue on as if there’s no problem. And when they do talk about atheists and skeptics, they misrepresent our position. I can’t tell if they honestly believe the version they’re peddling, or if they’re purposefully creating straw men.

A couple of times, they mentioned that one of the main reasons people reject the Bible comes down to a preconception that miracles are impossible. “And if you start from that position, then you’ll naturally reject the Bible.” But that’s a load of crap. Most atheists were once theists, so their starting position was one that believed in miracles.

They also mentioned that so many of these secular articles and documentaries “only show one side.” I thought my head was going to explode.

And they referred to the common complaints against the Bible as “the same tired old arguments that have been answered long ago.” It’s just so infuriating. If the congregants had any knowledge of the details of these “tired old arguments,” I doubt they’d unanimously find the “answers” satisfactory. But the danger with a series like this is that it almost works like a vaccination. The members of the congregation are sitting in a safe environment, listening to trusted “experts,” and they’re injected with a watered down strain of an argument. And it’s that watered down version that’s eradicated by the preacher’s message. So whenever the individual encounters the real thing, they think it’s already been dealt with, and the main point of the argument is completely lost on them.

For example, most Christians would be bothered to find out that the texts of the Bible are not as reliable as were always led to believe. Even a beloved story like the woman caught in adultery, where Jesus writes on the ground, we’ve discovered that it was not originally part of the gospel of John. It’s a later addition from some unknown author. To a Christian who’s never heard that before, it’s unthinkable! But if they’ve gone through classes where they’ve been told that skeptics exaggerate the textual issues in the Bible, and that the few changes or uncertainties deal with only very minor things, and that none of the changes affect any doctrinal points about the gospel, then it’s suddenly easier for them to swallow “minor” issues like the insertion of an entire story into the gospel narrative.

Sigh…

I’m going to either attend these sessions, or I’ll watch/listen to them once they’re available online. I may need to keep some blood pressure medication handy, though.

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Published by Nate

1,060 thoughts on “Frustration”

  2. Gary, what you have proposed is a “Battle of the Experts”. Happens at every trial in which forensics are involved.

    Johnny Cochrane was able to make the OJ trial about race, and a win on voir dire gave him the jury that disregarded all the forensics and acquitted because one of the cops once said “nigger”. If the prosecutors had kept the case focused on the actual forensics, OJ was a dead man. Likewise, I need to keep our case focused on Rules-of-Evidence admissible forensics, and not speculation.

    I chose this battlefield because I already know the answer to your conjecture about 2:1 balance of authorities against the authenticity of the Shroud. Peer-reviewed reports by credentialed scientists who are experts in the field, published in established and accepted scientific journals, are the only sort of out-of-court written expert testimony that you or I are going to be able to get admitted to evidence. Nothing else will meet the evidentiary standards of the US Rules. Opinion pieces will not, no matter who wrote them.

    I already know that the only two extensive peer-reviewed, professionally published expert reports on the Shroud that you’re going to find are McCrone’s work and the 1988 Carbon Dating are the only thing you’re actually going to be able to present. That’s why I put them into evidence myself. I then put the huge body of admissible evidence that refute them in to systematically crush them like an anaconda.

    McCrone is dead, and nobody has ever been able to reproduce his work, but many have demonstrated pieces of it that are false, and have demonstrated methological holes in his technique that led to his erroneous answer. He did his work in he 1970s. Forensics have come a long, long way since then.

    The failure of the 1988 Carbon Dating team to follow the established protocol and their use of an edge piece of mixed fibers is well documented. And the fingerprint-like face overlay of the cloth and the shroud are decisive.

    I know that the ratio of actually admissible, published expert evidence here in favor of my argument versus yours is similar to the balance between the Climate Change scientists and the Climate Change Deniers (with you in the role of the Deniers): not even close.

    That’s why I chose this battlefield. I knew you would go there, that you would assume that there is a large corpus of evidence that favors your viewpoint (which is more strongly held than you admitted in voir dire), that only religious Christians would study the Shroud, and that their science would be poor. I knew it, so I prepared an evidence trap for you.

    I did it to give you a real teachable moment.

    This doesn’t mean that its Jesus on the Shroud (though it probably is – indeed, the fact of the Shroud’s existence may EXPLAIN somewhat why Christianity was so persistent in spite of persecutions – the Christians had this marvelous THING to look at, in secret, to strengthen their faith).

