LELAND W. RUBLE
His opulent majesty, the authoritarian dictator of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, has made it official. As far as he’s concerned, the famous rag of Turin (an obvious 13th century forgery) has been proclaimed by Benedict XVI, as an icon “written with the blood of a crucified man.” This no doubt was said in desperation to detour critical attention away from overwhelming evidence that his priests have been engaged for decades in molesting children. And believe it or not, were doing it for centuries without any realistic form of punishment or disbarment as employed propagandists for the theocratic and fictionalized agenda of this ancient establishment of a false, manmade religion. A faith based on the mostly nonverifiable escapades of a four foot evangelizer who some deny ever existed, while other historians claim he did, but was just like any other evangelizer living delusionally with the distorted figments of an active imagination.
Of course, as is usually the case, it has been reported that the pope “didn’t raise scientific questions concerning the linen and whether as many in the scientific community consider it a medieval forgery.”
It’s an obvious realization that you cannot expect a man thoroughly indoctrinated in the dogmas and fantastic rituals of his church to reach sensible conclusions in regard to anything concerning reality. In fact, the avoidance of reality is a primary function of those who spend their existence avoiding the realistic falsehoods of heaven, hell, devils, and mystical salvation.
How extreme is this pope’s proclamation? “This is a burial cloth that wrapped the remains of a crucified man in full correspondence with what the Gospels tell us of Jesus,” the pope said. Just because someone, or more likely many individuals, were complicit in writing the individual fantasies that make up the gospels, this (the Shroud of Turin) does not pertain to any historically physical evidence for the very improbable and impossible circumstances of a man being resurrected after being declared permanently dead, and placed in a sealed tomb. It is obviously a forgery like many other antique relics that adorn Catholic churches and museums.
We can only guess that Benedict is merely continuing the practice of giving credence to another relic with the intended result of convincing his converts that Catholicism is a religion that depends greatly on supernatural explanations for its mystical and theocratic interpretation of existence. Of course, no matter how many scientists claim that the shroud is a forgery, this pope and his church hierarchy will never as they have for centuries, allow their religion to be swayed by rational scientific opinion. After all, nurturing the delusion that science is the enemy of religious faith, means that the pope and his church will avoid by all means possible, any notion that prevailing scientific opinion is convinced that the supernatural is a bogeyman invented by the religious establishment to bamboozle the public into falsely thinking such a realm actually exists.
It may be another 100 years before the Catholic church comes to the conclusion that the Shroud of Turin, and numerous other so-called holy relics, are no more holy than the pope himself. And that there is nothing on this planet that can in reality be properly designated as having the attributes of an object with supernatural capabilities. And then again, it may never be convinced that the supernatural is unreal, fictitious, and imaginary.
If one reads the gospels, which are after all the inerrant word of dog, one finds that the corpse of yeshue bar yussef was, in fact, wrapped in two separate pieces of cloth…….neither large enough to cover the whole corpse.
my problem with this obvious forgery is most simple – in art class where we told to put the eyes? At the halfway between the top (skull) and bottom (point of the jaw). Now look at the forgery again – where are the eyes? Is this a real head or one painted by an artist at a time when they didn’t know about the rules for realistic portrait painting. This misplacement of the eyes was a common (i can’t say universal although i believe that) error. For reference look at any of the byzantine paintings – same error!!