“Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose ... I suspect that ‘there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of,’  in any philosophy.”

 (J. B. S. Haldane, Possible Worlds))

 Salon.com, the Internet equivalent of MSNBC has a lengthy article by a author of a book to be released next week entitled “Brain Wars.” It’s about Out-of-Body Experiences (OBE) and Near Death Experiences (NDE)

http://www.salon.com/2012/04/21/near_death_explained/singleton

 It is my position that the Shroud has a direct relationship to the issues raised.

I think its time that inveterate skeptics understand that existence is not a simple phenomenon and at our existences most basic level, is weird, and does not yield to logic and common sense. OBE  and NDE are windows to another level of existence. We interface with that level of existence at the quantum level.

 Here are some points about quantum mechanics:

 1. Reality is consciousness based. The existence of any object is not defined until it has been observed.

 2. Quantum phenomena are  electromagnetic waves. That includes all the constituent parts of the atom.

 4. Human consciousness is  electromagnetic waves derived of the human brain.

 5. Quantum phenomena can operate independent of time and space.(quantum entanglement)

 6. Quantum mechanics defy reason  and common sense, but all calculations using quantum mechanics work and achieve predictable results.

 7. If human consciousness is a quantum phenomenon than OBE and NDE are rational in the quantum sense.

 8. Religion and science do not collide and at the quantum level they will merge and coalesce

 My observation:

 The quantum level is the interface between material existence and the creative force. It answers to a higher logic that is beyond our understanding. OBE and NDE are glimpses of that existence and its promise.

So is the Shroud of Turin.

Science and the Resurrection

There is a great deal of controversy over a book by Thomas de Wesselow, The Sign: The Shroud of Turin and the Secret of the Resurrection” Wesselow finds the Shroud of Turin to be the authentic burial cloth of Christ but denies that Christ was physically resurrected. The reported apparitions of Christ after his Resurrection were, in essence expositions of the Shroud. Wesselow is an agnostic who has stated that he doesn’t believe in miracles. I disagree but,

Those who claim the Resurrection was a miracle against the laws of nature have, perhaps, a limited view of the laws of nature. Atheist in chief Richard Dawkins writing in his epic screed against religion found the quantum theory of existence incomprehensible even though it works and was a factor in creation of the atom bomb.

“Perhaps there are some genuinely profound and meaningful questions that are forever beyond the reach of science. Maybe quantum theory is already knocking on the door of the unfathomable. But if science cannot answer some ultimate question, what makes anybody think that religion can?”

Quantum phenomena operate at times independent of time and space. Nothing is defined until it is observed. That’s what confuses so many and why they find it inexplicable. Two quantum particles can become entangled. What happens to one happens to the other simultaneously even though separated by light years..  Einstein called it “spooky,” I call it love.

Some believe that human conscience is  quantum phenomenon.  Beneath the quantum level of existence is another level of existence that defines the quanta.  None dare call it God. But as it seeks to unravel the mysteries of the quantum, science is staring God in the face, it's just that some scientists refuse to see it.

The Resurrection? Under these circumstances is not a mystery, but a piece of cake.
In October 2007, I wrote reflecting on the death of my adult son Michael. http://johnklotz.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html  

I used the scientific phrase “event horizon” as a metaphor for death: A black hole of such enormous gravity that even light can not escape its grasp. I also stated that those who love are joined in their psyches. At that time I was not aware of the concept of quantum entanglement except in a vague way.

I now believe that love is a quantum entanglement of two or more consciousnesses. Our path to the  entanglement with God is entanglement with others, but the straightest path is entanglement with Jesus Christ.
Dame Isabel Piscek has called the Shroud of Turin an event horizon of Christ’s Resurrection. I was unaware of that when I wrote in 2007. 

But as we used to sing in a hymn popular in the heady days of Vatican II:

We stand before your altar lord,
To share a common meal.
Love has brought us here today,
For love makes symbol real.


Amen and Happy Easter.

A question for Palm Sunday: Whose Son is he?