    The remarkable image is real, and not man made. It’s an incredible, apparently nature-bending phenomenon, highly improbable (indeed, the Shroud is utterly unique, which is what makes it such a difficult thing to analyze: there’s nothing to compare it to). That doesn’t prove that the man the Shroud covered was divine. Perhaps some freak accident happened to somebody who died just like Jesus, or perhaps it is Jesus, and the freak accident happened to him and that’s what helped people believe in him.

    One would get that impression from reading what John says obliquely in his passage about going to the empty tomb with Peter. He ran ahead, got there first, waited out side and looked in, and saw the rolled up facecloth and the burial cloth in the empty tomb. Then Peter went in, then John followed him into the empty tomb, and only THEN does John write “and he saw, and he believed”. From a straight read, John saw something IN the empty tomb that caused him to believe, that did not have that effect on him when he was standing outside looking in, seeing the cloths there.

    If there was nothing in the tomb but Peter, John himself, a rolled up facecloth and an empty burial sheet, WHAT did John see in that tomb that caused him suddenly to believe.

    The answer to that, is probably the Shroud of Turin.

    The Shroud is an interesting thing. You want to dismiss it. And if you hadn’t stipulated the Rules of Evidence, you could, with a handwave.

    Since I went ahead and waived the jury in favor of just talking to you, and you’re the one I have to convince, I can’t grind through to the end of the argument.

    But if there were a jury, impartial or even partial, and we arrived at this point, I will have presented them an avalanche of admissible expert forensic testimony, in the form of published peer-reviewed material, perhaps with the men who wrote the material there to testify in person.

    You will have promised the jury “twice as much contrary testimony”, but when you went out to actually FIND the professional, scientific, peer reviewed forensic evidence, published in professional journals, you’ll be thrown back on your heels and referring almost completely to two of MY exhibits – McCrone and Carbon Dating. You’ll have to do what Climate Deniers do: go out and find some guy to come in and testify as an expert.

    And when you do, on cross I will demand his credentials, and I will demand that he cite to the peer-reviewed published forensic evidence on which he bases his conclusion – and he will be left with McCrone and the 1988 Carbon Dating, and his views of those things. And all of the rest of the detailed dissection of those materials will stand against him. I’ll bring each fact of importance up again, and cite the journal and authority (and where it’s a Jew, or an Asian, or an atheist who did the research, I’ll be sure to point that out), and ask if he agrees.

    Of course your expert will say that he does not.

    I will ask him on what basis, and he’ll either cite to his personal opinion, or he’ll cite to McCrone and to the 1988 Carbon Dating – and that will allow me to bring up the various authorities that dismantle those old sources again, and again.

    The jury is always biased, but if they are able to shake free of their biases, they will conclude that the Shroud is ancient and not man-made, and not currently explicable. Because that is what the science says.

    And then they’ll wonder about what it is and how it came into existence, and how it managed to survive for so long.

    And I’ll answer “It’s Jesus’ burial sheet, it came to exist because of the miracle of the resurrection, and it survived so long because Christians guarded it because it’s been an obvious miracle, a sign, since the First Easter.

    And you’ll retort that it’s the burial sheet of some ancient Palestinian who happened to be crucified by the Romans at about the same time as Jesus, and in the identical manner (with peculiarities like crown of thorns and lance in the side and no broken bones) as Jesus, but that it’s not Jesus, and that it came into existence by some strange coincidence of luck, and was preserved for all of these centuries by luck.

    And even you won’t be very happy with your argument, but it’s all you’ll have.
    In fact, you’ll know just how the Climate Change Deniers feel when they’re all alone at night, sitting with a big pile of fresh evidence against them and a world full of circumstances that tell them they’re wrong…but certain they’re right nevertheless.

    It’s an uncomfortable place to be.

    The best answer is to admit what is obvious: It’s Jesus’ burial shroud, it was preserved remarkably, and the REASON it was preserved is because what is on it. What is on it is inexplicable, and gets stranger when you look at it more deeply. It may not make you believe, but it ought to make you doubt yourself.

