Frustration

1,060 thoughts on “Frustration”

1. Peter, I don’t argue that God is pure good. I say what God said about himself, out of his own mouth, through Isaiah:

   Isaiah 45:7
   “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I YHWH do all these things.”

   God is the source of all things, including evil. He said so himself, in words that proceeded forth directly from his own mouth..

   Other passages in the Scriptures say God is only good. There’s a Psalm that says that and other things. But those are the pious traditions of men recorded in the writings. They contradict the direct spoken words of God.

   Jump ball?

   No: “Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds forth from the mouth of God” – Jesus said that.

   “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I YHWH do all these things.” – YHWH said that.

   YHWH said that he creates evil. And he does. Obviously. He flooded the world and kills everybody.

   AIDS is a living organism. So is typhus. These things kill a lot of people, in horrible deaths. All living things are created by God – including AIDS and typhoid fever and MRSA.

   “He is not a tame lion.” – Narnia

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2. Gary: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040603104004745

   Thermochimica Acta, Volume 425, Issues 1–2, 20 January 2005, Pages 189–194
   Studies on the radiocarbon sample from the shroud of turin
   Raymond N. Rogers

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3. Hi Crown, Jesus said ‘only God is good’.

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4. Thank you, Crown:

   I’m not interested in reading the entire book you referred me to, but here is the abstract copied below. I will next google the bio of the author of the book and then google if there are any reviews of the book by other scientists and get back to everyone.

   Abstract

   In 1988, radiocarbon laboratories at Arizona, Cambridge, and Zurich determined the age of a sample from the Shroud of Turin. They reported that the date of the cloth’s production lay between a.d. 1260 and 1390 with 95% confidence. This came as a surprise in view of the technology used to produce the cloth, its chemical composition, and the lack of vanillin in its lignin. The results prompted questions about the validity of the sample.

   Preliminary estimates of the kinetics constants for the loss of vanillin from lignin indicate a much older age for the cloth than the radiocarbon analyses. The radiocarbon sampling area is uniquely coated with a yellow–brown plant gum containing dye lakes. Pyrolysis-mass-spectrometry results from the sample area coupled with microscopic and microchemical observations prove that the radiocarbon sample was not part of the original cloth of the Shroud of Turin. The radiocarbon date was thus not valid for determining the true age of the shroud.

   Keywords
   Shroud of Turin;
   Lignin kinetics;
   Pyrolysis/mass spectrometry;
   Flax fiber analyses

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5. But despite centuries of research, we’re a long way from even understanding how regeneration works, much less replicating the feat in our own bodies. The latter should be possible, according to James Monaghan, who studies regeneration biology at Boston’s Northeastern University, although he adds that “we are not even close, and putting a timeframe on it is difficult.” (emphasis mine)

   From http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130307-will-we-ever-regenerate-limbs

   I admit this is from a scientific POV but, well, try as I might, I was unable to find anything where goddidit. Maybe Crown can supply references?

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6. @Arch

   Crown – two words, sea kelp —

   I literally burst out laughing reading this shit.

   Not a good thing when you are doing this at work.

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7. If my information is correct, the author of the book that Crown referred me to, Raymond Rogers, was a chemist who tested the fibers of the Shroud and came to this conclusion: the radiocarbon dating of the Shroud performed by the three labs in the late 80’s was correct, but, the sample of the Shroud from which the three labs performed there testing was actually a separate piece of cloth, from the middle ages, that was used to patch the Shroud. Therefore, the patch is from the fourteenth century, as confirmed by the three labs, but the Shroud is not.

   I will look at reviews of his book and his views next.

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8. A Skeptical Response to Studies on the Radiocarbon Sample from the Shroud of Turin
   by Raymond N. Rogers

   Thermochimica Acta 425:189-194, 2005

   by

   Steven D. Schafersman, Ph.D.
   Consulting Scientist and Administrator of the
   The Skeptical Shroud of Turin Website

   February 8, 2005

   Revisions: Feb 28; March 10; March 14, 2005

   This report is my initial response to the controversy and publicity recently generated by the publication of the journal article by Ray Rogers cited above. It contains my initial thoughts and is subject to change. Please feel free to forward it and cite it using Web citation format, but it is subject to change and will eventually be expanded into a journal article for official publication that will contain references and illustrations. For several reasons, I had to write this present version quickly and informally, and it may contain errors that, if present, will be corrected. Although I point out the errors of logic and scientific evidence in Rogers’ paper, I include my own speculations and suspicions, for which I obviously lack real evidence. It should be clear which is which. Future investigation needs to be conducted. Please contact me if you find errors at the email address below. Some revisions have already been made. The most recent version of this paper will always be on the Web at http://freeinquiry.com/skeptic/shroud/articles/rogers-ta-response.htm.

