Ayn Clouter's Blog

ET QUAND ILS LE VIRENT, ILS FURENT FRAPPÉS D'ÉTONNEMENT (LUC 2:48):

Just in time for the holiday season, there's another great illustration of the quote atop my blog. Years ago that mocking leftist Kurt Vonnegut thought he was making up a completely ridiculous pastiche when he tossed into one of his cynical stories an aside about a dentist from upstate New York, who proved that Christ was not a Jew, by analyzing the jawbone structures in fifty famous paintings of Jesus. L'insensé a dit en son coeur: Il n'y a point de Dieu. (Psaumes 14:1).

Well, if you're Mister Secular Humanism, you won't believe me when I tell you that "forensic experts are now using computer images from the Shroud of Turin along with historical data and other ancient images to make an educated guess" about a question you probably never considered before:

What did Jesus Christ of Nazareth look like as a boy? ...police artists use the same "aging" technology employed when searching for missing persons and criminals. "In this case the experts went backwards. Now we have a hypothesis on how the man of the shroud might have looked at the age of 12"... The resulting image shows a fair-skinned child with blond, wavy hair and dark eyes. ...

As WorldNetDaily previously reported, the Shroud of Turin itself has been mired in controversy for centuries, with some maintaining the image on the linen is that of the crucified Jesus, while others reject it as an elaborate hoax. In the 1980s, three international laboratories were selected to run the newly refined accelerated mass spectrometry (AMS) method of carbon dating on the shroud, to help determine its time of origin. The labs ... all concurred the shroud was dated 1260-1390 AD.

No doubt you of little faith assume that's an end to it. But wait, there's more.

"And the napkin, that was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself." (John 20:3-7)

While some think the "napkin" that was on Jesus' head casts doubt on the whole shroud theory, others believe it helps validate the shroud as authentic. A relic called the Sudarium of Oviedo is claimed by some to be the actual cloth around Jesus' head. The cloth is impregnated with blood and lymph stains that match the blood type on the Shroud of Turin. ...

"The scientific and medical studies on the Sudarium prove that it was the covering for the same man whose image is [on] the Shroud of Turin. We know that the Sudarium has been in Spain since the 600s. How, then, can the radio carbon dating claiming the shroud is only from the 13th century be accurate?"

As Arthur Dent would have put it, this is obviously some strange use of the word "scientific" that I wasn't previously aware of. Once, before it became a casualty of the Cultural Wars, there was an institution that could settle such questions, as the former Filippo Bruno discovered in 1600. Its officers, unlike the scapegoats of Abu Ghraib who were inadequately trained to obey the memos of our next Attorney General, understood strict rules to follow:

...torture was not regarded as a mode of punishment, but purely as a means of eliciting the truth. ... The limit placed upon torture was citra membri diminutionem et mortis periculum -- i.e, it was not to cause the loss of life or limb or imperil life. Torture was to applied only once, and not then unless the accused were uncertain in his statements, and seemed already virtually convicted by manifold and weighty proofs.

Even in the search for mundane truths, one should not leap to conclusions, mais éprouvez toutes choses (1 Thessaloniciens 5:21).