Hey, It happens: Crazy Thinking on the Shroud of Turin
From NJ.com, the website of about a dozen regional New Jersey newspapers:
On the phone, RoseAnn Salanitri sounds like a nice lady. But then you go her website called “Conservative News and Views.”
There you will find prominently displayed a novel she has written titled “The False Prophet.” The false prophet in question is the pope. He’s plotting to obtain the DNA of Christ from the Shroud of Turin so he can clone the Antichrist.
Salanitri is a former Catholic who converted to a form of fundamentalism in which it is safe to assert that Noah took baby dinosaurs on the ark. I asked her whether Catholics might get a bit upset at her portrayal of the pope.
“If that’s how you want to be offended, you could be offended,” Salanitri replied. She defended her novel as being in the tradition of the “Left Behind” series popular among evangelicals, one in which the pope also leads the faithful to worship the Antichrist.
Maybe she is nice. Just because we might disagree. . . baby dinosaurs, however.
The Shroud of Turin may be the real burial cloth of Jesus. The carbon dating, once seemingly proving it was a medieval fake, is now widely thought of as suspect and meaningless. Even the famous Atheist Richard Dawkins admits it is controversial. Christopher Ramsey, the director of the Oxford Radiocarbon Laboratory, thinks more testing is needed. So do many other scientists and archeologists. This is because there are significant scientific and non-religious reasons to doubt the validity of the tests. Chemical analysis, all nicely peer-reviewed in scientific journals and subsequently confirmed by numerous chemists, shows that samples tested are chemically unlike the whole cloth. It was probably a mixture of older threads and newer threads woven into the cloth as part of a medieval repair. Recent robust statistical studies add weight to this theory. Philip Ball, the former physical science editor for Nature when the carbon dating results were published, recently wrote: “It’s fair to say that, despite the seemingly definitive tests in 1988, the status of the Shroud of Turin is murkier than ever.” If we wish to be scientific we must admit we do not know how old the cloth is. But if the newer thread is about half of what was tested – and some evidence suggests that – it is possible that the cloth is from the time of Christ.
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