Shroud of Turin (Epic)
- + 3 Humility
- + 5 Sacrifice
- + 2 Forgiveness
- 25% vulnerability to piercing damage
edited 20th Dec '11 5:35:49 PM by Talby
^ Now, that's just hilarious.
|like a boss|
Frankly I'm kind of skeptical to any findings done by a "Shroud of Turin Research Project", it just seems fishy to me.
Not sure who this professor is either.
go ahead and do every stupid thing you can imagine
Reading that, that sounds more like they said "we couldn't figure out how this thing came to exist one way or the other, so we're going to say it's real, which was our goal from the start anyway."
edited 20th Dec '11 5:57:29 PM by INUH
Infinite Tree: an experimental story
|like a boss|
If they can't explain it at all, I'm sticking with the guy who could.
Unfortunately I don't really remember specifics, can someone help me out here? The team proved it was made with some sort of obscure brush technique. They aired a special on I think the History channel years ago (before it started sucking).
go ahead and do every stupid thing you can imagine
Gotta trope, dood!
Seconding what INUH and Blixty Slycat said.
EDIT: I think I saw a Cracked article that said basically the same thing, Blixty. Lemme see if I can dig it up.
EDIT 2: Here
we go. Granted, it's Cracked, so you should still take it with a grain of salt.
edited 20th Dec '11 6:12:05 PM by Wulf
They lost me. Forgot me. Made you from parts of me. If you're the One, my father's son, what am I supposed to be?
Honestly, this is a bit silly. The Shroud of Turin has been debunked over and over again.
In any case, they may have finally offered an explanation as to how it was forged. They may have just proven the hypothesis that the shroud was created using selective bleaching, since setting linen out in the sun for a period of time causes it to whiten.
edited 20th Dec '11 6:18:35 PM by DrunkGirlfriend
"I don't know how I do it. I'm like the Mr. Bean of sex." -Drunkscriblerian
So it is not a medieval fake, because it took lasers to make the image? I think I'm detecting a flaw in their argument for "it could be real" though.
Or possibly it is the real burial shroud, as holographed by visitors from the future. They've not been able to destroy this particular piece of evidence for time travel yet... The fire was a nice try, though.
^It's not really "it took lasers to make the image" so much as "we, whose goal was to be unable to think of a way to fake it without modern tech, didn't think of a way to fake it without modern tech."
edited 20th Dec '11 6:15:48 PM by INUH
Infinite Tree: an experimental story
|like a boss|
Just because I think it might be interesting to see what they say versus what we say, here is a link to a similar discussion on another forum.
There's a guy there named Kratos who makes some very solid points:
I mention this because today, we report that a group of scientists – working, unexpectedly, for the Italian sustainable energy agency ENEA – claim that the marks on the cloth could only have been made by ultraviolet radiation. They say that "When one talks about a flash of light being able to colour a piece of linen in the same way as the shroud, discussion inevitably touches on things like miracles and resurrection," and that they "hope our results can open up a philosophical and theological debate". They do, however, say "as scientists, we were concerned only with verifiable scientific processes."
The implication, of course, is that a divine light shone when Jesus's body was resurrected, and that this emitted a burst of high-frequency photons which burned an image on the cloth around him. This possibility has been discounted in the past by Raymond Rogers, a member of the Shroud of Turin Research Project (Sturp) which examined the fabric in the 1970s, who said: "If any form of radiation degraded the cellulose of the linen fibers to produce the image color, it would have had to penetrate the entire diameter of a fiber in order to color its back surface", but that the centres of the fibres are unmarked. There are many hypotheses about how the images could have been made, and they have each come in and out of favour. Without wanting to be too cocky, when the ENEA scientists say that radiation is the "only" way the image could have been made, I imagine that many of their fellow researchers will say it's the only way that they managed it.
edited 20th Dec '11 7:13:33 PM by BlixtySlycat
go ahead and do every stupid thing you can imagine
Actually I'm more concerned about how you verify anything about it. It's not like people have Jesus DNA in a vault (not that it lasts centuries anyway) to test against the cloth. Even if the cloth came from the correct time period, wouldn't ANYTHING from that time period test correctly for that? It's not sufficient to verify if it's actually he shroud of Turin or not. This isn't even a question of faith in Christianity.
EDIT: Oh wait I just noticed the post before me makes exactly the same point. Hah.
edited 20th Dec '11 9:44:53 PM by breadloaf
so basically, idiots made a poor experiment and got poor results that other idiots will take as gospel truth.
I changed accounts.
Her with the hat
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
I think it's closer to "We can't work out how to make a fake from these results, therefore it couldn't possible be fake". Which smacks of arrogance on part of the study writers: Just because you don't know how it was done doesn't mean no-one else ever knew.
Is that cake frosting?
All right, this allegedly tells us something about the wavelength of the light emitted by Jesus when He resurrected.
Now, how can we find information about its polarization? 
edited 21st Dec '11 6:42:37 AM by Carciofus
But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.
Wherther the shroud is medieval fake or not is not proof in either way of the existance of the divine or the divine nature of christ * , the Catholic Church just clings on to its relics and miracles, because for the longest time, they were enough. They are kinda fighting an uphill battle, trying to uphold the idea of a fantastic reality where god regularly intervenes and heals believers and such. But they don't touch alleged modern miracles. Weeping statues are summarily denounced by the church, and Rome wouldn't sink so low as to take the Grilled Cheese Jesus as a genuine relic.
That being said, I believe the shroud is a hoax. Linen just doesn't really survive for 2000 years that well.