Richard Dawkins is refusing a debate challenge from William Lane Craig, a fundamntalist academic  at the Sheldonian Theater in Oxford http://shroudofturin.wordpress.com/2012/03/31/speaking-of-issuing-challenges-to-dawkins/

I think Dawkins has anointed himself as the "Atheist Pope." The jacket for God Delusion modestly described Dawkins as "the world's most prominent atheist." "The world numbers about eight billion individuals and climbing. What a terrible burden it is for Dawkins to be the foremost atheist among the eight billion.

That being said, when it comes to the slaughter of innocents in Canaan, I tend to agree that this was inexcusable barbarity. I remember watching a History Channel program on ancient generals two  or three years ago which recorded Joshua's slaughter of women and children in Jericho after "the walls came tumbling down." I was appalled. When I discovered that Joshua was acting on a divine command, I decided that I could not worship such a God. I was deeply saddened when a Jewish friend of mine gave the human reasoning behind that: Leaving the women and children alive would have resulted in the leaving the seeds of idolatry to blossom and grow. That came to mind a year or so later, when on another History (or Military Channel rebroadcast) I heard a Himmler speech to the German Generals as WWII ground to its close and the Third Reich was collapsing. “We had to kill the children,” he said, “because they would grow-up to seek revenge upon us killing their parents.”

Much of  Bible is rationalization for human endeavors. Of course, that argues against it not being history. Some of its history is sad.

But I highly recommend the direction of religion which is the basis of Richard Wright’s “The Evolution of God.” Jesus challenged the Pharisees” “What do you think of the Messiah [Christ], whose son is he?” Wright is somewhat dismissive of the universality of Jesus message adopting the “Paul did it view.” But I think the last paragraph of his book sums up not only the direction of religious thought, but of Christianity itself:

“Though we can no more conceive of God than we can conceive of an electron, believers can ascribe properties to God, somewhat as physicists ascribe properties to electrons. One of the more plausible such properties is love. And maybe, in this light, the argument for God is strengthened by love’s organic association with truth—by the fact, indeed, that at times these two properties almost blend into one. You might say that love and truth are the two primary manifestations of divinity in which we can partake, and that by partaking in them we become truer manifestations of the divine. Then again, you might not say that. The point is just you wouldn’t have to be crazy to say it.” *

Amen, Mr. Wright, amen. Wright is using the mysteries of quantum mechanics as an analogy to God and love. But, in my view it isn't just an analogy, its' an essential truth. Here I stand: Human conscience is a quantum phenomenon. Love is a "quantum entanglement” where two quantum entities develop a relationship that is independent of time and space. Einstein called the concept which as been scientifically demonstrated "spooky."

Einstein called it spooky, I call it love. 

*(Wright, Robert (2009-05-20). The Evolution of God. Little, Brown and Company, Kindle Edition.)

Oxford is as Oxford Does:* The Christ Icon and the Shroud of Turin

Oxford is as Oxford Does*


I have recently read the original Paul Vignon book on the Shroud of Turin originally published in 1902 which was reissued in English in 2002. I got it through Amazon. In 1902, three decades before he published his “Vignon Markings” he compared medieval depictions of Christ and found them inferior to the Shroud image and quite different.

 I was originally attracted to Christ to Coke because its author Martin Kemp was the leading art historian backing the DaVinci origination of what he dubbed "La Principessa" an art scandal par excellence when Christie evaluated a 100 million dollar drawing for $17,000 and sold it on consignment. See National Geographic Feb 2012, p. 101

 Kudos to Martin Kemp for "La Principessa." Really! Bronx cheer for "Christ to Coke!!" 