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  3. I will find some quotes from skeptical scholars and post them. However, it is now my turn, and I call YOU to the witness stand:

    Mr. Crown, will you please explain to the court how it is possible that Jesus had AB blood and yet was born of a virgin?

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  4. If the court may grant it, would Mr. Crown while explaining to the court, tell us how it is Jesus was male and not female given he can only have been a clone.

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  5. Gary:

    You wrote an interrogatory, which I have subdivided into numbered questions:

    “Crown: I would be very curious to know
    (1) how Catholic cloth experts explain the claim that the blood on the shroud and on the head covering in Ovieda have type AB blood on it.

    You can’t have type AB blood unless you have a human mother AND a human father.

    (2) Please explain.

    (3) I will be happy to concede that the shroud is of Jesus if you will admit that Jesus was not born of a Virgin and was not God.”

    (1) I cannot answer the question regarding Catholic cloth experts. The only information that I have is from published, peer-reviewed forensic reports from various sources, and compilations of the contents of those articles. I have no basis, from the articles or the compilations, to know anything about the religions of the forensic scientists who performed the tests, or the religion of the textiles expert from the University of Toulouse who discussed matters of the linen and its weave.

    I can state that the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP) Team that did much of the detailed work on the Shroud were composed of credentialled scientists from various fields, and that their members included a Jew and a self-acknowledged atheist, whose position following his work on the Shroud changed to agnosticism. Prior to studying the Shroud he was sure there was no God. After studying the Shroud, he was sure that what he examined was a real object, not a fraud, very ancient, and not explicable by modern understandings of chemistry and physics. He didn’t know what the Shroud is, and does not concede that it proves God, or the divinity of Jesus, or that the man on the Shroud was in fact Jesus (though he acknowledges that it may well be). But he does know that it’s not a fraud, and is very ancient, and is a true mystery. So his view, based on his participation, passed from “I know” to “I don’t know”.

    As far as the religions of the team members go, though, I do not know. I’m not sure that it’s relevant either. Copernicus and Grigor Mendel where Christian monks. Galieo was a practicing Catholic who taught in Catholic universities.

    Scientific techniques, if practiced under the supervision of others and properly recorded, produce reproducible results. That was the very problem of McCrone’s work: he worked alone, and published results asserting that the image on the Shroud was painted on, but his methodology was not fully provided, and his results have never been repeatable by anybody.
    THAT is what biased “science” looks like: a guy working alone with a belief system he’s determined to uphold, who fakes the data and relies on his prestige to carry the argument.

    Team science, with peer review and – crucially – repeatable results produces usable data regardless of the religion of the scientist.

    This is why I chose the forensic science battlefield, specifically, for the Shroud, and why I was so interested in using the US Rules of Evidence. Because under those rules, you’ve got McCrone and the 1988 Carbon Dating, and they’re very unimpressive, and I’ve got everything else.

    Your interrogative 1 ASSUMES that the religion of the scientists determined the result. Unfortunately for you, if we probe and find Jews and atheists (and we will find at least one of each) producing science that upholds the mystery of the Shroud, your case is weakened.

    One rule of lawyering: NEVER ask a question in court to which you don’t already know the answer.

    The forensic science of the Shroud isn’t Catholic. The Catholic Church takes its own strange positions on things. The Shroud ITSELF isn’t “Catholic”. It’s an object, from ancient Roman Palestine. It, and its companion facecloth, are KEPT by the Catholic Church, but the people qualified to do the sorts of analyses we’ve been discussing are people with PhD’s in specific fields of forensic science. Religion, or the lack thereof, is not a qualification to be allowed to perform such work.

    (2) In the normal course of circumstances as we understand them, following the usual laws of genetics as we have discovered them to date, blood type AB would require an “A” allele from one parent, and a “B” allele from another parent. But then, in the normal course of circumstances, following the laws of physics as we have discovered them to date, it is not possible for trillions of sugar molecules to lightly brown on two faces of a linen sheet, thereby capturing three-dimensional holographic negative information about a deceased human body, at a degree of detail sufficient to read the lettering of inorganic coins on the deceased’s eyes. The latter is as scientifically inexplicable as the former, and given the law-breaking nature of the latter, one can properly call it a miracle.