Not to mention, havent they carbon dated the thing? I'm pretty sure that alone debunks it,
Is that cake frosting?
It must be pointed out that the validity or non-validity of the Shroud is not an article of Faith of the Catholic Church. Catholics have all sorts of opinions on the topic; personally, I am fairly skeptical, but even more than that I just don't get why it would be a big deal even if it was the true one.
They have, but there is some debate whether the sample was taken correctly — some say that it contained bacterial residues which threw off the dating. The Wikipedia article contains a summary of the arguments in favor and against the dating. Personally, I don't know enough to have an opinion. But if there are doubts, I think that they should just take another sample and try again.
I'd imagine the reason it'd be a "big deal" to some people is so they can slam proof of their religion being "true" in the face of the rest of the world.
Is that cake frosting?
At most, they could use it to "prove" that some guy who probably was the religious teacher described in the Gospels was executed by the Romans.
This would not really imply that this teacher was the Son of God, or that he resurrected, or even that his teachings are represented faithfully by the canonical Gospels.
edited 21st Dec '11 8:02:45 AM by Carciofus
But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.
Logically, yes.
But the sorts who would pin something like the Shroud of Turin as important (read:evangelical fundamentalists) would take it and run with it . The logic would go as so "jesus was real. therefore the bible is 100% factual. therefore all other religions are going to burn in hell"
edited 21st Dec '11 8:06:24 AM by Midgetsnowman
KVLFON
It's been said that even if it's proven to be authentic, it won't turn the unbelievers to Christianity, and even if it's proven not to be, it won't turn the believers away from it.
"Atheism is the religion whose followers are easiest to troll"
Lost in Space
You know, it's funny — and possibly tangential, but whatever — but I have this strong suspicion that if God really wanted us to accept that there is concrete physical proof of the accounts in the Bible, He'd leave clues that are a bit less equivocal than an unusual piece of cloth of dubious age and authenticity. I find it really telling that people will go to these extreme lengths to find "evidence" to support their beliefs.
edited 21st Dec '11 9:30:10 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Citizen
To say the shroud is a "hoax" is inaccurate. Did somebody in the past present the shroud as "The 100% real Jesus cloth"? From what I recall, ever since the shroud first appeared in the middle ages, the Catholic Church basically said, "We're not saying if it's real or not, but you can look on it for inspiration." So basically they've always said that it's an inspirational work of art, full stop. And all these scientific tests have concluded is that they don't know how the image got there.
Correction: Apparently Benedict XVI did officially declare that the shroud is genuine in May 2010. Link
edited 21st Dec '11 9:47:25 AM by Lawyerdude
What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.
Presented without comment.
I know that this flies in the face of several other studies in the past, but am not educated enough to comment of the value of their work. This probably should not be taken at face value and retested by a separate group.
Italian scientists conducted a series of experiments that they said showed that the marks on the shroud - purportedly left by the imprint of Christ's body - could not have been faked with technology that was available in medieval times.
Skeptics have long claimed that the 14ft-long cloth is a forgery. Radiocarbon testing conducted by laboratories in Oxford, Zurich and Arizona in 1988 appeared to back up the theory, suggesting that it dated from between 1260 and 1390. But those tests were in turn disputed on the basis that they were contaminated by fibres from cloth that was used to repair the relic when it was damaged by fire in the Middle Ages.
The new study is the latest intriguing piece of a puzzle that has baffled scientists for centuries and spawned an industry of research, books and documentaries.
"The double image (front and back) of a scourged and crucified man, barely visible on the linen cloth of the Shroud of Turin, has many physical and chemical characteristics that are so particular that the staining Ö is impossible to obtain in a laboratory," concluded experts from Italy's National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Development.
The scientists set out to "identify the physical and chemical processes capable of generating a colour similar to that of the image on the shroud". They concluded that the shade, texture and depth of the imprints on the cloth could be produced only with the aid of ultraviolet lasers producing extremely brief pulses of light.
They said the image of the bearded man must therefore have been created by "some form of electromagnetic energy (such as a flash of light at short wavelength)".
Although they stopped short of offering a non-scientific explanation for the phenomenon, their findings will be embraced by those who believe that the marks on the shroud were miraculously created at the moment of Christ's Resurrection.
"We are not at the conclusion. We are composing pieces of a fascinating and complex scientific puzzle," the team reported.
Prof Paolo Di Lazzaro, who led the research, said: "When one talks about a flash of light being able to colour a piece of linen in the same way as the shroud, discussion inevitably touches on things such as miracles and resurrection. But as scientists, we were concerned only with verifiable scientific processes.
"We hope our results can open up a philosophical and theological debate but we will leave the conclusions to the experts, and ultimately to the conscience of individuals."
The research backs up the outcome of tests between 1978 and 1981 carried out by a group of American scientists who called themselves the Shroud of Turin Research Project.
They conducted 120 hours of X-rays and ultraviolet light tests and concluded that the marks were not made by paints, pigments or dyes and that the image was not "the product of an artist", but that at the same time it could not be explained by modern science.
One of Christianity's greatest objects of veneration, the shroud shows the imprint of a man whose body appears to have nail wounds to his wrists and feet, pinpricks from thorns around his forehead and a spear wound to his chest. Each year it attracts millions of pilgrims to Turin cathedral, where it is kept in a climate-controlled case.
The Vatican has never said whether it believes the shroud to be authentic or not, although the Pope said the image "reminds us always" of Christ's suffering.
edited 20th Dec '11 5:16:41 PM by Pentadragon