Just a thread for questions and findings on controversial topics.

I'll start it off with the Shroud of Turin....

Little background to it, it's supposed to be the linen cloth that Jesus was wrapped in when put in his tomb. And has a silhouette/whatever of a human on it. Most believe this to be of a man (Jesus).

My questions:

*How do you know that it is a man? DNA found on it was said to be all female. And looking at the silhouette (see below) looking at the WHOLE form, it looks a bit feminine to me. Parts of the face that many attribute to facial hair could have been swollen due to some type of disease (like scurvy). And to me, it actually kinda' looks like the figure has boobs. Those of us with them can support the fact that they flatten out when you lay on your back. Too bad the thing is so damaged in the area that would show us the waist and shoulders properly. That would be a huge help...

Discuss? Comments? Thoughts?


Full body shot

O.K. I'll bite,but I doubt that's a woman myself.
Just saying.
Of all the things that bother me most about the relic the one that sticks out most is the weave of the fabric.Researchers have said this type of weave is consistant with what a wealthy Jewish person would have owned.
Not really a historian or anything but wealthy and Jesus aren't two things I associate with each other.
Shroud Of Turin (Skeptic's Dictionary)

A wealthy female admirer perhaps having taken it off her own body?

Sometimes covering the dead with something worn of your own is a way of wrapping one's self and love around them.

There also is the possibility it was acquired in the giving of the converts as they gave up their wealth unto the poor.

I had never heard the female DNA thing.

I'm too lazy to look it up but Jesus was a buried in a tomb that was saved for another man. He offered it to Jesus. Maybe the guy was wealthy and it was his shroud that was wrapped around Jesus.

At least I remembered what I learned in school

People get juicy when they rot? I should have used the word decay, not as disrespectful sounding.


Then again it is Jesus we're talking about here so it could be seen as a spiritual thing so people will continue to be faithful.

Those do appear a bit like breasts.

To me, this is just like people who see an effigy of Christ in a dog's a$$ (true story look it up), or Mother Mary in a bagel. I'm sure if I really looked, I could see Colin Farrell's face in a bucket of icecream or Kathy Lee Gifford silhouette in the rust of an 86 Ford pick-up. People only get excited about religious pictures, because they're looking for them, and they have a subconsciousness pull in our minds.

We're basing what Jesus would have looked like, not Jesus the magical virgin-birthed un-dead superhero, but rather the more reasonable civil-activist and freedom fighter Jesus; on paintings and engravings created three to four hundred years after his supposed execution. No one can and will ever know exactly what this person would have looked like, and the happenstance of this being the magic shroud placed on him is too great.

This is just another avenue where religion tried to use science to validate something religion has no business dealing with: fact. Religion doesn't have to be factual to be important, but in our ever intellectually expanding world, religion is being less needed and grasping at anything to stay prominent. There were no camera's back then, so this is the way to say; "look, we basically have a picture taken of Christ so he's real and we're right, yeah". The same mentality was put into searching for pottery that would supposedly have recorded the voice of Jesus, after the Pompeii pottery was played back like a record and the faint echoes of a pottery workshop from 1200 years ago can be heard. Religion has many detractors, science and rationality can cause a lot of it to seem silly, but needing to prove religious stories is more about the faithful needing to prove it to themselves than to throw it in the faces of atheists or agnostics.

It's just one dead person, one nameless person who lived, loved, laughed, lost, and then laid down and died. Millions died before him/her, a billion have died after him/her, the only thing that makes this one person special is that their death dressings remembered them long after all their relatives and friends were dead and forgotten as well. This isn't the face of a savior, just the shadow of a person from a time long before ours'.

Most people don't want to know that our burgeoning population is exceeding our earth's carrying capacity. Once a species exceeds the environment's carrying capacity, that species dies; we are on our way to starving ourselves to death. Since societal controls don't usually work, we are just going to have to wait for a massive plague to wipe out the population excess.

nsane are you volunteering to be the first victim in this strike?