    If the source of the miracle that could make such an image, and then get a body out of the sheet with the image without smearing a drop of blood is supernatural, indeed, if the source is as advertised all along: the Creator, then obviously the Creator can make a man with whatever blood type he chose.

    You asked me to explain. I can no more do explain HOW than I (or anybody else) can explain how an image of that particular nature got on the Shroud. But your question was open-ended, so perhaps I can explain WHY.

    WHY type AB? Well, back then, nobody knew anything about blood type, so it was irrelevant. Men would only learn about blood typing in our era, in an age when it was possible to discover the features of the Shroud that make it not art but stunning mystery. Such men would have the science to recognize blood-type, and type AB has particular significance. First of all, it’s rare. Therefore, that it appears on the Shroud and the Cloth is itself a first, easy point of common reference. It allows for the elimination of other possibilities.

    Because it’s rare, the fact that it appears in a third miracle, the Lanciano Eucharistic Miracle of circa 600 AD, is itself an interesting cross reference.

    The fact that we have three blood samples from two articles of cloth that were on the same man, AND a blood sample from centuries later from an alleged miracle involving the heart of Jesus offers us the possibility to someday, perhaps, with even more advanced science, to do a comparison of blood samples from all three. And if the Lanciano miracle’s AB blood proves to be the same blood, genetically, as the blood on the Oviedo Cloth and on the Shroud…well, wouldn’t that be something?

    It would be, and it wouldn’t matter whether the tests were done by a Catholic, a Jew, a Japanese or an atheist. In fact, let’s have all four do it simultaneously, side-by-side, along with a Muslim and a Hindu, while we’re at it. Let’s see if they get the same results.

    More generically, God’s choice of AB blood for Jesus could have a lay teaching purpose. Type AB is the universal receiver: he who has it can receive the blood of anyone, and is compatible with all. If Jesus’ had a blood type, and God were making a point to people in the age that CARED about blood types, then the logical choice would be type AB.

    As far as your point (3) goes, such an exchange cannot be made. One cannot “concede” truths. They’re either true, or they’re not true. Objectively, and unknowably for certain to either of us, Jesus either was or was not the son of a virgin and God the Father. He either was or was not killed on a cross. He either was resurrected or was not. The Shroud of Turin and Oviedo Cloth either covered his dead body or didn’t. The image on the Shroud, and the way the body got out of the Shroud without smearing blood, either was in defiance of the laws of physics (and therefore was a miracle), or was not.

    By “agreeing” to one set of stipulations, we cannot thereby cause anything on that list to change in its truth. The truths of these things are independent of human opinion. We may not know the answers, but we cannot CHANGE the real answers by bargaining over what we will “accept”. Any such bargain is nonsensical.

    I, personally, am convinced by the evidence that the IMAGE on the Shroud cannot exist under the laws of physics. It does, and so the IMAGE is a miracle. So, I know I am looking at something supernatural. It’s the fact of the supernatural itself that causes me to then, as the SECOND step, look at the information conveyed BY this miracle.

    If the image on the Shroud were of an elephant-headed man, but the Shroud had the same incredible chemical properties as it does, then I would be looking into the meaning of an elephant-headed man, and might well take it as a sign from Ganesh, the Hindu deity.

    But the image on the Shroud looks like Jesus. And that means that I need to know more about this Jesus.

    That makes sense to me. Bargaining over truth, as though it were malleable and I could just “choose” to believe things without any proof, just because I want them to be so – that does not make a lick of sense to me. So I cannot accept your proposed exchange of truths in question (3). To my experience and belief, truth just doesn’t work that way.

    Was Jesus born of a virgin? Tradition says so. It doesn’t matter to me either way.
    Was Jesus God? It depends on what one means by God. But that is not a question you asked in your interrogatory, and one does not volunteer information in a proceeding.

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  6. Does anyone know why there has not been more carbon dating done on the shroud? If there is any doubt about the cloth sample that was used, why not take other samples?

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  7. You asked a fourth interrogatory question: “Mr. Crown, will you please explain to the court how it is possible that Jesus had AB blood and yet was born of a virgin?”

    Someone scribbled a note asking how he could not be just a clone.

    The answer is the same as the answer to the question of how the first human came to be, or the universe, or the image on the Shroud: sovereign act of will of the Creator. Nothing more, nothing less.