   Introduction: An Exercise in Pseudoscience

   Ray Rogers, a retired chemist who formerly worked at the Los Alamos national laboratory (and who passed away on March 8, 2005, after illness with cancer), recently published a pro-authenticity Shroud of Turin paper in a legitimate and peer-reviewed chemistry journal, Thermochimica Acta (hereafter TA). The Rogers paper makes two claims: First, the piece of the Shroud linen that was age-dated using radiocarbon technology in 1988 was actually a much-younger patch of cloth that allowed the radiocarbon labs to reach an incorrect medieval date. Second, using his own age-dating method, Rogers claims that the Shroud is actually much older than the early 14th century radiocarbon date. This paper has created a minor media frenzy, since it is one of the few Shroud papers published in a legitimate scientific journal in two decades, and–more importantly–explicitly makes the claim that the Shroud dates from the first century and is thus authentic. For these reasons, and quite understandably, observers perceive that Rogers’ paper must be exceptionally reliable. Unfortunately, these observers would be wrong. This response examines the scientific issues and elucidates the reasons why the Rogers paper fails in its claims in every instance.

   In past years, Rogers has published many pro-authenticity papers in various pro-authenticity and pseudoscientific journals, symposia, and websites devoted to the Shroud of Turin, and the public press justifiably took no notice, since private publishing outlets for UFOs, astrology, creationism, and other pseudoscientific topics are numerous (and fill supermarket newsstands and pseudoscience conference book tables). Mainstream media writers know that such privately-published pseudoscientific outlets contain no data or findings that possess legitimate scientific value, and ignore them. The well-know Shroud of Turin website at http://www.shroud.com, for example, has posted seven of Rogers papers in the last three years, including two in which Rogers examined the same evidence, made the same analysis, and reached the same conclusions that he did in the TA paper (one of these seven papers apparently had been published previously in an obscure journal, but I cannot determine if the others were). These papers justifiably received no attention by the mainstream media. It is only when he was able to get a pro-authenticity Shroud paper published in a legitimate scientific journal that public attention was given to his claims. The real story in this controversy is not the mistaken age of the Shroud of Turin, but the misjudgment of a science journal editor and the breakdown of its peer review process.

   There is a very recent similar example in which a legitimate biology journal published a paper about intelligent design creationism; as with the present case, the journal had never treated this topic before, but the editor was suitably pliable. He claims he was not biased, but it is clear from his abundant written justifications after the fact that he was indeed biased (but apparently not religiously so; the issue is more complicated, and to understand it you have to be knowledgeable about the details of alternative theories of evolution and biosystematics). And it appears he sent the creationist ID paper to very friendly unnamed reviewers whom he knew in advance would approve it (no official associate editor was used for the peer review; any evolutionary biologist actually familiar with the content and context of the submitted paper would have rejected it). As is typical with creationist ID papers, it contained plenty of legitimate and reliable scientific information and had the veneer of scientific respectability, but it also contained subtly illogical arguments, speciously misused data, and omitted the vital scientific information that completely refuted its pseudoscientific conclusions. It should never have been accepted for publication by the editor. The editor later resigned and the journal’s officers, elected councilors, and past presidents published a statement saying that the paper was “inappropriate,” had “no credible scientific evidence supporting it,” and “does not meet the scientific standards” of the journal. Rogers’ paper in TA has characteristics identical to the ID pseudoscience paper in almost every detail. I believe that a future investigation will reveal that his TA paper’s editorial history will also be similar, and I further suspect that there will be similar editorial board repercussions.

   (cont’d)

   Gary: I will let readers read the rest of this article themselves. I will post the link below.

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9. I didn’t cite to a book. I cited to an article published in a chemistry periodical: Acta Thermochimica.

