Credulous as Hell

I don’t watch much television, but the other evening I watched a fascinating programme about the Turin Shroud. Apparently (although it’s not yet proven), there is now doubt being cast upon the carbon-14 dating methods which declared the shroud to be a medieval hoax, manufactured in about 1350. There is now a suggestion that the shroud may, in fact, be genuine.

Well, whatever next? Personally, I couldn’t give a flying fuck whether it’s genuine or not, but the TV programme was interesting in as much as it presented a series of facts (well let’s call them hypotheses), all of which challenged the 1988 announcement that the shroud was only 600 years old. It’s far too complicated to recount all of these hypotheses here (even if I could remember half of them), but some of them were based on newly-discovered inaccuracies of the caron-14 dating methods (apparently, there needs only to be a 2% variance in the accuracy of the test to throw the date out by as much as 1,100 years); some of them were based on evidence of paintings and descriptions of the shroud that exist from as far back as 500 AD (sometime before 1350); some on the fact that if it were a medieval hoax, nobody can explain how it was done (and the programme featured international experts in cloth weaving & dyeing who all said it was impossible); and some on the fact that the position of the nail holes in the image of the body is inconsistent with the usual depiction that appears in all other medieval art , but yet consistent with Roman practice in Jerusalem in the year 33 AD. Spooky stuff.

However, notwithstanding that the programme makers (and the presenter too - that adorable little Christian reporter, Rageh Omar) seemed to be desperately trying to get us to believe the shroud’s authenticity, it all seemed rather sad. It made me wonder why people are spending millions of dollars (yes, millions & millions & millions) trying to prove that a piece of cloth is actually 1,975 years old rather than only 651 when even if they succeed, it still doesn’t prove that it was used to bury the body of Christ. These are people who clearly need their faith to be bolstered by something as trivial as a rather questionable old relic. Does this not suggest that they should really be questioning themselves about why they believe in the first place? The altars of Catholic Europe are full of the interred bones of saints who, if their existence is to be believed, must have had more limbs, ribs and skulls than your average man in the street had! It's all nonsense.

Of course, this is nothing new. People are forever displaying their pathetic desperation; forever trying to underpin their own insecurities or inadequacies by chasing the elusive ‘truth’. I mean, look at Mohammed al-Fayed with his obsession that Prince Philip drives a white Fiat Uno on his Saturday nights out; look at Ralph Rene (one of the main exponents of the theory that the 1968 moon landings were a fake) who believes that the USA staged the whole lunar hoax in order to distract the American public from the Vietnam war (as if American citizens could be that gullible). These people are out there, and they want to let us know that.

So as I say, I don’t care either way about the Turin Shroud. Whether it was really used to wrap up some insurgent’s corpse following a Roman execution in Jerusalem in the year 33 AD, or whether it was whipped off the table of some medieval lord and daubed with a bit of gravy browning to present the image of a (suspiciously European-looking) man – it don’t mattah! For while there are lies and truths to be told, someone will continue to make television programmes about them. Furthermore, people will continue to watch them.

Today's quotation from Horace: "We are free to yield to truth."