    The laws of physics are the opinions of God. MATTER and ENERGY are bound by them. WE are bound by them. HE is not.

    God likes his opinions, and doesn’t change them lightly. He decided to make Jesus as he did, for the reasons he did it, and so he did. Just like he made the first man.

    Scripturally speaking, angels have at times mated with humans and produced offspring. If they can, the Creator obviously can.

    Christian tradition says he did. Once.

    So, that’s how. It’s God we’re talking about here. If God made a Son, no laws apply other than as he chooses to MAKE them apply.

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  8. Dave, I don’t know the answer, but I can conjecture. If as a person of faith you held a relic and were uncertain about it’s authenticity would you subject it to testing that would prove it to be inauthentic?

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  9. Crown: “More generically, God’s choice of AB blood for Jesus could have a lay teaching purpose.”

    And there you go, folks. Conservative Christians will trot out all kinds of “experts” and (pseudo) scientific evidence to support their supernatural claims, but if they get caught in a corner on the evidence, they always have the fail proof escape: God “poofed” it, and it was so.

    Nonsense.

    “Poofing” in not evidence. It is faith.

    Judge: Mr. Crown, please present actual evidence without any “poofing” or your case will be dismissed…and no more Catholic relics. I now consider them as inadmissible due to your “poofing” attempt.

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  10. Dave wrote:
    “Does anyone know why there has not been more carbon dating done on the shroud? If there is any doubt about the cloth sample that was used, why not take other samples?”

    I do.

    The Shroud of Turin doesn’t belong to the public. It isn’t in a museum. It is an artifact possessed by the Catholic Church, and kept under the control of the Diocese of Turin.

    The pressure to carbon-date the Shroud began long ago, but for decades the carbon-dating technique required substantial portions of material, which would often substantially destroy the object being dated.

    The Church only consented to a carbon-dating of the Shroud when the techniques had improved significantly enough to require only small strips of cloth.

    However, the Church was always leery of carbon-dating for many reasons. Among lay people, carbon dating is Science, capital “S”, and treated as Truth, capital “T”. But the truth – and the Church was well-briefed in this (recall: some of the greatest research universities in the world are Catholic institutions) – is that carbon dating alone is never conclusive, often inaccurate,

    The Church authorities were concerned that, whatever the outcome, people would stampede to the wrong conclusions. If the cloth were found to be very ancient, people would assert that it WAS the burial shroud of Christ, and base their faith upon it. And the ancient dating might not be accurate, and a later revision could cause people a crisis of faith.

    Conversely, the Church was concerned that if the outcome were that it was not ancient, that people would jump forth to proclaim fraud, which might also not be true: carbon dating is notoriously inaccurate. There are living snails that carbon date to 60,000 years old.

    The carbon is dated, and the carbon may not have been part of the living tissue. The Shroud is burnt from a medieval fire and is covered with soot.

    Also, theologically, the Catholic Church doesn’t base its faith in relics, or place its faith in them. They are museum pieces, reminders, but they are not the BASIS of faith.

    So, given the keenness of people for carbon dating, the Church was very leery for a long time that it would be used for no good purpose. The authenticity or falsehood of the cloth itself changes nothing regarding Catholic doctrine, but it sure can cause people crises of faith if THEY have placed their faith in it.

    It took the Church a long, long time to agree to a carbon dating.

    The Church was also concerned, for the same reasons, that the results would be manipulated.

    Many were vehemently opposed to even the small amount of damage that would have to be done to the cloth to extract the sample, given that the testing served no purpose vital to the faith. Shall we cut a strip off of the original Declaration of Independence in order to carbon date it? Shall we nip a corner off the oldest Magna Carta, or cut a one-inch hole in the Mona Lisa to verify its age? Shall we break a toe off of the statue of David to analyze it? No? Then why carve a piece off of the more ancient, more revered Shroud of Turin to satisfy the curiosity of some people?

    Also, when the Church finally agreed to permit a, single, carbon dating, the negotiations to bring it about were intense, and often bruising. There was an intense concern all around that people with an agenda to manipulate and an axe to grind NOT have sole custody of the sample, and that the sample be done in a way that would be authoritative.

    Thus, a detailed protocol was determined as to how, when, where and who would take what. In particular, small samples were to be taken from different portions of the Shroud, and it was all to be tested.

