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Carbon Dating & The Shroud of Turin
BlackTyranny writes "The Shroud of Turin, carbon dated in 1978 by a team of scientists, may be far older than originally thought. Raymond N. Rogers, a retired chemist from the University of California-operated Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, part of the original team, used samples given to him in 2003 from the Cardinal of Turin's scientific advisor. Roger's contends that the carbon dating might be faulty because "the people who cut the sample didn't do a very good job of characterizing the samples," that is, taking samples from many areas of the cloth." I think the shroud 'Patch' may be made of the big foot suit. ;)
The carbon dating was done in 1988, not in 1978. The article is wrong.
... Raymond N. Rogers has been a long time believer of the authenticity of the shroud. A Google on his name will show a long involvement. It is doubtful he will ever have findings that will be contrary to his own beliefs. This does not mean he is wrong nor a fraud. It would just be more believable if the findings were from an unbiased third party.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
All you have to do is look at the face image on the shroud. It is a completely orthogonal image. If the shroud was wrapped in any way around a person's face, there is no way that the image could have been generated.
Hey kids, you can try this at home. Just wet your face and lightly wrap a paper towel around it for a second and then see if you recognize yourself in the image.
People should not fear what they do not understand; people should fear because they do not understand.
Is that the item is from about the right time period or not. In truth if you could show that it is about 2000 years old it doesn't prove much. Lots of people died back then and where wrapped in a cloth. And the Romans used crusafiction as a standard form of capital punishment. So at best you can show that it was the death shroud of someone who died 2000 years ago via a more or less standard way of executing someone.
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Um, aren't you chastising Cmdr Taco's belief that he has a right to chastise Christian's beliefs?
I'm all for being nice to people, but I think you're logic is a little self-defeating.
Summary completely misses the point of the article that the new analysis was carried out on vanillin content of the fibres rather than carbon isotopes.
It was folded up, and one corner caught fire or got charred (moltern lead from the roof?). That explains the triangular and diamond patches that have been sewn on at a later time.
http://xoomer.virgilio.it/bachm/VHAELST6.PDF
Well, the 115 people who have posted in the first 1/2 hour seem to disagree that it is uninteresting. :-) For those interested in this kind of thing, might I suggest considering a subscription to the Skeptical Inquirer, published by http://www.csicop.org?
I am not affiliated with them, but am a long-time subscriber. They cover the Shroud of Turin, UFO's, ghosts, etc., etc. I as a scientist love them, and I was surprised that my mother, who is somewhat of a believer in the paranormal, also likes them. From their website:
The Magazine for Science and Reason
For a fast-growing number of discriminating persons, the Skeptical Inquirer is a welcome breath of fresh air, separating fact from myth in the flood of occultism and pseudoscience on the scene today.
This dynamic magazine, published by the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, tells you what the scientific community knows about claims of the paranormal, as opposed to the sensationalism often presented by the press, television, and movies.
CmdrTaco went to Hope College, which is an excellent Christian based institution. He also attended Christian school all the way through high school.
./ crowd that have similar thoughts on the matter.
What you really missed was CmdrTaco flaunting his contempt for not only the college, but his parents beliefs and one of their strongest reasons for paying to send their son to very excellent schools. That means he can realate to about much of the
In this context, I would also have to consider Taco's comments to be a blantant attack.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
This is a useful quick read: The Skeptical Spectacle, No Bull Facts About the Shroud of Turin.
First, the British Museum did no dating. They simply coordinated the results from three labs in the US, UK and Switzerland.
Second, this 'bioplastic coating' was simply a hypothesis from Stephen Mattingly of the University of Texas. STURPS Joan L. Rogers took authentic Shroud fibers, which she laboriously extracted from the STURP sampling tapes by washing them free of adhesive with xylene (not a solvent for any "bioplastic polymers"), to Metuchen, NJ, for laser-microprobe Raman analysis. The analysis is extremely sensitive, but nothing was observed that would indicate a "bioplastic polymer."
Third, even at the time, scientists in the dating lab in the UK were skeptical: P.H South, while examining threads from the sample on behalf of the Oxford University Radiocarbon Dating Laboratory found indications of cotton. To him it seemed like material intrusion. In an article entitled "Rogue Fibers Found in Shroud," published in Textile Horizons in 1988, South write of his discovery of "a fine dark yellow strand [of cotton] possibly of Egyptian origin, and quite old . . . it may have been used for repairs at some time in the past, or simply bound in when the linen fabric was woven."
I well remember that, at the time, no one (except the odd spin doctor) thought these results conclusive and asked for more material. This was denied.
Did he inhale?
The margin of error depends on the age of the sample (amongst other things). It is not fixed at 2000 years: see RC dating
Did he inhale?
