"there is no conclusive evidence that the shroud is a fake"
You seem to have listened to the OJ trial. The same folks that said "there was no conclusive evidence to convict Scott Peterson" and OJ might buy that there is no conclusive evidence that the shroud is a fake--but carbon dating IS CONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE.
Stating that the shroud is believable because they're putting forward this new theory that "aw, gee, maybe they carbon dated the wrong threads," that's right up there with deciding that it's PROVEN the sun revolves around the earth because "aw, gee, maybe they were using the wrong slide rule when they did the calculations for the orbit of the sun and moon."
There needs to be more than legend to prove it's Jesus's burial cloth. There needs to be provenance, and the carbon dating removes that possibility. If legend is all we need to prove something in the face of tangible evidence to the contrary, I got a fire-breathing dragon in my backyard I want to sell you. Sure, I know, no animal exists on the planet that breathes fire according to every taxonomist and biologist, but gee, I read about them in some storybooks, so they must be real.
Where did I say that? You shouldn't have a problem to link to it. I said there is no conclusive evidence that it's a fake or that it is real. I'm waiting for more evidence, and I'm relying not on your opinion but on the experts. Why don't you relax a little, and stop hyperventilating?
I got a fire-breathing dragon in my backyard I want to sell you.
No thanks. I wouldn't buy a thing from you. You talk too much, lol.
If you go back and look at all of the evidence related to the Shroud, you'll find (even before this latest piece of evidence was made known) that the probability of someone creating this on their own back in the 11th or 12th century was extremely remote. In particular, there is no question that the Shroud was "created" using a process that is identical to photography, when in fact photography was not invented until the 19th century. The notion that someone would develop a primitive form of technology 700 or 800 years earlier than this -- without leaving any other evidence of it for this period of time -- seems so highly improbable that I would consider it an "article of faith" that can't possibly be substantiated.
It's worth noting that the Shroud of Turin did not attract much attention around the world until the end of the 19th century. The reason for this is simple: the Shroud itself did not seem to be all that spectacular -- it was an ancient piece of fabric with what appeared to be the image of a man on it. What changed all of this was the advent of photography. An Italian photographer named Secondo Pia received permission to photograph the Shroud during one of its rare public displays, and while he was developing the film he produced a negative that had far more detail than the original image (the dark image of the Shroud that you often see in pictures is the negative, not the original).
The implication of this was immediately clear to Pia: The "negative" he was looking at was actually the real image, and the "original" image on the Shroud was actually the negative -- which meant that whatever process was used to produce that image was identical to a photographic process that the world had only discovered recently!
The Shroud may actually be fake, but it certainly is not a "proven fake." The Shroud cannot possibly be "proven" to be a fake until someone can figure out how the image got there. Even those scientists who insist that it was a forgery are at a loss to explain how someone in the 12th century could possibly have created something that human beings cannot even create today.
Perhaps the most compelling evidence in favor of the Shroud's authenticity is the evidence surrounding what is known as the "four-finger" phenomenon on the image. While most artwork from the Middle Ages depicting the Crucifixion shows Christ nailed to a cross with nails driven through his hands, the image on the Shroud does not show this. Instead, it clearly shows nail wounds in the wrists, which is exactly how a person would have been nailed to a cross -- because nails driven through the middle of the hand would not support the weight of a human body without tearing through the hand. Point #1: If someone in the 12th century was intent on making a realistic forgery of Christ's burial shroud, then why would he depict the crucifixion in a manner that did not match the prevailing view of how the crucifixion occurred?
More importantly, the hands shown on the image appear to only have four fingers -- leading to speculation that perhaps the person whose image was on the Shroud had his thumbs cut off before "burial." The reality is that the image is anatomically correct, because driving a nail through the wrist between the two bones of the forearm (the radius and the ulna) damages one of the key nerves in the wrist and produces a reflexive reaction in which the thumb is drawn across the palm in such a way that it is not visible from the back of the hand. Point #2: I find it extremely unlikely that a forger in the Middle Ages would have known such minute detail about human anatomy that he would have been able to replicate the results of this reflexive action.
One of the most serious flaws in the argument that the Shroud was created by someone in the 12th century is this: Almost no anatomic detail is visible in the image unless you get further than 15 feet away from it. If someone HAD "painted" it, he/she would have had to have used a paintbrush over 15 feet long!