    The Church’s fears proved spot on, for the Protocol was violated. The sample taken and tested was from the edge. It was tested, not according to protocol, and dated to the 1300s, and you had major magazines proclaiming to the world that it was a fraud.

    And that is that. There will be no second carbon dating of the Shroud in our lifetimes. As long as anybody is alive who remembers the 1988 debacle, or can read the comments about it, the Church isn’t going to expose this precious old treasure to that sort of manipulation again.

    The issue is not, and never was, the result of the test. The Church never based faith on a piece of cloth anyway. The issue is simple: the Church had to override massive internal opposition to damaging the object for a testing that was supposed to be fair and follow a pre-negotiated protocol.

    The Shroud was damaged, the Protocol broken, the results were published, the Shroud declared a fraud on the front pages all over the world. Careful forensics ever since have systematically demolished the credibility of the 1988 test, but the men who broke the rules to produce the result they got, got the result they wanted to get (Because they broke the rules), and now people still cite to their “work”.

    The Shroud was damaged, the Church was lied to, the contract was broken, and the public trust betrayed. The Church is never going to let anybody touch the Shroud for carbon dating again.

    And that’s why.

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  11. @Crown,

    You wrote: But the image on the Shroud looks like Jesus.

    And how do you know this since there are no living witnesses that can share with us what Yeshua actually looked like?

    As Arch pointed out, biblical anthropologists have made a best guess, but that’s all it is.

    There may well be an actual “image” on the shroud and, as you pointed out, the shroud is “a real object, not a fraud, very ancient, and not explicable by modern understandings of chemistry and physics.”

    But what evidence do you offer that “the image on the Shroud looks like Jesus”?

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  12. Hi Crown,

    Bravo! I’m just sitting here in the public gallery enjoying the “show”. I am a christian but not a Catholic, so I am open-minded about the Shroud. I have done a little reading about it, but not a lot. You are clearly a formidable barrister and I appreciate all the evidence you have submitted. I will certainly be having another look. I don’t see how your evidence can be simply dismissed, it requires me to do a bit of reading, which I will enjoy doing. Thanks.

    Since I am in the public gallery, and just heckling (quietly!), I am not bound by rules of evidence, so I will comment on the AB blood group and your explanation of it as a “sovereign act of will of the Creator”. I agree, but I think logic tells us that this can be explicated further.

    Mary was the mother of Jesus, so he must have been born from one of her ova, that’s the only way we can meaningfully say she was his biological mother. So God apparently chose to fertilise that ovum in some way. The most obvious way (would God do the obvious thing?) would be to miraculously create a sperm, complete with DNA ….. and blood group – not a difficult thing for God to do, I imagine. I can understand people not believing that happened, but I cannot see how the AB blood group is difficult to explain.

    Thanks again.

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  13. Dear UnkleE:

    Nothing is difficult when you can “poof” it.

    This is why Christians need to stop claiming that they have “evidence” for their supernatural claims. If you are always able to resort to “poofing” to explain how something happened, that isn’t evidence that is faith, or as we skeptics call it,…superstition.

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  14. Now to dismantle the nonsense of the Shroud of Turin and the face cloth of Oviedo.

    I could copy and paste the entire article, but it is very long and many of you would probably consider such a long post as rude, so I will post some excerpts and the link at the end:

    —The shroud cloth was radiocarbon dated in 1988 to circa 1260-1390 CE by three separate laboratories. This date is consistent with the earliest documentary evidence of the shroud’s existence. It is also consistent with a fourteenth-century bishop’s report to Pope Clement VII that an earlier bishop had discovered the forger and that he had confessed.

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  15. —36. The church conducts secret tests and suppresses unfavourable results: In 1969 the Archbishop of Turin appointed a secret commission to examine the shroud. That fact was leaked, then denied, but “At last the Turin authorities were forced to admit what they previously denied.” The man who had exposed the secrecy accused the clerics of acting “like thieves in the night.” More detailed studies — again clandestine — began in 1973. The commission included internationally known forensic serologists who made heroic efforts to validate the “blood,” but all of the microscopical, chemical, biological, and instrumental tests were negative. The commission’s report was withheld until 1976 and then was largely suppressed, while a rebuttal report was freely made available. Thus began an approach that would be repeated over and over: distinguished experts would be asked to examine the cloth, then would be attacked when they obtained other than desired results.