 His opinion is ignorant and a disgrace for an expert. I say "ignorant" because he obviously didn't do his homework on the Shroud. He cites Pantocrator as the seminal Christ  icon and ignores or does not know about the well publicized Vignon markings linking it the Shroud image to the Pantocrator. He is dismissive of Ian Wilson’s “Mandylion theory,” and list Wilson’s latest book as “Reading” as well as the entire Shroud.com cite. (Kemp, Martin [2011-10-13]. "Christ to Coke : How Image Becomes Icon" Kindle Edition location 1005). He ignores the Vignon markings even though they are discussed in the Wilson book he lists as “Reading.” (Wilson, supra: Figure 26, Kindle location 2680)

 And he sort of grouses about the carbon dating controversy and then swallows it whole hog. His attribution of it to the Medieval/Renaisance times as a painting by an unknown Italian or French artists is – GIVEN THE EVIDENCE – absurd.

 “If I were asked to provide an art-historical date for the portrayal of Christ on the Shroud, I would estimate it have been made in the later thirteenth or first half of the fourteenth century in Italy or southern France. This is consistent with the much denigrated carbon dating.” (Kemp: Kindle Locations 954-956).

  It is not a painting. If anything, what Barrie Schwortz has estimated to be more than a quarter of a million hours of Shroud research has demonstrated that.

 However, I have a working theory or an opinion about Mr. Kemp’s astute blindness. One of the bases of his LaPrincipessa opinion is carbon dating that was done on its vellum which dated it to DaVinci’s time. Is it possible that Oxford Don Kemp used Oxford’s very own carbon dating lab to do the dating? If so, is his attack on the Shroud authenticity occasioned by a necessity to, at least indirectly, defend the Oxford carbon dating lab?

 Perhaps the good Professor could enlighten us on who did is carbon dating? Just asking. Were we in court and he was testifying as an expert on the Shroud, it would be an admissible question on cross-examination. It’s called bias.

  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*Apologies to Forest Gump

Tunes of Glory

Does anyone remember "Tunes of Glory" where Alec Guiness pushes his rival for regimental command to commit suicide and then fantasizes a glorious funeral for his rival in his own nervous breakdown scene?


 I think both Romney and Santorum are headed for the deep end.  This may end badly, very badly. The best Romney can hope for now is begrudged nomination and a national campaign where he ends up denying everything he said to get the nomination. The most interesting thing about Michigan and Arizona is how a substantial plurality of Catholic voters rejected Santorum and chose a Mormon for Pete's sake!

Not totally unrelated is the quick action of the Archbishop of DC PUBLICLY chastising the priest who PUBLICLY snubbed a Lesbian Catholic at her mother's funeral. Santorum's remark, since retracted, that JFK's speech on Church and State made him "puke" is of the same genre as that priest's actions.

There is an old Pat and Mike joke about Mike seeing Pat leading a parade. "Pat," Mike asks, "what's this parade about?" "I don't know," Pat replied, "but these are my people and if they are in a parade, I'd better be leading it."

Actually, Christ has been leading this parade longer than the clergy will admit. For his time and place, Christ was a radical feminist.  He openly  discussed scripture with not only Jewish women but with a Samaritan woman at the well. You can look it up!

As far as the priest in DC is concerned: Mathew 5:5 says it all:  "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted." God bless Lawrence O'Donnell. 

Both Rick S and Romney may have someone to answer to a lot more powerful than the voters. They both becoming increasingly flaky. Hey guys, GET A GRIP ON IT!

Did Mitt Romney launder money for "Latin American" investors?

Missing the forest for the trees (or counting cavities in the gift horse's mouth.) How many have actually seen the "When Mitt Romney Came to Town" video? http://www.webcasts.com/kingofbain/

Newt, the messenger may be extremely flawed to the extreme, but the message is "spot on." It is brilliant and to the point. Romney was a corporate raider of the worst ilk. Did you know that Bain Capital was financed by unidentified Latin American investors? I didn't. Did you know Romney's wealth is mostly parked off-shore in foreign accounts? I didn't. Those facts are off-handedly cited in the video which concentrates on the horrors inflicted by Romney and Bain Capital that impoverished men, women and children who were paying their dues to the American dream. No wonder Mitt won't release his income tax returns.

Did you appreciate that Romney and his friends drained 180 million from a company and drove it into bankruptcy when maybe looting it for only 90 million might have allowed it to survive? Maybe I should have known it, but didn't.

