Tea at Trianon: If the Turin Shroud is a Forgery...

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, April 24, 2022

If the Turin Shroud is a Forgery...

From The Guardian:

Many would argue that, even if the shroud could be proved to be the burial cloth of the man named Jesus who was crucified 2,000 years ago, that doesn’t amount to proof of his resurrection, the central tenet of Christian belief. “The carbon dating could show it was definitely from the time of Christ, but it’s still a stretch to go from that to seeing it as proof that he rose from the dead,” says Richy Thompson of Humanists UK. “Some people believe that, yes, Jesus was a real person, and we know crucifixion was a thing in those times, and Pontius Pilate is a well-documented historical figure.
“What many non-religious people would say is, where is the evidence? Because if you’re going to make extraordinary claims, you need strong evidence to back it up. And the fact that people believe [in the resurrection] is not in itself evidence that it actually happened.”
Rolfe is unperturbed: he says the image on the cloth seems to have come from a massive burst of radiation, emitted in a fraction of a second.
When it comes to the carbon dating, he’s certainly not alone in his scepticism. Barrie M Schwortz, a photographer who documented the shroud in 1978, says “murky” would be a good word to describe the events of 1988.
“Today there are at least six peer-reviewed scientific articles that challenge the results of the carbon dating,” he says. In his view, the players involved were in a hurry to get the job done, because they wanted to get carbon dating on the map. “Those tests made it a household name, and today it’s used widely in archaeology,” he says. “I’m Jewish, so I don’t have a horse in this race, but I’ve come to believe it’s the authentic burial cloth because I’ve looked at the science.”
The British Museum is less willing to get involved this time around. “Any current questions about the shroud would be best put to those who currently care for it in the royal chapel of the cathedral of Turin,” a spokesperson said. (Read more.)

From Aleteia:

In his report, published on the website of Italy’s Department of Chemical Sciences and Materials Technologies, de Caro pointed out a few flaws with dating by Carbon-14 analysis. He noted that textile samples can easily become contaminated with substances that could skew its results. He wrote:
“Molds and bacteria, colonizing textile fibers, and dirt or carbon-containing minerals, such as limestone, adhering to them, in the empty spaces between the fibers that at a microscopic level represent about 50% of the volume, can be so difficult to completely eliminate in the sample cleaning phase, which can distort the dating.”
De Caro noted that fabric can even become enriched with new Carbon-14 samples. At this point, it would become hard to identify if carbon dating measured the original fabric, or a layer of carbon that was accumulated over time. (Read more.)