    37. The group most famous for claiming the authenticity of the shroud is STURP (Shroud of Turin Research Project), now disbanded. ‘Unfortunately, almost all of these were religious believers, most of them were Roman Catholics’, and the scientists were all selected by the Holy Shroud Guild; in fact, the leaders of the group, John Jackson and Eric Jumper, ‘served on the Executive Council of the Holy Shroud Guild, a Catholic organisation that advocated the “cause” of the supposed relic. So having this group investigate the Shroud was a little bit like having the Flat Earth Society investigate the curvature of the Earth’. STURP was comprised of 40 US scientists, made up of 39 devout believers and 1 agnostic. Knowing that the proportion of believers to agnostics is much different in scientific circles than it is in the general population, it has been calculated (Debunked! by Georges Charpak and Henri Broch) that the odds of selecting a group of 40 scientists at random and achieving this high ratio of believers is 7 chances in 1,000,000,000,000,000. In other words, the formation of this group is stacked and very biased towards authenticating the shroud, and therefore you must take their claims with an extremely large grain of salt.

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  16. —39. The church has never claimed the shroud as an authentic relic, however it has not discouraged the myth. Father Mike Mahler from ‘Cornell United Religious Works’ states:
    “The Vatican has never made a statement about the authenticity of any relic, including the shroud. It is also highly unlikely that it will ever do so. Further information is found in the New Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 13, and Volume 18, page 476. The latter article raises many good points which create serious doubts about the authenticity of the shroud as Jesus’ burial cloth, even if the shroud originated in the first century.”

    Yet the Vatican has no problem verifying miracles. In 2002 the Vatican recognised the 1998 after-death-miracle on Monica Besra which has been attributed to Mother Teresa. This has been very controversial, with the doctor who first diagnosed Besra saying the church should not push Besra’s case because it was medication, not a miracle that cured her. Her husband also supports the doctor’s version of events. Doctors that are on record saying that it is a miracle did so anonymously and can not be traced. Besra’s medical records containing sonograms, prescriptions and physicians’ notes have been seized by the church. Besra is a 30-year-old tribal woman from Dulidnapur village. She is illiterate and speaks her tribal mother tongue only. Until recently she has not been a Christian, yet her statement is written in fluent English and shows familiarity with details of Catholic belief. It is obvious that the text has not been written or dictated by her. But Besra cannot be questioned, she has vanished. It is very damming that the Vatican will authenticate such a controversial case, contrary to medical advice, yet won’t pass the same authority on the Shroud of Turin.

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  17. —Conclusion

    In this essay I have shown that claims made by Father Laisney regarding the dating of the Shroud of Turin are irrefutably false. Whether they were made deliberately to deceive or through ignorance was not determined. I have also listed numerous reasons why the Shroud of Turin can not be, or is extremely unlikely to be, the burial cloth of Jesus Christ. For believers it’s not just a matter of demolishing 2 or 3, or even 20 or 30 of these reasons, they must be able to clearly show that they are all flawed arguments. Since some use quotes from the Bible itself, for them to be false would mean that the Bible is in error also. Proving the Shroud authentic by proving the Bible wrong would be a backward step for the Church. If you can’t have complete confidence in the Bible, you can’t have complete confidence that Jesus even existed at all. I am of the opinion that the Shroud of Turin is nothing more than a religious gimmick used by the Church to bolster the shaky faith of their gullible and insecure flock. I believe it is unlikely that Jesus the man even existed, let alone was crucified around 30 CE. Thus no evidence of Jesus has ever existed and this explains why the manufacture of fake relics has been necessary and rampant for the last 2000 years. That these relics could fool ignorant, superstitious, medieval peasants is understandable, but that modern educated people with libraries of knowledge and scientific and forensic tools at their disposal still believe in this forgery is both amazing and disappointing. For some it is a testament to the human mind’s ability to delude itself. For others it is an example of the lengths they will go to in their attempt to deceive their followers. Accepting the cloth as the burial shroud of Jesus Christ will remain the domain of faith, not science. I will end with a quote from Joe Nickell, author of Inquest on the Shroud of Turin:

    “We should again recall the words of Canon Ulysse Chevalier, the Carbolic scholar who brought to light the documentary evidence of the shroud’s medieval origin. As he lamented, “The history of the shroud constitutes a protracted violation of the two virtues so often commended by our holy books: justice and truth.”

