[AUTHOR'S NOTE: As a Christian, I will admit this is information that I have trouble reconciling with my religious beliefs, and it especially bothers me because it's something that wouldn't upset me if true -- it actually solves theological issues I have about sticky issues such as the premature death of a child. As a human being, curiosity got the better of me, and I've learned that I cannot simply reject the idea of reincarnation. Like Dr. Tucker, I'm merely more open to the possibility, in the light of evidence such as that I'm about to describe.] Little five-year-old Ryan from rural Muskogee County, Oklahoma began having nightmares involving a past life. Ryan claimed he had been a well-known actor who lived in Hollywood, had a sister who was a famous dancer, and once knew Rita Hayworth. He said that he had been really rich, married multiple times, loved Chinatown and Chinese food, lived in a house with a swimming pool on “rocks” drive, owned some sort of agency that changed names, and provided a host of other details about this mysterious "previous life." Ryan's father Kevin, a police officer with thirteen years experience, proposed that mother Cyndi should keep track of all Ryan’s past-life claims. To be precise, over a period of several months Cyndi documented 102 unique claims that her son made about a past life. Meanwhile, Ryan's nightmares continued to get worse. He would turn white and gasp for air, struggling for every breath. He talked about things that seemed gibberish, like a meeting in a New York graveyard with someone he called "Senator … [Read more...]
The real face of Jesus, part 4
Russell Breault of the Turin Education Project said, "It's human nature to always want to put a name with a face. The scripture gives us the name. The Shroud gives us the face." The highlight of the History Channel program "The real face of Jesus" was the work of Ray Downing and his team at Studio Macbeth in an effort to cull a human face from the image on the cloth. Ray and his team are some of the best computer graphics artists in the world, specializing in the creation of accurate and lifelike death masks of famous people. Downing said, When you look at the Shroud, you have the impression that it's a picture, but it's not a picture at all. It's a database of information. If one were to single out one single thing about the Shroud of Turin which separates it from every other effort on the planet is that it encoded three dimensional information in a two dimensional surface. Downing and his team meticulously studied the Shroud. They had to overcome a number of difficult issues that were unique to this assignment. For example, the cloth was very dirty, with copious marks of bloodstains overlaid on the image of the body and had to be cleaned. At one point Downing said to a coworker, "I think the solution [about the problem of separating the distortion of the image] to it is to realize the Shroud wasn't hanging on a wall. It was wrapping a corpse." To separate the image of the man under the Shroud, bloodstains on the material had to be contrasted and highlighted in order to be digitally scrubbed from the body. A special raster algorithm known as Fast Fourier … [Read more...]
The real face of Jesus, part 3
Many people concluded that the Shroud of Turin must be a clever forgery once the carbon 14 dating test results of 1988 were announced. Those results apparently established a date of origin for the material ranging between 1260 and 1390 A. D. The three laboratories selected to perform the tests had impeccable reputations. They worked independently, yet achieved remarkably similar results -- all three labs declared the shroud had a medieval origin, more than a thousand years after the death of the Christ. Assuming their work was stellar and the results were accurate, the Shroud could not possibly have been used to cover the body of Jesus after the crucifixion. So why has it been preserved and continues to be venerated, if the shroud is nothing but a fake? And why have people continued to study a forged relic? These and several other questions came to mind while watching the History Channel special (link to full program here) titled "The Real Face of Jesus": Is it possible to still believe the shroud could be real, given the results of carbon dating experiments performed in 1988? Should the veracity of the scientists and the results of the tests be trusted? If the Shroud really wrapped the body of a dead human being, was that man the crucified Christ? If the Shroud is genuine, can it be used to somehow determine what Jesus looked like? The first three questions enumerated above will be answered in this article, and the fourth question will be addressed in the fourth and final installment of this series. In my personal opinion, the integrity nor … [Read more...]
The real face of Jesus, part 2
What is the Shroud of Turin? What does it mean? Photographer Barrie Schwortz of STURP (Shroud of Turin Research Project) describes the Shroud as "religion and science living on the same piece of cloth." And he should know; Schwortz spent five days in 1978 working as a principal photographer documenting the efforts as part of the Shroud of Turin Research Project that was led by physicist John Jackson, who worked for NASA in the 1970s. When Jackson ran a photograph of the Shroud of Turin through a VP-8 digital analyzer (a specialized computer typically used to map three dimensional simulation models from two dimensional images) at NASA, the remarkable result of his experiment led to the commission of the STURP (Shroud of Turin Research Project) team. Jackson's test culled a three dimensional image from the two dimensional photograph...and no other painting or work of art has ever reproduced such a phenomenon. Only photographs of three dimensional objects can produce that same effect. The test result clearly indicated that the fabric had once been used to wrap a three dimensional object, which in this case was the dead body of a human being, believed to be none other than Jesus, the Christ. No matter what else might be said or written, this religious artifact will always have doubts about it veracity and authenticity due to the lack of a clear chain of custody and the now controversial results of carbon dating tests. Like any other religious artifact, the fact that it exists cannot be offered as irrefutably proof of the existence of God, because proof does not … [Read more...]
The real face of Jesus, part 1
Not that long ago the History Channel featured a phenomenal two hour special titled "The Real Face of Jesus". The program provided new and extensive details about a scientific study of the Shroud of Turin, plus information about alleged corroborating evidence, and an attempt to reconstruct the facial image from the shroud by an expert at producing accurate and lifelike death masks. Of course, skeptics have argued that experiments have proved that the image on the shroud can be produced by artificial means, but scientific evidence rebuts their claims -- these experiments might create an image that superficially resembles the image on the shroud, but not with all of the unique characteristics of it. Carbon-14 dating allegedly dated the material of the shroud as being between than 1260-1390 A. D., but scientists from the STURP team have subsequently invalidated their own findings. Over the years, the Shroud has been handled, lost, burned, hidden, and taken as plunder in the course of its known history. The chain of ownership is consistent after the date provided via Carbon-14 dating, but a history of an alleged burial shroud for Christ existed from the first century A.D., with a miraculous healing of King Agar V. Some people question whether or not Jesus actually existed, but as the Catholic priest Father Jonathan Morris has said about Jesus, "We don't believe in an idea. We believe in a man." If Jesus the human existed, as the Bible and history indicates, and if the story of his crucifixion are accurate, the man suffered horrific injuries and inconceivable … [Read more...]
