[Swordmaker]

It's the shouting, the passion, and the anger. In my admittedly-limited experience, and in my slightly-less-limited reading of history and literature, I've observed that those who run short of reason or proof will, too often, resort to noise, or even violence. I believe too many of you Turinistas have been there too many times. Or you'll find a respectable individual scientist or authority whose words can lend credit to your hopes, dreams, and aspirations and then cling to those words like a drunken, chubby chick to her date on prom night.

FlowerPlough, YOU are the one who uses ad hominem attack, using noise such as names like "turinistas" and "shroudies" and other diminutives to minimize your opponents in this discussion... not us. Another good example is the following: we are "a drunken, chubby chick [clinging] to to her date on prom night" All of that is an ad homimen attack on everyone who has argued with you on this forum... and that certainly is an insult.

YOU, on the other hand continually refuse to look at the evidence that what the labs tested in the 1988 carbon dating tests WAS NOT homogenous (the same as) with the main body as the Shroud. If it was not, then it is not representative of the thing intended to be tested and THEREFORE can not be equated with it. The proofs are now incontrovertable. They have been proved with three different methods.

Carbon 14 testing is not infallible. It fails for several reasons... one of which is testing the wrong thing... mis-sampling. And that is what happened in this case.

Raising Gore and Global warming is a non-sequitur and irrelevant to this issue. Drop it. It is again, meant to belittle and compare us to fake science. And science is NOT done by consensus, unlike Gore and his, let's have a bunch of people vote on it... and call them scientists. The people who have weighed in on the Shroud are WORKING IN THEIR FIELDS... Blood specialists, Chemists, Physicists, Forensic specialists, etc., and know what they are doing... while their critics are almost always working outside of their fields.

The previous test proves the shroud is medieval, or it proves that those holding and cutting cloth samples from the shroud are incredibly incompetent and definitely should not be trusted holding the shroud, or it proves that those holding and cutting cloth samples from the shroud intentionally bonerized and sandbagged the sampling and therefore, the test results, because they see foresaw the most benefit to themselves down that route. And if this third possibility is true, then, again, those holding and cutting cloth samples from the shroud are definetly not to be trusted with it.

First of all, the test did not prove anything about the Shroud... because the test has been invalidated... but I will agree that it did prove the sample takers were incompetent.

But your conclusions that it was MY people is wrong. Those were the people under the aegis of the Oxford Lab and the British Museum... and the STURP scientists were systematically excluded from all input and control of the 1988 Carbon14 testing. The sample cutter's ignored the prepared protocols that STURP had written for such a testing... and instead cut the sample from the one area the STURP scientists had agreed should be avoided because their testing had shown it was NOT similar to the rest of the Shroud... because it fluoresced under ultraviolet light, unlike the rest of the shroud... meaning it was chemically and physically different than the main body of the shroud. But the 1988 team ignored those findings and cut away, blissfully ignorant if the previous work... or deliberately making that choice. They did note the presence of cotton in their footnotes, also ignoring the studies that stated the Shroud is Flax based linen...

Is the Shroud in the care of people who are somewhat incompetent? In light of the ill-advised 2002 "restoration" of the Shroud, I have to answer "Yes." Many of their decisions are not based on good science... but they own it. They can do with it what they choose.