Diogenes wrote: ↑Tue Apr 11, 2023 11:28 am
That's the problem with religion in general and chasing relics in particular. Religion poisons everything, turning rational objective scientists into advocates.
I do not discount religion can poison things, but everything can poison things - money, politics, sex, drugs, atheism, etc.
Chasing religious relics is a goofy and perhaps blasphemous* obsession.** Erasmus once remarked that many buildings could be constructed just from the wood of fake crosses. The most interesting, laughable and perhaps most emblematic of relics is the foreskin of baby Jesus.
I'm not arguing for the authenticity of those other relics.
the blood of the Oviedo Shroud.
This one I do believe is legit. I will be discussing this when I cover the provenance of the TS.
outsiders say that the group's religious bias is strong enough to warrant its exclusion from the upcoming trials.
This is such a ridiculous claim because one can read all the reports from STURP and see religious beliefs had nothing to do with their methodology. Sure, the
conclusions are compatible with religious belief, but not their methodology. They did pure science to reach their results.
For Mueller, it is "an argument on a higher plane—an argument of physical laws and mathematical principles." Accepting a super natural explanation could change "the way we look at the world," he says. "Science has never had to frame a supernatural process."
This is false. Cosmology and physics have already entered the non-natural realm.
Harry Gove, whose laboratory at the University of Rochester was among those chosen for the dating tests, said he "wouldn't touch it [the analysis] with a ten-foot pole" if STURP was involved. "The trouble is they're all people who actually have a pretty strong belief it's Jesus's shroud, and it bothers the hell out of me they're the only ones so far who've carried out any kind of scientific measurements," he said.
And who's the one that's biased here?
Gove and Garman Harbottle, a senior chemist at Brookhaven National Laboratory who has been associated with STURP, as a skeptic, for 10 years, were refused access to the shroud in 1978.
Not so sure about this claim.
"It's very difficult for scientists to talk to Cardinals," Gove remembers.
Even to this day this is true.
Nobody's faith depends on it …I don't care which way it falls."
This is a true statement. Most Christians have little to no knowledge of the TS. So, the TS has had no impact on their faith.
Dinegar and other STURP members see no inherent conflict between science and religion.
This is true as well.
But Dinegar maintains he wears only his scientist's hat during his work on the Shroud.
Anyone can read the reports from STURP to confirm this.
"The fundamental problem is personal egos," asserted Roger Morris, a physicist at Los Alamos who participated in the 1978 tests. Morris was hesitant to become involved at first, fearing the Vatican would try to influence results.
But "I did not see that," he remembered. "What I saw was a lot of personal bickering because someone was excluded."
This highlights the difference between the STURP team and the C-14 team. There was no such bickering that I've seen in STURP. Whereas the C-14 team had bickering from the start.
