I just learned that one of the featured talks in the US Pavilion at Davos (I detest Davos anyway) is titled Did God Take The World’s First Selfie in 33 A.D. It’s about the Shroud of Turin, which some gullible adherents think is a genuine artifact from Jesus’ time, rather than a medieval fake used to gouge money out of Christian pilgrims.
I can’t even.
This is what the United States of America looks like to the rest of the world: a nation of rubes and yokels.
USA House denied entry to Gavin Newsome.
I heard the theory is, Leonardo da Vinci was hired by an Italian duke to make a more believable fake as substitute for an obvious fake that had been in the family’s possession a couple of centuries.
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The method was apparently to use a panopticon to project an image that served as outline for a painting. As a projection on a flat surface induces a distorted image, the lower part of the image is elongated.
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I hope Lionardo or whoever did it got well paid.
David @ 1
It happened two weeks ago, but it is the first time I hear about it. The venue was pressured by the US government to deny him entry – a classic petty Trump move.
The Shroud of Turin was known to be a later work of art a long time ago.
They even took a small part of it for Carbon 14 dating.
There is a small group of cultists who spend a huge amount of effort waving away all the evidence.
IIRC, they are called “Shroudies”.
Davos sucks anyway.
It is a small group of very rich and powerful men who pretend they have something interesting and important to say.
A sign that the US has now reached mediaeval times in its rush back through the ages.
birgerjohansson@3-
The version I heard was that the shroud was likely draped over a model and painted/stained, hence the geometric distortion when the cloth was laid out flat.
Why now? It’s quite a nice town with a very interesting insect fauna in the surrounding mountain streams.
I heard that the proportions of the shroud image do not match what you would get if you draped it over an actual body.
3D analysis reveals Shroud of Turin image likely came from sculpture, not Jesus’ body (August 2025)
Maybe Jesus H. Christ just had a very weird body. Maybe that’s why the Gospel writers never mentioned his physical characteristics, including even hair and eye color.
Christian group plans world’s largest Jesus statue in Spain, based on Shroud of Turin features
This could be even worse than the “caucasian Jesus” traceable to medieval art.
Yes, Reginald, it surely WILL be worse. From your cited article:
The design features open arms, simulating the act of embracing humanity, and will include a 2.5-meter moving heart at its center. Visitors will be able to enter the hollow interior of the monument, where they can experience this heart, intended as a space for reflection and spiritual unity…
Visitors entering the statue will experience an environment where natural light filters through the perforations representing Jesus’s wounds, illuminating the interior like a constellation of stars. “Each morning, when the first rays of sun pass through the wound of his side and illuminate the heart, it will descend slowly to the ground by means of a pulley mechanism so that all can come close to touch it and worship it during the day,” the association explained. “After, when night falls, the heart will return to its anatomical position and will be backlit and illuminated, through the holes, as if it were a constellation of stars.”
I foresee EPIC technical glitches that will be both hilarious and appalling.
This 3D “carbon copy” of Jesus was created using the Shroud of Turin
Historian claims Shroud of Turin is actually tablecloth made in Burton
PZ said: This is what the United States of America looks like to the rest of the world: a nation of rubes and yokels.
We are the most scammed country on the planet.
We are constantly bombarded with smishing, phishing, and vishing.
Romance scams, employment scams, bank scams, you won the lottery scam, your grandson is in jail scam, it’s never ending. Almost every month there is an article in a local news feed alerting us citizens to a new scam going around. I live in an area with a dense elderly population; there is a constant steam of stories about them losing their life savings.
I think the quote sometimes attributed to Willie Sutton explains that adequately.
“Because that’s where the money is.”
Anthropologist David Akins says the image on the relic is not an image of Christ, but the face of the Fisher King…the last guardian of the Holy Grail.
Well, it DOES look a lot like that old knight who greeted Indiana Jones in Alexandretta…
@14 VReginald Selkirk
That was in the back of my mind as I wrote it. You fish where you know there is a good chance of catching a (fat) fish.