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10. http://llanoestacado.org/freeinquiry/skeptic/shroud/articles/rogers-ta-response.htm

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11. I couldn’t resist. Here is the next paragraph:

    Ray Rogers is a member of STURP (Shroud of Turin Research Project, an organization totally composed of believers in the authenticity of the Shroud) and accepted the authenticity of the Shroud from the very beginning of their work in the middle 1970s. He accepts all the shoddy work that STURP passed off as science two and three decades ago. As is well known, STURP’s analyses on image formation, identity of the blood, sticky tape pollen, and history were hopelessly incompetent and unscientific, despite their claims and posturing to be rigorously scientific. There is no real blood of any kind on the Shroud. Both the image and “blood” were applied by an artist. These facts were conclusively proved beyond even a shadow of doubt by microscopic chemist Walter McCrone, whose microscopic analysis revealed the presence of abundant iron oxide (red ocher) and cinnabar (vermilion) pigments on the Shroud. He published the photographic and chemical evidence in his papers and book. I have microscopically observed these pigments myself on Shroud fibers and can attest to this fact (see below). Joe Nickell first showed that the quality of the Shroud image could not be a direct image transfer by any natural mechanism from a human body due to inevitable distortion, and so must be an artistic rendition, and he demonstrated an easy way that the Shroud could be created by molding a wet linen cloth over a bas relief carving or cast and daubing or tamping red ocher pigment on it that makes an image appear that is very similar to the Shroud’s image. I was the first to point out many numerous inconsistencies and logical lapses involving the Shroud’s speculative history, unnaturally elongate Gothic-art body shape, Palestinian pollen fraudulently applied to sticky tape samples, supposed but non-existent photographic negative quality, alleged 3-dimensional quality, and other anomalous features, and to explain how the STURP members went wrong. All of these facts are by now well known among informed scientists and are completely accepted.

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12. Jesus said (as recorded at Mark 10:18): “Ti me legeis agathon oudeis agathos ei me heir ho theos”

    Which is to say: Why me call you good no one good if not one the deity.

    Which is to say: Why do you call me good? No one is good if not the one deity.

    So yes, Jesus certainly called the deity, the Mighty One, El, Elohiym, YHWH, “agathon” – which is “good”.

    And God certainly is good.

    (“Good” in the Hebrew means “functional”; “evil” – “dysfunctional”

    But that does not mean that YHWH is not also the creator of evil, and the sender of evil, because YHWH said so himself, out of his own mouth.

    “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I tYHWH do all these things.”

    God is good. But God is also the creator, of everything, not just good things. God created Satan. God created AIDS. God created cancer. God created Hurricane Sandy. God created everything that is under the Sun.

    Now, many things that MEN consider evil, because they kill us, are not evil in the eyes of God. It is functional that men should die, lest evil be immortal and never be cut off.

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13. There are many other avenues of evidence that prove the Shroud is a late medieval artifact. The Skeptical Shroud of Turin website at http://www.skeptic.ws/shroud/ mentions all of them in several papers and a PowerPoint presentation by myself and others. In brief, every competent and honest scientific investigation of the Shroud of Turin has proven that it is a medieval artifact, a reproduction or representation of the Shroud of Jesus Christ (not a medieval fake, but a 1st century fake!). Ray Rogers and his STURP colleagues continue to pursue their Shroud pseudoscience, in opposition to empirical evidence, logical reason, and skepticism–the hallmarks of legitimate science. In violation of good scientific practice and honesty, Rogers’s TA paper completely ignores all of this evidence that refutes his analysis and conclusions. Rogers’ paper is an exercise in pseudoscience and should not have been published in Thermochimica Acta. The editor of that journal should be ashamed. So should the STURP “scientists,” but I don’t expect that to happen soon.

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14. At the beginning of his paper, Rogers states that the early 14th century radiocarbon date “came as a surprise in view of the technology used to produce the cloth, its chemical composition, and the lack of vanillin in its lignin,” and the date “does not agree with observations on the linen-production technology nor the chemistry of fibers obtained directly from the main part of the cloth in 1978 [two references cited].” This is nonsense: First, the references he cites are STURP papers that were written with an obvious pro-authenticity bias and lack of scientific objectivity; although published in legitimate scientific journals, their methods and conclusions are suspect and I claim they are exercises in pseudoscience; McCrone conclusively refuted the conclusions of these two papers in his book. Second, these papers contain no data or analysis to support a First Century date using any scientifically-recognized age determination method. The methods Rogers cites–observations of linen-production technology, chemistry of fibers, and amount of vanillin in lignin–are, unlike radiocarbon dating, useless in accurate and precise age determination. At most, they would allow suggestions of age, and suggestions are notoriously unreliable and subject to bias, which is the case here.

