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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. ;)
Who decided to patch the shroud along the way?
Is how the image was produced in the first place. As best as I know, it's unique to (at least) medievil tech. Does anyone out there have a good scientific explaination for it? Perhaps it could be a History Channel show, "God Tech".
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
Leviticus 19:19
King James Bible: Ye shall keep my statutes. Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind. Thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed. Neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woollen come upon thee.
Good News Bible: Obey my orders. Do not crossbreed your cattle. Do not plant two kinds of seed in the same field. Do not wear clothing made from two kinds of fiber.
The National Geographic channel last night aired an hour-long investigation into the mystery of the shroud of turin. NG was made the argument that Leonardo Da Vinci created the shroud. Anyone who's interested should check it out.
NG claimed that Da Vinci had family ties to the church that housed the shroud, thus creating a link between how the shroud could have been obtained by the church.
NG made other intereresting links and arguments.
I found it particuarly amusing that the image on the shroud is extremely similar to Da Vinci's own self portrait. It seems well within Leonardo's personality to pull such a prank that has lasted for centuries.
As for the actual age of the shroud, as long as it was *before* Leonardo's time, he could have obtained the material. If his goal was to trick the people of his time with the shroud he probably would have sought an older-looking one anyway.
From nationalgeographic.com: Behind the Mysteries Week: "Da Vinci and the Mystery of the Shroud" at 8P et/pt Jesus's image, believers say, was burned into the Shroud of Turin by the intense heat of resurrection. But is it genuine? Or was it created by someone with extraordinary skills, like the great Leonardo Da Vinci?
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The Sunday Times [28 November 2004]
Andrew Sullivan: Where the Bible bashers are sinful and the liberals pure
. . .
Take two iconic states: Texas and Massachusetts. In some ways they were the two states competing in the last election. One is the home of Harvard, gay marriage, high taxes and social permissiveness.
The other is Bush country, solidly Republican, traditional and gun-toting. Massachusetts voted for John Kerry over George W Bush 62% to 37%; Texas voted for Bush over Kerry 61% to 38%.
Ask yourself a simple question: which state has the highest divorce rate? Marriage was a key issue in the last election, with Massachusetts' gay marriages becoming a symbol of alleged blue state decadence and moral decay. But in fact Massachusetts has the lowest divorce rate in the country at 2.4 divorces per 1,000 inhabitants. Texas, which until recently made private gay sex a crime, has a divorce rate of 4.1.
A fluke? Not at all. The states with the highest divorce rates are Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas. The states with the lowest divorce rates are: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont. Every one of the high divorce rate states went for Bush. Every one of the low divorce rate states went for Kerry. The Bible Belt divorce rate is roughly 50% higher than the national average.
Some of this discrepancy can be accounted for by the fact that couples tend to marry younger in the Bible Belt and many do not have the maturity to know what they are getting into. There is some correlation, too, between rates of college education and stable marriages, with the Bible Belt lagging behind a highly educated state such as Massachusetts.
The irony still holds, however. Those parts of America that most fiercely uphold what they believe are traditional values are not those parts where traditional values are healthiest. Hypocrisy? Perhaps. A more insightful explanation is that socially troubled communities cling to absolutes in the abstract because they cannot live up to them in practice.
Doesn't being born again help to bring down divorce rates? Jesus was clear about divorce, declaring it a sin unless adultery was involved. A recent study found no measurable difference in divorce rates between those who are "born again" and those who are not; 29% of Baptists have been divorced, compared with 21% of Catholics. Moreover, a staggering 23% of married born agains have been divorced twice or more.
Teenage births? Again, the contrast is striking. In a state such as Texas where the religious right is strong and the rhetoric against teenage sex is gale-force strong, teen births as a percentage of all births are 16.1%. In liberal, secular Massachusetts they are 7.4%, less than half. Marriage itself is less popular in Texas than in Massachusetts. In Texas the proportion of people unmarried is 32.4%; in Massachusetts it is 26.8%. So even with a higher marriage rate, Massachusetts has a divorce rate almost half of its "conservative" rival.