I don’t mean to be uncharitable, but for one glaring orange reason it is obvious that at least seven tens of millions of your fellow voting citizens are just that.
Biggest and most powerful military in the world, as well.
(motto: overkill ain’t enough)
Dr. Joe Nickell showed how to make your own “Shroud of Turin” using only medieval technology. The cover of his book shows his results, and most people think that is an image of the real shroud. World recognized microscopist Walter McCrone showed that there were paint pigments scattered in the “definitely not painted” image. He was the only scientific member of STURP (Shroud of Turin Research Project) who wasn’t an idiot evangelist/apologist trying to “prove” it was authentic and even claiming scientific validation for MAGIC. So now we have yet another creationist chemist making counterfactual claims, what a shock. Just how did the image get magically focussed on the shroud, since uncolluminated radiation creates very out of focus results. And the image fingers are highly distorted and elongated. I guess that Jesus had Marfan syndrome, but only in his magical fingers since he was not very tall in that fake shroud.
Even the Catholic Church had even admitted it was a forgery, since a bishop claimed to have talked with the forger. But they continue to display it, along with the crutches they buy and regularly dispense at alleged miracle sites (usually on moonless nights), claiming it brings the people to gawd so it’s all good. The Catholic Church also promotes “Boiling Saints Blood” in a sealed vial in SA, but refuses to let scientists examine it because “that would destroy the miracle”. A.D. White (founder of Cornell University) even suggested a chemical mix that would exhibit those properties, and religionists have attacked him for that since. Their gawds are always such extreme wimps.
The Catholic Church is dishonest to their core, they have even been found laundering suitcases full of Italian mafia money. Look at the “Our Lady of Guadalupe” painting (very faded, contrast enhanced for newspapers*), and it includes both Catholic and indigenous SA Indian (Aztec) religious symbols in the painting. And examine all the other “miracle” sites they promote in the Third World. While in a couple of SA countries as part of a seagoing scientific expedition, which landed periodically for supplies, I discovered that the Catholics there are sure that the entirely fictional Noah and his big box (an ark is a chest or a box, traced back some 5,000 years, the Jews didn’t even invent that fable**) was actually beached in the Andes. You know, it had to be, since the entire Earth was flooded with water that came from above sky and then disappeared to somewhere else by MAGIC. Also note that there were only 2 of each ritually “unclean kind” and 14 of each for the rest. And no fresh or salt water fish or other water born life that could never tolerate a year in the wrong type of water, and no plants (including trees) to preserve, since those things just spring out of the ground.
The argument that shroud could never have been a painting includes the moronic comment that there are no brush strokes, so it could not have been painted (because people only paint with brushes). Of course, they carefully avoided consulting with an actual artist, and there are cave painting going back 10s of thousands of years that are brush stroke free; negatives of hand prints created by blowing pigments through a hollow reed over the artist’s hand on the rock wall. Of course, the psychotic religionists of STURP castigated McCrone, how dare he usurp their flimsy gawd. Nat Geo even did an ultracredulous piece on the shroud, further cementing their reputation as “photo journalists”, and not actually scientists. They do spend a lot of time pretending to be the latter, until caught, then they are merely the former, so totally excusable.
Of course unevidenced rumors were quickly spread by religionists that the “RED blood stains” (obviously painted after the rest and actually impossible, since blood turns black with age) had been DNA sequenced and found to be from a male. Who knew that pigments are sexual. And when pressed to say which scientific organization did the DNA sequencing, no names are forth coming to “protect the scientists” from evil atheist attacks. As usual, they get EVERYTHING backwards.
The scientific community overall recognizes that “supernatural explanation” is an oxymoron. In science, and in any rational activity, “to explain” means to render previous “unknowns” in terms of “knowns”. Creationists invariably get this backwards by trying to “explain” knowns in terms of unknowns, and of course eventually, unknowns in terms of even greater unknowns. Since they don’t have any supporting evidence for their claims, it eventually comes down to their final illogical defense, “it was a miracle” (their name for MAGIC) so, any excuse will do.