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15. As pointed out by Antonio Lombatti (personal communication), editor of Approfondimento Sindone, the skeptical international journal of scholarship and science devoted to the Shroud of Turin, only after one month of careful study on where to cut the linen samples for dating were the samples removed from the Shroud. This process was observed personally by Mons. Dardozzi (Vatican Academy of Science), Prof. Testore (Turin University professor of textile technology), Prof. Vial (Director of the Lyon Ancient Textiles Museum), Profs. Hall and Hedges (heads of the Oxford radiocarbon dating laboratory) and Prof. Tite (head of the British Museum research laboratory). There is no way these scientists and scholars could have made such an error and failed to see that the cloth samples they removed was really from a patch, “invisibly” rewoven or not.

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16. @Crown

    So in your view it is ok for “functional” being to create “dysfunctional” being?

    Doesn’t it make the functional being seem dysfunctional?

    I dunno, to me substituting the good and evil to functional and dysfunctional doesn’t change much for me, though I can accept your point about how men consider things “evil” because they kill us but God’s definition of evil is different.

    That being said, so what is God’s definition of evil then? Because by this logic even Satan is not evil. And when God says he creates “evil” in the bible I he’s referring to the “evil” by men’s definition? If he is creating “evil” according to God’s definition then we are back to the same problem – how can a Good being create Evil?

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17. Detailed photographs of the area from which the sample was removed clearly reveal that there was no patch there. (How could Benford and Marino’s unnamed “textile experts” observe the correct proportions of 1st century and 16th century threads from the “patch” using photographs, while the legitimate experts named above–using both photographs and personal examination of the actual Shroud!–miss seeing that there was a patch there in the first place?) There is no 16th century patch in the area from where the 14C samples were removed; patches can be found only where the fire had burned the linen in 1532, and of course there is the Holland backing cloth. Both the patches and Holland cloth have weaves completely different from the Shroud’s distinct herringbone pattern, which was easily identifiable by the radiocarbon dating scientists when they processed the cloth sample.

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18. Rogers’ new method of using the amount of vanillin in a sample to determine its age is useless and incompetent. According to Rogers, the vanillin in authentic Shroud fibers is missing, but the Raes “patch” fibers do possess vanillin from his tests. Thus, he concludes that the amount of vanillin (a breakdown product of flax over time) can be used to age date his samples, and because “the Shroud and other very old linens do not give the vanillin test, the cloth must be very old,” thus making it “very unlikely that the linen was produced during medieval times.” But this is subjective, non-quantitative nonsense: to demonstrate the efficacy of his new dating method and thus prove his claim of age discrepancy, Rogers first must date his Shroud samples by independent methods and must also independently demonstrate the effectiveness of his vanillin-dating method using other independent samples to calibrate the method, and he fails to do both of these! Rogers refers to the presence of vanillin in “all other medieval linens,” but he provides no evidence to support this statement. This is shoddy and unreliable methodology and reasoning, totally unacceptable for publication in any scientific journal. Its publication proves unprofessional favoritism on the part of Thermochimica Acta’s editor.

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19. Of course, we scientists must always be grateful to STURP for allowing us to get the correct radiocarbon date in the first place: STURP’s overwhelming and obsessive certainty in the authenticity of the Shroud–derived from the massive self-deception of believing their own bogus scientific data and illogical conclusions–gave the Catholic Church the confidence it needed to permit scientific dating of the Shroud and proving once and for all that it was First Century in origin. Members of STURP literally convinced the Catholic Church to proceed with the radiocarbon dating program that allowed truly neutral, skeptical, and mostly secular scientists (and thus completely different in character from STURP personnel) to get their hands on a piece of the Shroud and subject it to a legitimate and competent scientific test. I believe if the Church thought it was possible to get a Fourteenth Century date, it would never have permitted the sampling and dating, since its goal has always been to milk the Shroud for its faith-strengthening qualities. For two decades, STURP has been attempting to make up for their error and get back in the good graces of the Church. I always smile when Rogers and the other believers in the Shroud’s authenticity suggest another dating experiment. As they well know, it will never happen! The Catholic Church was burned by the STURP technicians and scientists and never want to experience that again.