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  19. Dear fellow readers: Do you see what happened in this discussion? If evidence is presented to conservative Christians that debunks their supernatural claims; and that evidence cannot be explained away with natural means, conservative Christians resort to magic (poofing).

    Magic is not evidence.

    This is why it is almost a waste of time to have these discussions with believers: no amount of evidence is going to change their entrenched, faith-based, supernatural beliefs (superstitions). Even if we could dig up the very skeleton of Jesus, prove by DNA testing that without any doubt, it is Jesus…Christians would explain it away with magic and still insist on Jesus’ bodily resurrection and his claims of divinity:

    “Well, God must have made the skeleton as an exact replica of Jesus, with the same DNA as Jesus, and buried in the sands of Palestine, just to throw off hard-hearted sinners and skeptics, who must believe by faith and not by evidence.

    Aaaargh!

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  22. I’m sorry if that statement offends you, Crown. I mean that sincerely since you seem like someone I would enjoy having a beer with, but I cannot retract that statement.

    I believe that those of us who have “seen the light” regarding the false claims of conservative Christianity and other fundamentalist, supernatural-based religions, must be polite but honest when it comes to the supernatural. Calling conservative/orthodox Christians ignorant idiots (which I do not believe that you are) would be rude and inappropriate; saying that your supernatural beliefs are ignorant nonsense is being honest.

    Superstitions must be confronted and condemned, not coddled and given respect.

    Many tens of thousands of people have suffered physically and mentally due to the supernatural claims of religion. The time for treating these superstitions with polite, kid gloves is over. We must be honest and straight forward: Religious supernatural claims are ignorant nonsense, invented by Bronze Age nomads, living thousands of years ago in terror of every unexplainable natural disaster, attributing floods, lightning, famines, and bad harvests to the whims of invisible gods, not due to natural forces of nature.

    It is time to abandon these beliefs and accept reason and the scientific method as the basis of reality, not the schemes of good and evil ghosts.

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  23. “Nan wrote:

    You wrote: But the image on the Shroud looks like Jesus.

    And how do you know this since there are no living witnesses that can share with us what Yeshua actually looked like?”

    What I meant was: there’s a circumcised man. His face has been battered. His body is covered with the marks from having been flagellated. His hands are pierced at the base, his feet are pierced, his side has been speared. His head has blood from several wounds. None of his bones appear to be broken.

    If we found the image of the body of a man on a burial shroud, and he was the same, except his legs were broken, the Christians would say: can’t be Jesus, Scripture says his legs were not broken.

    If we found one who wasn’t whipped, or who didn’t have the peculiar blood around the head, or who wasn’t lanced in the side, or who wasn’t circumcised, the Christians would point to the image and say “Not Jesus: doesn’t comport with the Bible.”

    But in the case of the man on the Shroud, his final torment and crucifixion matches exactly the account in the Scriptures in every detail. If we found a body on a shroud, the only one Christians would accept was one who looked exactly like Jesus as far as the details went. And that’s what the body on the Shroud does: it meets the expectations, in all of those respects, of what Jesus would look like.

    That’s what I meant. I didn’t mean his face.

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  25. From the above linked source:

    39. The expression (of the face on the Shroud) is strangely composed for someone tortured to death, and the hands are neatly folded across the genitals. A real body lying limp could not have this posture. Your arms are not long enough to cross your hands over your pelvis while keeping your shoulders on the floor. To achieve this the body can not lie flat, yet Jewish burial tradition did not dictate that a body must be hunched up so as to cover the genitals before wrapping in the shroud. The claim that rigor mortis had set in and thus caused the legs not to be straight is ridiculous, since the arms should also be contracted, plus the timing is all wrong for rigor mortis. The most obvious answer is that the artist knew the image would be displayed, and didn’t want to offend his audience or have to guess what the genitals of Jesus would look like. It is also suspicious that Jesus is depicted assuming a pose that medievalists refer to as the venus pudica pose. This pose is associated with nudity and loss of innocence.

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