April Fools' Day is at our throats
Was there a great rush at the White House to get the offshore oil decision out before Thursday? No good, because it's become April Fools' week.
Then there's the great Texas hoax (name yourself after the Texas Motor Speedway for $100,000), eagerly lapped up by both media and interwebs, just to show what's happened to journalistic integrity.
But speaking of, consider how GMA and nearly every other media outlet has lapped up the History Channel's shroud of Turin story. Presumably the idea was to put out the release and the show for the christian holy week. The History Channel, whose past record is very shady regarding both historical and journalistic integrity, seems to play down the inconvenient, repeated, scientific evidence (the "blood" is paint pigment, the fabric is 12th-14th century, etc.). The provable date of the shroud's fabric coincides with the heyday of a medieval trade in religious relic faking that is little known today. This industry was one of the outrages that fed the Reformation, which makes any hint of evangelical protestant faith in the shroud a bizarre irony.
The shroud is the whack-a-mole of idolatry. Its credibility has been smacked down repeatedly as long as there's been the science to do so. The only researchers who still support it have, in one way or another, impugned their own impartiality, usually at the start. One tests something like this by setting out to find out what conclusions the evidence support, not by setting out to find in the data proof of what one already believes.
The enormous amount of creative energy that went into relic fakery in the middle ages ought to be an historic fascination in itself. There is no more reality in this than in the latest image of an angel in a doughnut or whatever. As a relic of an era in which gullible acceptance of such "signs" was the norm, when (to judge by what reformers found in the 16th C.) fake relics outnumbered real ones by about 1000 to one, and in which skepticism was kept under wraps on pain of death, the shroud holds much more interest.
Then there's the great Texas hoax (name yourself after the Texas Motor Speedway for $100,000), eagerly lapped up by both media and interwebs, just to show what's happened to journalistic integrity.
But speaking of, consider how GMA and nearly every other media outlet has lapped up the History Channel's shroud of Turin story. Presumably the idea was to put out the release and the show for the christian holy week. The History Channel, whose past record is very shady regarding both historical and journalistic integrity, seems to play down the inconvenient, repeated, scientific evidence (the "blood" is paint pigment, the fabric is 12th-14th century, etc.). The provable date of the shroud's fabric coincides with the heyday of a medieval trade in religious relic faking that is little known today. This industry was one of the outrages that fed the Reformation, which makes any hint of evangelical protestant faith in the shroud a bizarre irony.
The shroud is the whack-a-mole of idolatry. Its credibility has been smacked down repeatedly as long as there's been the science to do so. The only researchers who still support it have, in one way or another, impugned their own impartiality, usually at the start. One tests something like this by setting out to find out what conclusions the evidence support, not by setting out to find in the data proof of what one already believes.
The enormous amount of creative energy that went into relic fakery in the middle ages ought to be an historic fascination in itself. There is no more reality in this than in the latest image of an angel in a doughnut or whatever. As a relic of an era in which gullible acceptance of such "signs" was the norm, when (to judge by what reformers found in the 16th C.) fake relics outnumbered real ones by about 1000 to one, and in which skepticism was kept under wraps on pain of death, the shroud holds much more interest.
Labels: April Fools Day, hoaxes, shroud of Turin
posted by Uncle | 23:02
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