And how many of the personal stories of middle class workers impoverished by Bain Capital did you know? A couple maybe. But to paraphrase Stalin (ugh) about his atrocities: the loss of one job is a tragedy; the loss of a million is a statistic. The video tells the story of several US workers who had paid their dues but were nonetheless impoverished by Bain capital predatory practices.

Incidentally, one of the companies plundered by Bain is in Indiana where a right to work law is now being considered.

Bottom line: don’t get angry at Newt or weep for Mitt. Watch the video! This may be the video that saves America (if not the Republican Party) from Romney. Perhaps it should also be required watching for the Evangelical leaders meeting in Texas this weekend.

Perhaps Mormons are Christians, but Mitt Romney certainly doesn’t act like one. The Gospel of St. Matthew relates the parable of the Last Judgment where the only measure of our love of God is how we treat the least among us. Fear that judgment Mitt. Fear now.

THE SHROUD OF TURIN, THE RESURRECTION AND JOE KENNEDY

THE SHROUD OF TURIN, THE RESURRECTION AND JOE KENNEDY

By John C. Klotz

"In 1929 I sold short,
In England I'm presented at court,
But you've got me down hearted,
'Cause I can't get started with you"
"I can’t Get started"
Duke/Gershwin 1936

This piece is written with a sense of irony; tongue in cheek but with a deadly serious intent. For the last 60 years or so controversy has swirled about the Shroud of Turin, the reputed burial shroud of Jesus Christ,

In 1988, carbon dating tests on a corner of it reportedly established that it was a medieval fake. However, in peer reviewed science journal articles since that time, the validity of that conclusion has been pretty much demolished. Among other things, the tiny corner of the Shroud which was taken for tests was atypical of the Shroud fabric and contained threads, some of them cotton, added by a repair using medieval invisible weaving techniques.

But before getting to the evidence of the Shroud’s authenticity, let me explain what relevance Ira Gershwin and Joe Kennedy have to this discussion. The issue is circumstantial evidence. On the basis of two circumstances in the first two lines of the verse quoted above, it is established beyond doubt that Ira Gershwin was twitting Joseph Kennedy, the father of President John F. Kennedy in the song.

Joe Kennedy was famous for having sold short before the stock market 1929 crash, it was one of the sources of his great wealth. Selling short means that in the month prior to the crash he agreed to sell a large number of shares at prices at the then going rate at a future date. It was a bet that the market would go down. I imagine there were other short sellers although the only notorious one was Joe Kennedy. On that fact alone, you might conclude that the verse was about Joe Kennedy,

But there is second fact in the verse. “In England I’m presented at court.” They may have been other less celebrated short sellers in the fall of 1929, but I will make a safe bet that none of them were ever presented at court in England. Kennedy was. After a stint as chairman of the fledging Securities Exchange Commission, President Roosevelt appointed Kennedy as Ambassador to the Court of St. James, the English court.

Only two facts, but if it was a “money or your life bet,” you’d be pretty safe betting that Joe Kennedy was the subject of Gershwin’s verse.

Now let’s turn to the Shroud of Turin. What circumstances lead me to believe that the case is closed and the Shroud is the burial cloth of Jesus of Nazareth and quite probably proof of his resurrection. In this case, there are not two circumstances to draw a straight line, but hundreds.

A note on sources. Without footnoting every detail, I am using two primary sources which in turn are an abundant source of additional sources. One is http://shroud.com whose editor and founder is Barrie Schwortz. Barrie is a Jewish photographic expert who signed on as a photographer for a group examining the Shroud in 1978. Starting from an attitude of complete skepticism about the Shroud, and expecting to make quick work of debunking its authenticity, like many experts before and since, Barrie was astounded by what he saw and photographed, and over a period of eighteen years, moved from skeptic to a believer in the challenged antiquity of the cloth.

Another source is Dan Porter’s Shroud Story. http://www.shroudstory.com/book/BookChapterPage1.htm It is a work in progress But it covers the whole breadth of Shroud issues with hyperlinks in for each issue.