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20. Jay Ingram, writing in the Toronto Star, discusses a topic with which I was not familiar. Ingram interviewed Clint Chapple, a biochemist at Purdue University, and Malcolm Campbell, a botanist at the University of Toronto. Chapple points out that it was odd that Rogers used a powerful and precise technique, pyrolysis mass spectrometry, to assess the carbohydrates in the cloth, but didn’t choose to apply that technique to the vanillin. This was odd because the incredible accuracy of this technique as applied to vanillin is scientifically well-documented. “I’ve published using this method and have this instrument in my own lab. The method would have easily revealed the presence (or absence) of degradation products like vanillin had the author been seriously interested in testing his hypothesis,” Chapple says. Instead, Rogers used a staining technique that reveals the presence of vanillin if you get a color change. But this is a qualitative, not a quantitative test.

    Malcolm Campbell states that, “in biological sciences, a scientist would be hard-pressed to get their paper published if they ever attempted to quantify vanillin on the basis of this staining technique.” Staining is a rough guide to the presence of vanillin and cannot detect very small amounts. (In fact, the pyrolysis mass spectrometry was conducted by Rogers and STURP in 1981 when they had access to the facility, but Rogers only had his home laboratory, so a poor and inadequate staining technique was all he could manage.) Campbell and Chapple identified other flaws in the paper, such as the same lack of controls and replication that I describe above. As Ingram writes, “these should have been enough to deter the editors of Thermochimica Acta from publishing it. Why didn’t they? Maybe they were unfamiliar with the chemistry of linen and its breakdown products; maybe they have a soft spot in their heart for the shroud. Who knows?” Ingram concludes, “the incident just underlines the fact that the Shroud of Turin will never go away, and believers will try anything, including arguments masquerading as science, to prove its authenticity.”

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21. For example, STURP published several papers that concluded that real blood was present on the Shroud, but all their precise tests for protein, iron, albumin, and other substances proved nothing of the kind. Two groups used specific tests for blood and published the results, both finding none. The first was the 1973 Italian Commission, who used at least six sensitive tests for blood, blood species, and blood type; all were negative. The second was the late Walter McCrone, the world’s leading forensic microscopist, chemical microanalysis, and the person best qualified on the planet at that time to use microanalytical forensic tests for blood on tiny samples. At that time, McCrone was working as an associate of STURP, so he had complete access to the important Shroud sticky tape samples. His articles in The Microscope, other scientific journals, and book, Judgment Day for the Shroud of Turin, contain his negative blood results with full documentation. STURP, however, continues to mendaciously ignore and impugn these results. I suspect that the STURP pseudoscientists actually did first use their own specific tests for blood, but when they were negative, they unethically suppressed them and published instead their highly technical and instrument-intensive methods that, with convoluted, labored, and illogical reasoning, gave them the conclusions they desired. These mistaken results were then published in technical journals with sympathetic editors that apparently never dealt with microscopic forensic methods of this type before.

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22. For sure Howie!

    I’m not sure if good or evil can be defined since they seem to be terminal concepts that do not reference other concepts. Honestly, I doubt we really disagree on the meaning of good and evil. When we apply it to someone or a personal deity I think it is better understood as having good moral character. I believe in the classical conception of God as having purely good moral character.

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23. Ok. I think we have seen enough.

    How do you spell fraud? Answer: S-H-R-O-U-D!

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24. Nate, I am childless because me and my wife work far too many hours. Now I’m curious how having children changed your view! Do you mind if I ask, what was your view before and after and what experiences led to the shift?

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25. Peter, that’s the entire reason I referred to the chapter! 🙂 Do you think I did not see that? But, hey I can argue against “hyperbole” in other ways. One important reason we cannot take the annihilation commands in Deuteronomy 7 and 20 as hyperbolic is because we have other warfare rules of engagement for non-Promised Land nations found in Deuteronomy 20 that include sparing of women and children if the nation does not surrender.

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