Make a Difference

Day: April 6, 2009

Heat Wave but no Global Warming?

Interesting…

Several stories on major Australian media sites about extra deaths possibly caused by the Victorian heatwave in January.

But so far, not a single mention of CO2 or global warming.

Quite rightly, of course, because individual weather events, even unusual weather events and their consequences, should not be blamed on global patterns without some evidence that the two are connected.

But it is hard to imagine that some journalists, even a year ago, would not automatically have claimed these deaths as adding weight to the global warming thing.

Holden Cuts Production to Half – Good News?

According to PM Kevin Rudd, Holden is the bright star in the GM firmament, the only good GM news anywhere in the world. This because a new four cylinder car is due to come into production in 2010.

But Holden’s Australian sales fell by 20% in the first quarter of this year, with sales to some export markets falling by 80%. An entire shift at the Adelaide factory is being cancelled. Staff have the option of losing their jobs or working one week on, one week off, at reduced pay. Production is forecast to be about 310 vehicles per day, down from a peak of about 600.

This is good news?

OK to Pick on Christians

I read the latest Adelaide Church Guardian this morning. It’s dismal, of course. More breast-beating about no-one going to church. The yawn-inspiring PC nonsense the Guardian constantly parrots might give church leaders some clues about declining attendances if they were really interested.

But there is an article about ‘Jesus Week’ at the University of Adelaide and Uni SA. It’s a pretty harmless event. A BBQ here, a prayer meeting there, Christians wearing t-shirts or jumpers that advertise the week and their faith, invitations to church, or to studies that will give students a better understanding of Christianity and who Jesus is. In that one week they were asked to take down a banner (because of OH&S concerns), declined permission to hold a free BBQ (no problem for other groups) and a lecturer told a student to take off her Jesus Week jumper on the grounds that it was offensive.

So I was already thinking about this when I saw Andrew Bolt’s post about ‘Finger-pointing at the faith.’ An English (government sponsored) charity has produced a magazine for children in care, which encourages them to ‘Stand up for what they believe in.’  As long as they are not Christians.

The magazine shows a boy wearing a cross verbally attacking a young muslim woman. He is portrayed as a racist thug. She, of course, is all sweetness and light.

Who Cares? Trust chief executive Natasha Finlayson said she had no intention of withdrawing it, describing the cross as ‘bling’ rather than a religious symbol. That’s insulting enough – start describing the central symbols of other religions as ‘bling’ and see what sort of reaction you get. But it is also untrue. The cross the boy is wearing is meant to be a symbol of his religious faith. The magazine itself says so – when the bully wearing the bling asks the girl about her hijab, she replies that it is ‘part of her religion, like the cross you are wearing.’ 

If the roles were reversed, and a Muslim boy was shown picking on a Christian girl, humans rights groups would be pouncing. And they would be right to do so. Publishing that kind of sneering portrayal of any religious group under the heading ‘Stand up for what you believe’ is sheer hypocrisy.

The Shroud of Turin and the Knights Templar

Whatever one thinks about its authenticity, the Shroud is a fascinating object.

Carbon dating tests conducted in 1988 indicated the Shroud could not be dated any earlier than 1260. That figure was immediately disputed (and not just by Shroud believers) because it was claimed that the very small parts of the Shroud removed for dating had been taken from a place where repairs had been carried out in the Middle Ages.

Last year John Jackson, a Colorado physicist working with Oxford University, said that because of high Carbon Monoxide levels, those dating results could have been skewed by as much as 1300 years. Christopher Ramsey, head of the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit (the group that tested the Shroud in 1988) said ‘There is a lot of other evidence that suggests to many that the shroud is older than the radiocarbon dates allow and so further research is certainly needed.’

The other evidence includes matches with the Sudarium of Oviedo, and pollens, cloth and weave types that are a perfect fit to 1st Century Israel.

One of the problems has been a gap in the Shroud’s history.

The Shroud, or something like it, had been known in the Eastern Church until the sack of Constantinople in 1204. But there was no record of its existence between then and the appearance of the Shroud we have now in France in 1353. The Shroud was in the possession of a family descended from a Knight Templar who had been in the Middle East. This led historian Ian Wilson to propose that it had either been in that family’s possession, or in the possession of the order of Knights Templar between 1204 and 1353 – and therefore that this was the same cloth and image that had been known in the East.

Now Dr Barbara Frale, an historian researching the Templars in the Vatican Archives, reports finding a Templar document which confirms Wilson’s theory.

Even now, no one understands how the image came to be made on the cloth. The negative image, wounds in the wrists rather than the hands, realistic blood flow patterns and a multitude of other factors make it unlikely in the extreme that it is a medieval forgery. So what is it?

Probably the two best books on the Shroud are Ian Wilson’s The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence That the World’s Most Sacred Relic Is Real and John Iannone’s The Mystery of the Shroud of Turin: New Scientific Evidence.

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