The best proof of the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin is the Shroud itself. There are not dozens of physical facts about the shroud that demonstrate its authenticity, but hundreds. In sum, the Shroud is the burial cloth of a man who was crucified after receiving a merciless beating. There are many wounds that were inflicted by the beating, and they are consistent with the whips used by the Romans at the time of Christ. In addition there are other wounds consistent with a “crown” of thorns being pressed into his head. There is a wound in the side of chest consistent with the account of his side being pierced by a lance at the scene of the crucifixion. There are wounds consistent with nails having been driven through his wrists. This is only a very abbreviated partial list of coincidences between the image on the Shroud and the Gospel accounts of the crucifixion.

I am particularly intrigued by the fact that the nail holes were in the wrist. The skeptics claim that the Shroud is a medieval fake. However, until modern times’ all the known paintings of the crucifixion showed Christ hanging on the Cross with nails driven through the palms of his hands.

I attended Christian Brothers Academy in Syracuse New York from 1950 to 1954. There were four years of religion classes. I can’t remember in which year it occurred, but I do remember one of my teachers noting that all the paintings of the crucifixion were erroneous because they showed nails driven through the palm of the hand and that was an impossibility because the palm lacked the substance to support the weight of the crucified body. It may have been a surprise to some that the nails were driven into the crucified man’s wrists, but to me it was an old story. And because the artistic tradition is so at odds with wrist nails, it is a compelling circumstance indicating that the image on the Shroud long pre-dated medieval times. Pollen and limestone dust indicate a Jerusalem origin for the Shroud. Then too, there are blood stains and other indicia of secretions that are compatible with what would be expected of a shroud that covered the body of a recently tortured and executed man.

But the stains are not the image on the Shroud which remains inexplicable. A History Channel special: “The Real Face of Jesus” explored among other things the question of what produced the image while using the image to create a face of Jesus, the crucified man. It’s speculation as to what created the image is off-the-chart, concluding that it was essentially created by some scanning process.

The image, the stains, and other physical evidence contained in and on the Shroud when compared to Gospel accounts circumstantially prove that the Shroud of Turin was in fact the burial shroud of Jesus of Nazareth. It is a reasonable supposition that solving the problem of the creation of the image will lead to another conclusion: that it is proof of the Resurrection.

For nearly two thousand years the Shroud has been among us, in one place or another. The proofs of its authenticity through science could not have been made until advances in science in the last two or three decades.

I do not believe in the supernatural. I do believe in an eternal self-consciousness of all existence that is by my definition both natural and God. What we call supernatural is simply what we, with our limited knowledge, can not explain.

For those two millennia the Shroud has been among us, waiting perhaps for our human knowledge and science to unlock its truths. I believe that science has now allowed us to prove its authenticity. If I can demonstrate from two lines in verse by Ira Gershwin that he was referencing Joe Kennedy, given the scores if not hundreds of coincidence between the Shroud and the Gospels, there ought to be no real doubt about the authenticity of the Shroud. Only one other artifact comes close to matching the uniqueness of the Shroud and that is the face cloth which covered Christ’s face which is now in Oviedo, Spain. Its blood stains match those of the Shroud and the two cloths are both mentioned in the Gospel.

Science has emerged in our times as both Christ and Anti-Christ. It has unleashed unprecedented destructive power and while one branch seeks to preserve the environment, other, better financed branches, cooperate in promoting the industries that destroy it. If we are to avoid – or win – the environmental Armageddon that now engulfs us, science will have to lead the way.

But in the authentication of the Shroud, and in the efforts to decipher the process by which the image was created, science is doing something more. It is bringing new meaning and new vitality to the Christian message.

At Mass, Catholics sometimes chant:

Christ has died,
Christ is risen,
Christ will come again.

Perhaps when the mystery of the Shroud image is decoded, we shall chant:

“Christ has come again.”


Copyright John C. Klotz, NY, NY 2011



.