Take abortion. America is one of the few western countries where the legality of abortion is still ferociously disputed. It is a country where the religious right is arguably the strongest single voting bloc and in which abortion is a constant feature of cultural politics. Compare it with a country such as Holland, perhaps the epitome of social liberalism. Which country has the highest rate of abortion? It is not even close. America has a rate of 21 abortions per 1,000 women aged between 15 and 44. Holland has a rate of 6.8. Americans, in other words, have three times as many abortions as the Dutch. Remind me again: which country is the most socially conservative?
. . .
More at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2088-13782 27,00.html
Well, ok lets think about this logically. We already have several possible reasons for the inaccuracy of the carbon dating. This is just yet another look at the dating method used to show that is has flaws.
To me, the most blatent flaw is the know fact that the shroud has/had a bacterial infestation in its long history. Enough so that any dating method used would and should clean the cloth before attempting to date it, but it was not cleaned, and might not be possible to clean before dating. This new look wants to take samples from multiple places on the shroud, which makes much more sense knowing that there is contamination that will skew any and all results to a newer creation date (as the bacterial mass would was living on the shroud after its actual creation and thus have giving a possitive time shift to the data collected which still includes this added mass to the testing mass, the shroud fibers themselves, not the shroud and bacteria that is on the shroud.
There was a similar issue with the dead sea scrolls. But with those, a solution was found to get more accurate readings by measuring the age a one of the scrolls which had were dated and cross-referenced with other known sources to be known accurate to the particular dates/time frame, and compairing that result with the result found on the other scrolls. In those cases, there was a 200-300 year difference resolved. By compairing the resulting carbon date output range in those cases, it was found that the lowest possible number in the carbon dating was the true date. It was still within the margin of error of data in that particular case(s), but it was the extreme low end which was a 200-300 year shift from the nominal value of the range.
In the shroud's case, there is no other documentation found with the shroud, no other similar objects which have dates associated with them, at least not until the 16th century when it passed into the hands of the church. And thus no way to use the same methods used to date the dead sea scrolls in this case. What is known, is that there is contamination. How much is up for debate simply because more tests have not been performed, and because science does not want to expose the known flaws with carbon dating. I say known as they are known to scientists and intelligent people, but not known to the general public who have been lead to believe that it is the be-all-end-all method and that the results never lie, but when in reality, the results can easily be skewed to the possitive timeframe by contamination (this is why other objects that are dated try to use material that is not exposed to the direct elements, but this is not possible in this case).
All I am saying is that there are many known reasons for the dating to be skewed. Is it possible that the dating was skewed 1100 years or so, I do not know. It could be if the bacterial infestation was extrememly pervasive in the area from where the sample was taken.
Personnally, I believe that it may be a fake, but the fact that we have yet to prove it one way or the other keeps my mind open. The real question should be if it is a fake, how was it made? We still have yet to answer that. There is speculation that it was painted by an artist, but if that was the case, the paint should have been absorbed by the fibers and penetrated them, when the coloring is only on the extreme edges of the fibers. Another suggestion was that it was "burned" on by a massive bronze/iron statue being heated and the cloth being draped over the statue. This too has been disprooven as the photographic negative effect would not have been created with this method (emperical tests were done to test this and the resulting works did not withstand the photographic negative test). When after almost 700 years no one has been able to show how it was made, especially with all the advances in science and technology only showing how much more there is to the shroud, I keep a open mind that it could be authentic, but a skeptical mind given the nature of the time in which it came into existance...
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Of course, it is quite possible that in Massachusetts many more people have sexual relationships without being married, so in the end it may turn out that are actually more people staying with their initial partner in Texas then there are in Massachusetts. Here in the Netherlands there has been a time when it was not done to get married. You simply lived together. The law even came up with special rules for people who did not want to marry out of rebellion against the concept to marriage being a life long bond. Nowadays many people live together several years before they get married. So divorce rates being lower does not say a damn thing about the number of people that break up after having sexual relationship with someone else.