Actually, the Catholic church does not hold the shroud to be authentic, and church officials have made no comment on the new anaysis reported in this article. This new analysis was not performed by "the church", but rather by an independent researcher.
I have read the whole text. The issue isn't about control, nor is it about hate. Either we are here for no reason at all, or we were designed with a purpose in mind. The Bible affirms the latter, and that said purpose no more includes homosexuality than it does obesity.
Nature, of course, was the prestigious peer-reviewed scientific journal that carried the story of the 1988 carbon 14 dating.
This article addresses most of the comments that have been posted in this thread.
Dan
Not at all. The Hebrew codes specified in Leviticus et al specify a code of life that is extremely survival oriented, efficiency oriented, and family oriented. The end result of this is a nation that managed to thrive and grow to eventually produce movements which now dominate most of the world. Control for its own sake though it is not:
1) The kosher laws effectively prevent food poisoning and obesity. Much of what is forbidden, under available food preparation techniques (which were also specified at a high standard of sanitation), would have been either a bacterial risk or unhealthy in general.
2) Other laws, such as those governing clothing and housewares, prescribe a level of quality control that may have increased initial costs on many items, but probably resulted in better durability and a lower long term TCO.
3) Sex laws served two purposes. They held the family units together and guaranteed growth of the nation (more offspring than parents) as well as preserving the purity of the group. This may not make sense biologically but it avoided the cultural confusion which we Americans are so fond of.
4) The entirety of the code gave the Hebrews a sense of "something different" from their neighbors, as it continues to for those who follow it. Hence serving to unify the people and enhance a sense of nation, which is why they are just about the only cultural group of that period to have survived to the modern day.
Yes, the procedure for creating the shroud as being a photographic image has been duplicated successfully.
Near the bottom http://www.petech.ac.za/shroud/isthe.htm
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Tell me, where in the bible does it say to hate people that are homosexual?
Yes, in Leviticus, it talks against homosexuality. If it were only in the old testament, then it most likely wouldn't apply today because it would be considered under the Mosaic law of which Jesus was the ultimate sacrifice that we don't have to live under it anymore.
But, homosexuality is mentioned in 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 Which is
also in 1 Corinthians
and again in Romans 1:24-28 which is
But, I have to agree about the religious right"Which in my opinion are the modern day pharisees.", they often quote these scriptures as well as Leviticus, but fail to recognize the scripture after Romans 1:28. Quite a few of these so called "Christians", when I say so called, I mean that they claim they're Christian, but turn around and back-bite, gossip, judge, etc and what Romans 1:29-32 says
Back to judgmental behaviour, Jesus himself said "Judge not, lest ye be judged.". And Christians are supposed to have a forgiving attitude. Jesus himself said in Matthew 18:21
That means a Christian must forgive someone if wrong was done to the Christian, or if Joe Schmoe decides to try to kill me, but fails, I really have no choice but to forgive him, to do otherwise would be saying that I'm better than Jesus
To summarize what I have just said, no Christian is allowed to be hateful to anyone. To do otherwise would be going against the Christian teachings, which is to have a "Christ-Like Walk"
"As to the authenticity of Shroud of Turin, I personaly have doubts about its authenticity, but I refuse to pass final judgment on the matter as I doubt we will ever have all the facts."
A good attitude. These are some of the facts I've picked up:
* A forger confessed to the Church for having created it.
* The history of the shroud is not known before the mid-1300s.
* The weave is not like that of Jesus' time.
* It's the wrong size and shape according to the Bible. It should be be strips, not one large piece.
* It was not supposed to have been draped over the body according to the Bible, but wrapped around.
* In order create the undistorted 2D image, it would have to have been suspended flat, not wrapped or draped over a body.
* If the image was burned onto the shroud with some holy light, why did the beard burn darker than the skin?
* The height of the man shown on the front is different from the height shown on the back. The head is also out of proportion and shown in more detail than the rest of the body.
* Three labs in 1988 tested samples selected by the holder of the shroud to be accurate samples all found with 95% confidence it was from 1260-1390, the age which theories already put the forgery or materials.
I don't need any more to conclude it's a fake.
Interesting. However, you do not become ritually impure if the blood can be attributed to non-uterine or wound causes, from what I read. You do not become impure if your nose bleeds, for example.
I don't remember any specific references to nosebleeds and the like, but I could be wrong. It probably depends on the cause of the nosebleed (i.e., being punched is a wound, whereas spontaneous nosebleeds may have been).
A woman is also ritually impure from menarche until just before she gets married. If she's contagous, she can pass it to other women, just not men.
Probably just a rule to enforce chastity, which frankly is practical. No chance of pregnancy out of wedlock (unless you are visited by an angel...) and no chance of STD's if you didn't have sex!
There are certainly purity laws that make sense from a hygene point of view. However, these ones are somewhat difficult to justify.
