4 ~- Wednesday, October 19, 1988 ~ North Shore News IT HAVE a picture of the Shroud of Turin on my wall at home in the dining room. The Shroud has just been revealed as a hoax. ] guess I'll leave the picture up. Only for different reasons. In the first place, i clipped it from a magazine some years ago and had it framed as an exercise in keeping my mind open. It is one thing to keep one’s mind open to such possibilities as life on other worlds or telepathy or lower taxes or honesty in politics or peace in our time. It is altogether another to stay open to the possibility of miracles, of religions being based on verifiable truth as opposed to faith, of evidence of God having walked upon the planet. As a lapsed Catholic, I no longer accept the dogma of Jesus Christ as the Son of God who came down to Earth to atone for our sins. I'd like to. But I can’t. After all my various readings and experiences in life so far — humble as they are — I have come to the general conclusion that Something motivates the universe. More specific than that, | cannot be. If L could, I wouldn't be writ- ing columns, books, magazine ar- ticles or scripts — I'd be writing gospel. But go ahead, call this ‘‘Some- thing’’ God. That’s just about as good a word as any, although I find it not quite as satisfactory as the Atman or the Tao or the Great Spirit. Names like Jehovah and Allah, with their masculine identification, are hopelessly out of date. The no- tion that God might be a male — or a female, for that matter — is pathetically, maybe even patholog- ically anthropomorphic. A god with sexual organs would be no god at all. A god in human form is absurd enough. Yet the Shroud of Turin lingered in my thoughts right up until Jast weekend as the one possible scien- tific case to be made for Jesus as the actual Son of God. But then reports leaked out that three separate carbon-dating tests carried out on fragments of the Shroud showed we can take the capital ‘'S’’ down now. It's just a blanket dating from somewhere between the years 1,000 and 1,500 A.D. The exact century hasn’t been publicly announced yet. The shroud is a brilliant fake. The only question now is whodun- nit? A chap named Geoffrey de Charny, a French knight, is the prime suspect, although Leonardo da Vinci — making a superior copy of the original fake — has been implicated. In case you missed the story, samples from the shroud, released by Catholic authorities to scientists in Zurich, Arizona and London, were cleaned, dissolved and reduc- ed to a form of powdered graphite. Towards completely repainting your car with our ‘Supreme’ paint service. *Excludes glass claims HOURS Mon.-Fri. 8am-6pm Saturday 10am-2pm 945 West 1st St. North Vancouver (next to Beaver Lumber) 984-4117 The powder was compressed into small metal pellets and atomized by 2,000-volt electric charges. ce R ationality is sometimes an emotional curse. Being forced to make use of our reflective consciousness is an effort, for there are always impulses and Stirrings from the older parts of our brain.”’ a STR S e Giant magnets were used to sep- arate the particles into different weights until Carbon 14 could be isolated and electronically measured. The system is called ac- celerated mass spectrometry. It is infallible to within a margin of er- cor of 100 years either way. If the material had dated from the time of Christ — while this would not amount to proof posi- tive that it was the blanket Christ's body was wrapped in after he was taken down from the cross — it would certainly have shaken up a lot of lapsed types like me. I have to admit that as | read the reports on the scientific findings concerning the shroud, a deeper sense of disappointment struck me than I would have expected. Rationality is sometimes an emotional curse. Being forced to make use of our reflective con- sciousness is an effort, for there are always impulses and stirrings from the older parts of our brain. Objectivity is the gift of the modern age. And as we all know, it is a gift rejected to this day by millions, if not billions, of human beings. Among them, I have been secretly holding out all this time, | realize, hoping that the scientific method would come up witha documented miracle, which the shroud would indeed have been had it proved to be 2,000 years old. Oh well, PH keep the picture up on the wall anyway. A hoax that endured for a millenium or more is something to admire in its own right. And something else to keep in mind. Part of being ‘‘open”’ is being willing to accept harsh, cruel facts as well as the infinite possibilities of magic. If the shroud had proved to be The Shroud, I would have written a column about how I was going back to church, As it is, alas, I’m not. Another hoped-for miracle bites the dust® TELEVISION ADVERTISING BOB RANDALL When you list your home or apartment with BOB RANDALL, he'll advertise it for you on TV absolutely FREE. He'll produce a commercial for you and run it 7-8 times a day, every day, for a week. That's 49-56 announcements on the world’s most powerful advertising medium TELEVISION! To find out more about BOB RANDALLS astounding FREE Television Advertising offer, call him today for a no-obligation “meeting. BOB RANDALL Sussex Off: 984.9711 Real Ros.: 980-8700 Fax: 984-3350 Sussex Group-S.R.C. 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