And creationists, as is the case for all obscurantists, always start with the conclusion ad work backwards to find, or most often, invent “supporting evidence”. Some years ago the largest newspaper in this state was peddling “real” miracles, and they even had a guest column “proving that the grotesque up to 9,000 pound GMC Hummer was actually far more environmentally friendly than any electric car. The publisher even claimed that birth control was immoral, and disappeared for a while when asked for evidence (which he never provided).
https://www.skeptic.org.uk/1988/11/from-the-archive-explaining-the-turin-shroud-the-creation-of-a-religious-hoax/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_McCrone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Shroud_of_Turin
*I once worked in a lab with a color theoretician who had seen the relic in real life in SA, and he said it was badly faded, but newspapers promoting it obviously used high levels of contrast enhancement. And of course, some idiot priest proclaims that the colors are just as vibrant as the day it was “discovered” (how would he know, since it is 500 years old) on the top of a hill where the church had wanted to build a Basilica anyway.*** Any “photos” you see where the lower parts are clear has cropped out the embarrassing SA Aztec Indian religious parts of the painting, and the parts not cropped out are hand wavy explained away as showing the superiority of the Catholic religion to the Aztec religion.
The religious are moral leaders, my ass. I have even seen newspapers proclaim that the Catholic Pope is the “moral leader of the world”. The current pope says that the church needs more exorcists. You know, because demons are REAL. And he also insists that Adam and Eve were real, otherwise the church can’t “cure” everyone of a moronic invented disease like “Original Sin”. Punishing children for fake alleged crimes their parents committed is so very Christian.
**https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_fkpZSnz2I
Irving Finkel is a world leading cuniform writing expert, and a great speaker.
***The ultracredulous are trivially duped over and over again with absolutely no recognition on their part. The vast majority of religionists voted a convicted felon, sex offender, and pedophile into the WH.**** And most would do that again. As Isaac Asimov pointed out decades ago: “It is religion that recruits their squadrons. Tens of millions of Americans, who neither know nor understand the actual arguments for or even against evolution, march in the army of the night with their Bibles held high. And they are a strong and frightening force, impervious to, and immunized against, the feeble lance of mere reason.”
“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled”, attributed to Mark Twain, but not his exact wording.
Breakdown of the religious supporters of the impossibly stupid, Narcissistic, Vengeful, Psychotic Career Criminal Orange Baboon in the recent WH election:
White Evangelical Protestant: 81%
Hispanic Protestant: 63% (even after all his Hispanic attacks!)
White Catholic: 60%
White non-Evangelical Protestant: 57%
All the remaining ones are under 50%, but none are near zero.
There is no known cure for complete stupidity combined with willful ignorance. Average US adults function at a 6th grade level of reading and comprehension, making them really easy marks.
“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.” Seneca (5 BCE – 65 CE)
There was a time when having a pro Shroud presentation in a US government sponsored pavilion should have gotten the fundies up in arms because it’s an icon, and venerating icons is bad in their version of Christianity. And it’s a Roman Catholic thing, which should also make it suspect.
In the 1960’s I saw a shroud of turin like event. Two teens were found dead in a car in a field. They had put handkerchiefs over their faces and saturated them with model airplane glue to get high. The handkerchiefs dried creating a death mask not unlike the shroud of turin.
Someone should write a book on the malicious idiots PZ points out are ‘influencers’ that are ru(i)nning this country. The title would be ‘Gullible’s Travels’.
I remember a bumper sticker that said, ‘jebus is coming, and boy is he pissed’
So, all this talk about the medieval world should bring to mind that the magat admin is creating a ‘new dark ages’.
I happened to be in Turin a decade ago when the “Shroud” was let out of Vatican custody for a visit. It is deeply unimpressive: all you can see under the conditions in which it was displayed are faint smudges you can persuade yourself show a humanoid figure.
Yes another nail in the coffin of the “Shroud’s” authenticity:
A New Document on the Appearance of the Shroud of Turin from Nicole Oresme: Fighting False Relics and False Rumours in the Fourteenth Century.