Agreed. But some rituals and customs and rubrics and the like are just for flavor -- for rich tradition. Such as a Catholic woman vieling her head in front of the Blessed Sacrament (still a requirement in canon law -- despite its unobservance, this rule was NEVER abrogated). This rule is largely for a symbolic gesture of humility, but has no real practical side.
Lex orandi, lex credendi.
Nothing like removing all context from a passage and making it sound like total jibberish.
Keep in mind, that would be Old Testament, and God is speaking to Moses (the guy leading the Israelites around at the time) providing him with a rather lengthy list of stuff they shouldn't do. Such as sacraficing babies to idols (Leviticus 20:2), hot hot man love (Lev. 20:13), and of course bestiality (Lev. 20:15-16), and other things of that sort...
Although the mixed seeds and the fiber blended clothing thing seems odd, and I doubt they had GMO seeds at the time. Most of the strict rules being enforced in those chapters comes after the Israelites had been screwing themselves over on a few occasions and defying rather simple to follow guidelines which were specified before all this stuff.
I wouldn't consider regular crop rotation methods as "mixed seed", sure you have some voluntary growth from the previous year but that's undesired and unintentional.. Agreed, it does seem weird, it could have been intended simply to make the Israelites a visual example of being "set apart"(holy) to the other people they encountered along the way.
Although, harddrive manufacturers need to read this one..
(Lev. 19:35 KJV) Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment, in meteyard, in weight, or in measure.
Go ahead, mod me down for doing a little research before I post.
One is the home of Harvard, gay marriage, high taxes and social permissiveness.
The other is Bush country, solidly Republican, traditional and gun-toting.
--- snip ---
The states with the lowest divorce rates are: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont.
Anyone else notice that these are better characterized as predominantly Catholic states? Perhaps these stats aren't so surprising given that divorce is recognized as OK by Protestants and is doctrinally proscribed in Catholicism.
Methinks that that the author of referenced article (and the parent's poster) didn't consider all the available data.
Linux is not Windows
From: Did Jesus Rise From The Dead: The Resurrection Debate, with Gary Habermas and Antony Flew (who recently made news).
This is a popular fiction with no evidence whatsoever to back it up. As someone else mentioned, most relics of the True Cross are smaller than a splinter. The total volume of all known True Cross relics is about .004 cu. m out of an estimated volume for the entire Cross of .174 cu. m. See both Wikipedia and The Catholic Encyclopedia.
And the brethren went away edified.
They reproduce in a wierd way. The males "penis" is nothing more than a spike that pierces the cuticle of the female. The female has a soft spot in the cuticle for such mating. The male then deposits its sperm directly into the females blood where they migrate towards the females ovaries and fertilze the eggs that are there.
This technique of sperm migrating towards reproductive organs has allowed male ticks to "rape" other male ticks. With a larger, stronger "spike" the gay ticks pierce the male ticks and the rapists gametes migrate towards the male victims own testicles, where they stay until he subsequently mates. The sperm which the victim deposits into a female tick is now a mixture of his own and that of the gay ticks. So the gay tick can have offspring by raping males.
The raping ticks themselves can get raped. So a mating session could involve a female mounted by a male, mounted by male, mounted by yet another male, etc.
A female tick can be picky, so a gay tick doesn't need to court her, it just waits till a straight tick is accepted and mounts her. Once mounted, the straight tick is easy prey for the the gay ones since it's now immobile.
Only the gay ticks have superior schlongs. The straight ones don't need them since females have that soft spot, so there was no evoulutionary pressure to get bigger ones. So basically you have three distinct populations. Female, Straight Male, and Gay Male. If I remember right there are no bisexual ones.
I don't remember where I read this, but I do remember that it was a book and not a web site.
Lest there be any misunderstanding: I'm not Catholic, and have never venerated a relic of any sort, whether Catholic, Buddhist, Hindu or even a SETI moonrock!
1. "The clerics simply assume that the shroud belongs to Jesus (assuming that he existed at all) and then direct their scientists to prove that the shroud belonged to Jesus."
While there may well be a case where this occurred, the Catholic church does not now, nor has it ever in the past, recognized or authenticated the Shroud as an official relic. It's been the subject of some intense disputes with in the RC church, to the point that Pope Clement VII ordered that in the case of all future exhibitions, a priest present should "declare in a loud voice that it was not the real shroud of Christ." In fact, the theory that Shroud was only a painting -- whether forgery or 'representation' -- was advanced WITHIN the Catholic church over 600 years ago!
As an apparent result of these and other dispures, the Shroud seems to have been treated more as an embarrassment, than a relic the church wished to display or advertise.
See the Catholic Encyclopedia (1912) article for details: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13762a.htm
2. "It is doubtful he (Rogers) will ever have findings that will be contrary to his own beliefs."
