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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.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.