Satan’s Magic Cloth – the Shroud of Turin

It is the twenty first century and people are still clinging to an art fraud from the fourteenth century to stimulate faith. Fraud does not stimulate faith. Fraud stimulates more fraud.

The cloth, “the Shroud of Turin”, which has a unique image imprinted on it, put there by some lost process, is just one lone survivor of the thriving phony relic business of the middle ages. Enough pieces of the true cross were sold by the church, enough to build apartment buildings along with hundreds of gallons of Christ’s blood, were hallmarks of a corrupt age that preceded the selling of indulgences and the Reformation.

The Roman church clings to its pagan roots and pagan fascination with superstitions that equal relics with good luck and magic.

So now after many tests including modern carbon dating and putting the Shroud firmly in the fourteenth century, the RC church is selling the same old shit to inspire faith at a current exhibit in Turin. Shit that inspires faith is superstition or shit faith.

People, fanatics keep coming up with more bizarre ways that could prove this Bogus Turin cloth to be the actual burial cloth of Jesus of Nazareth. Can I sell you some shares in the Brooklyn Bridge?

The Shroud is a fraud because it conforms to the exact details of the synoptic gospels, written fifty to hundred years after Jesus. Oral history changes over times. The gospels, their alleged facts are there in writing. Logic to me dictates that the oral history of the gospels finally written down would miss details or add them. This cloth does not challenge the established story recreated and finalized decades after the ministry of Jesus.

Because the Shroud conforms to an image of Jesus with a crown of thorns and a spear wound in his side and other markings on the cloth, that cloth was made to order. Made to order to conform to gospels which if you believe the Jesus Seminar only accurately quote Jesus eighteen percent of the time in those accounts written much later than Jesus’ lifetime.

If the most important part of the gospels, the words and ideas of Jesus are on shaky grounds, how can anybody believe the stage sets drawn around the words to illustrate the story.

So if you get an object that conforms to faulty gospels one hundred percent – it is hardly proof but a customized sure hit bogus relic.

There is some fascinating literature about the Shroud. Most of that has been written in the last forty odd years and concerns the use of analysis and science to disprove this magic cloth possibly originating from the king of all fraud – Satan.

Is everything O.K.? RC Church

There is a very good op-ed article in the New York Times full of the upbeat aspects of a separate arm of the RC church, separate from the Corrupt Hierarchy making hay for their own careers even in the middle of a communications meltdown over the handling of Child Abuse by Clergy in a worldwide organization.

That separate arm of the church are those working in the field to alleviate pain, suffering and poverty in the third world.

In contrast, regarding the boys in the front office:

The Catholic Church still seems stuck today in that patriarchal rut. The same faith that was so pioneering that it had Junia as a female apostle way back in the first century can’t even have a woman as the lowliest parish priest. Female deacons, permitted for centuries, are banned today.

That old boys’ club in the Vatican became as self-absorbed as other old boys’ clubs, like Lehman Brothers, with similar results. And that is the reason the Vatican is floundering today.

It is an uplifting piece of writing in the midst of the pig swill official press releases coming out of the Vatican and its failed administration.

I find it quite distressing to keep coming back to the Jaded players on the Vatican ball team. Cardinal Hoyos after being instrumental in returning the schismatic Pius X cult back into the church chose to do so by tricking Cardinal Re to sign off on it. Cardinal Hoyos is now trashing the dead John Paul II by saying that he cleared the letter he wrote praising a French Bishop for protecting a French Priest from civil prosecution for his crimes against children.

John Paul toward the end had little focus on any letters I would think. The full responsibility of that letter falls on Hoyos. Though past the age of eighty and unable to vote in any future papal enclave, he is trying to rewrite the history of his mismanagement of whatever they put him in charge of at the Vatican.

And then you have Secretary of State Bertone who wants to deflect fault away from Vatican policy and cover-ups by having a brilliant bureaucratic idea. He throws out how pedophilia has nothing to do with celibacy and everything to do with homosexuality. How gay of him.

Bertone’s pronouncement is so much like the old fashioned Public Relations/Press Release that the church has used for decades in its one way, only way, of talking to you and not talking with you. For decades, the MSM, Main Stream Media, has accepted these handouts as news to be repeated without comment in newspapers and now on the Net.

This is what got Bishop Martino in trouble in Scranton. You don’t have people skills and you hand out press release after press release after press release. The trouble with that is that issues that deserved to be addressed in dialogue with the laity got merely addressed as a parent speaking to a child. The church and its hierarchy have lost touch with reality. Martino gave up, claiming insomnia as a debilitating factor. I have to wonder, if in the final analysis, whether it was a guilty conscience of following Vatican instructions on every matter in the Diocese that helped to empty pews, empty pews, empty pews.

The MSM has not pushed back until of late. The tidal wave of unsolved problems of the Vatican and a bureaucracy that no longer has any effect in the rule of the church is an easy invite for journalism to come in and perform an autopsy so to speak. The people in the pews want accountability and humanity. The pope seeing a few sex abuse victims only because he has to and not because he wants to comes through loud and clear to the man and woman on the street.

To continue from the Op/Ed piece by Nicolas Kristof.

A Church Mary Can Love

So when you read about the scandals, remember that the Vatican is not the same as the Catholic Church. Ordinary lepers, prostitutes and slum-dwellers may never see a cardinal, but they daily encounter a truly noble Catholic Church in the form of priests, nuns and lay workers toiling to make a difference.

It’s high time for the Vatican to take inspiration from that sublime — even divine — side of the Catholic Church, from those church workers whose magnificence lies not in their vestments, but in their selflessness. They’re enough to make the Virgin Mary smile.

I invite you read the entire article by Mr. Kristof.