Raymond Rogers, who authored the study, published in "Thermochimica Acta", that has generated all the hubbabaloo does NOT now claim that he, or anyone else has proved that the Shroud of Turin is the Shroud of Christ. To the contrary, he's been quoted as saying that "It's a shroud from the right time, but you're never going to find out (through science) if it was used on a person named Jesus".
http://tinyurl.com/68jfl (www.smh.com.au)
ABSTRACT OF THE ROGERS ARTICLE:
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.
"Thermochimica Acta", Volume 425, Issues 1-2
http://tinyurl.com/4vy6r (www.sciencedirect.com)
3.Results of comprehensive STURP study of the Shroud, the consortium of scientists who physically examined the Shroud in 1978, was NOT sponsored or encouraged by the Catholic church, did NOT include many Catholics, and did NOT conclude that the Shroud of Turin was the Shroud of Christ. Raymond Rogers, who was a member of that team, was quoted at that time, when asked that question at a public press conference, as saying, "We do not have test for Jesus Christ. So, we can't hypothesize or test for that question."
"Report on the Shroud of Turin", Heller, 1983
used copies from Amazon - http://tinyurl.com/46fln
4. "So at best you can show that it was the death shroud of someone who died 2000 years ago via a mo
The individual image on the shroud not only shows wounds and body traces compatable with crucifiction, but also with a stabbing to the side and a crowning with thorns. Crucifictions may have been done all the time (a debatable point) but the additional wounds appear to be compatable with only one known victim.
I don't use the King James. Given that its language is a little archaic and it worked off less reliable manuscripts than we now have, I prefer to use a modern literal translation such as the English Standard Version. I augment it with a Greek New Testament and the New International Version as well.
My job is to study and teach the Bible, so I already know, thanks :^)
That's a poor interpretation. The Greek, literally translated into English goes along the lines of:
ALL SCRIPTURE GOD-BREATHED AND USEFUL FOR TEACHING FOR REPROOF FOR CORRECTION FOR TRAINING IN RIGHTEOUSNESS THAT PROFICIENT MAY BE THE OF GOD MAN FOR EVERY GOOD WORK HAVING BEEN EQUIPPED.
Now it's quite obvious that without an 'is' in there, the sentence makes no sense. Given that 'is' does not have to be in the sentence, but can be implied, we can drop it in in the most logical place that will give us a readable sentence. i.e. between 'scripture' and 'God-breathed.' It makes more sense of the first half of the sentence and gives reason for 'that' being there.
But we can look at the context and get a very good idea of what it should be in 99.9% of the cases. Or by simply applying rules of grammar, as in this case.
Paul is encouraging Timothy to remain faithful to God's word and preach it. The interpretation accepted by leading Biblical scholars, that appears in English translations of the Bible and that obeys the rules of grammar, fits with the context of the book and is much more likely to be right that your interpretation. Given that there are other passages validating scripture as being from God, this is quite logical.
I should state at the outset that I think the Shroud is the real thing. Rogers and I have had numerous discussions on this. He won't agree with me and won't disagree with me (even privately). As a scientist he is excellent and he adheres to scientific principles, as the editorial in Nature makes clear. I trust him even as I disagree with him on some aspects of the Shroud of Turin.
Ray Rogers is a Fellow of the University of California, Los Alamos National Laboratory and a charter member of the Coalition for Excellence in Science Education. He has published many scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals. In 1978, together with several other scientists, he personally examined the Shroud of Turin in Italy for several days and collected numerous samples of fibers and particle materials for further study.
Rogers HAS NEVER STATED that the Shroud is authentic or not. He has never promoted a particular religious view. He does not believe that the images are miraculous for scientific readsons. He has amply shown that the carbon 14 dating of 1988 was invalid and if you read his report, that is all that it addresses. Rogers' FAQ includes these topics:
The Shroud of Turin images are not painted
The bloodstains are real blood
Why radiation did not cause images
Why scorching did not cause images
Why the carbon 14 samples are not valid
The 1532 fire and autocatalytic process
The meaning of variegated bands
Cellulose decomposition and image formation
Superficiality of the images on the Shroud
Double superficiality and what it means
Body decomposition rates
Why fibers are not involved in image formation
Other dating methods useful for the Shroud
The 1532 fire and image properties
The 2002 restoration consequences
Optical and physical properties of flax
Image properties and the scientific method
Unconfirmed bioplastic polymer coating
Why a bioplastic did not affect carbon 14 tests
DanMy father-in-law, Dr. Alan Adler, was on the STRP team and did the original blood work on the Shroud.
Before he died, his two favorite statements about the Shroud were, "It's BLOOD! B-L-U-D!" and "There is no test for Christness."