I'll do my thoughts so far on the second "controversial topic" first...

this doesn't sound very well thought out, I'd like to see the full artical, essay, blog whatever it is before I say anything to deeply about it but thise "mathematician/clergyman" sounds like he's taking some things that make sence and mixing it his whatever looks right...

I think Gingers post is global so I don't know who this, "them" is that "we" are letting starve or die in nsane's post. considering that it would be a global extintion there is no them or us in the matter... Also in nsanes post, the last part is void of relevance in my opinion since we have parts of this country that are equally as bad as any third world country if you know where to look. the part most people see are the louder more prominant, anyone feels like a roadtrip you could go to Mudstick Kentucky its a decent portrait of real poverty. hit the hills people made their houses and grow/raise their food and you can forget about cell signals, ipods, wifi and all that stuff. We have without a doubt (at least in my mind) one of the better countries in the world, if not the best (I said country, not government, I have those sheep shankers) but theres still a lot of f**ked up sh*t in it...

Ah, yes, the Malthusian catastrophe. Do we need another world war to be cool? Seriously, though. Europe is begoting less and less children in the world while the population of the poor people multiply, so it (apparently seems) to be getting more balanced in the future, I hope.

And those places that have a continuing increase in population, the land is unable to feed the population.

This graph was done in 1994 and you can see how off the projection is for 2025:


Just think, if a zombie outbreak were to occur, imagine how bad it will be with a growing population.

What we need is a good damn plague, something that runs through about 1/4 of the population in about a decade or less.

Is it cruel, of course?

Yet our advancements in science, technology and medicine is actually preventing this very natural life-cycle from happening. When forests grow wild lighting causes fires to burn it, when herds grow to large famine wipes half of them out, when lands become exhausted volcanoes destroy the surface only to deposit better/more enriched soil. But humans have fought increasingly too hard to combat this natural occurrence when it pertains to ourselves, so we opt in destroying the planet and raping her of her resources, while keeping those barely alive on life support and wasting our precious resources on those dealing with droughts and genocide.

Yeah it's awful, but it's also a fact of life, and trying to combat the natural pruning of the species by keeping the weak and old alive is actually the most inhumane thing we can do. Because it's making the lives of the stronger and more populated areas harder and harder, because we're carrying the rest. War is a way humans have kept each other in check, up until the creation of total warfare at the dawn of the last century, and now war is always "bad". So how can we make room for the next generations when their getting piled up here like a traffic jam? Sorry ancient, sickly, diseased or destitute; but if your can't get your sh!t together and carry on anymore, the world has to leave you behind. Every other animal with a herd-mentality knows that you let the weak get picked off my the predators, so that the majority can carry on, refusing to do this is going to kill off those who can continue to keep the herd in prominence.

We as a species need to allow the weak to be picked off by the predators, even if that means by fellow humans or geographical issues.

There is a plague every century, and apparently we are past due. Also, the caldera in Yellowstone is past due to erupt, but I think I would rather suffer a plague than the wrath of a super volcano.

While I'm not sure I agree with population control through war, disease or neglect, I am very glad to hear I'm not the only one who does not believe reproduction is/should be the ultimate life goal. With the numbers of people in my life getting pregnant, and with apparent disregard for whether they can support another person, I was starting to feel like a freak for not wanting to have a child.

I've never wanted to be a mom, and I don't see my feelings ever changing. I feel like I can give plenty to the people around me, without creating a new person for that purpose. (Besides, there are plenty of moms taking care of the population thing -- probably too many.) And I've taken some heat lately for my beliefs.

If I ever had to be a parent (if God forbid one of my friends passed away but had wanted me to raise her child), I would be a parent. But I would not choose this path otherwise.

So yeah, thanks for not shoving babies down my throat. Metaphorically.

edit: Nothing against parents. It's a damn hard job, and they've got my respect.