Reasonable Dissent

Oh No! Fake Shroud of Turin?!

The skeptic’s world is all a-buzz about this latest “finding” about how the Shroud of Turin may not be such a divine miracle after all. Seriously, just about everyone is reporting on this story. So, I just have to ask, who cares?

There are 2 reasons for making such a big deal out of this. Either they’re trying to “prove” that Christianity is a false religion, or they’re trying to kick up controversy. It’s fairly obvious that whatever the goal was, the second one is really all that’s going to happen. Let’s look at this from a Christian point of view. What does the research say? Mostly it says that he came up with a way to put a similar image on a similar type of cloth with means that they might have had some time in the past. So what! You’ve got to be kidding me. We have (according to statistics that Richard Dawkins quoted, and I haven’t researched) just under 50% of the people in this country blatantly admitting to the belief that all the scientific evidence for evolution is crap! In the face of such an enormous amount of evidence for our planet being billions of years old, they believe that it’s more like 10,000! Now, let me ask again, what were you thinking you would do with science to show these people that the shroud is a fake? It’s already been dated to the 13th or 14th century, and that didn’t mean a thing to the ‘true believers’.

Don’t get the wrong idea – I understand completely that it might be nice for you to just systematically disprove every last little piece of divinity that these people cling to.  But it just isn’t going to happen this way. Seriously, it’s more like a neat thing to wonder about for most Christians, rather than a place to base your beliefs. People like to claim to have a  piece of the ‘true cross’, or put a bone from a saint in their church. How many people in the country have a baseball that was signed by their favorite player. Yeah, it would suck to find out that the ball was a fake, but does that make you think any less of the player? I really don’t think it’s any different for Christians, even in the event that you could definitively prove that it wasn’t divine (which I doubt you could, for them).

I wouldn’t really have a problem with someone sitting in their basement and tinkering with this idea in their free time, but what we actually have is funded research in the quest to disprove the shroud.  From one report:

Garlaschelli received funding for his work by an Italian association of atheists and agnostics but said it had no effect on his results.

Well, good that it didn’t affect him, but that’s not the point. This is what this Italian association of atheists and agnostics chooses to spend money on? I don’t know the situation in Italy nearly as well as I do here, though I’d like to (actually, I feel the same way about their wine…). But I really must protest to any significant use of funds for such a purpose. It doesn’t get us anywhere, but it makes the A&A community look like we’re actively working against religion. A campaign of hate is pointless. Let’s see that funding going to getting better science and reasoning courses in schools, or exposing domestic abuse condoned by certain religions. The Shroud of Turin? Come on, it’s a trinket. There are much more pressing issues facing our world today.

Tags: atheism, Christianity, science