Miracle of the Shroud IV - The Phantom Image

[Filippo Lippi]

"Travertine Aragonites"

is an anagram of

"Intransigent arrogance"








Probably.

 

[Rincewind]

"Travertine Aragonites"

is an anagram of

"Intransigent arrogance"








Probably.

Close enough...

 

[JayUtah]

...taken from a tourist site in Jerusalem and found to "match".

Taken from a tourist site made partly of limestone, oddly enough.

[T]he claim that CaCO₃ from one place can be found to be a "match" to CaCO₃ from another is the claim that O₂ from one place can be said to "match" O₂ from another.

Akin to my analogy that if someone hands me two glasses of water I would be able to tell that one came from the faucet while the other melted from an ice sculpture.

And these are the same sorts of people telling Jabba they can determine that stains on the cloth are "tortured blood."

Notice also that the "source" of the "matching "(limestone)" is the "traditional" site of the "tomb"...which does not even pretend to take into account that the city of Jerusalem and its environs were razed to the ground.

One of the other mentioned sites was also Golgotha. Perhaps some Christians have this romantic notion of the reported site of Jesus' execution as still some lonely hill outside the city, revered and preserved exactly as it might have been 2,000 years ago. It's not; it's actually a busy bus station in the middle of modern Jerusalem. Trying to "match" a common building material there to dust on the cloth, and saying that makes it authentic, is just laughable.

There is no reason at all to believe that the modern tourist site of the "Holy Sepulchre" can be taken to be the tomb in which the body of the HJ was said to be said to be laid...

Indeed. It's a very old site, to be sure. I know some of the shopkeepers near it. But as you might guess, I tend to classify the purported authenticity of the site in the same category as general belief in the shroud and other artifacts -- a great mass of mythology later built up around and in the religion.

And this is to be taken as evidence of "authenticity"...

You can certainly see the desperation among those authors who want to ignore the cloth's known history since 1350 and attribute everything observable on it to one purported singular event a thousand or so years previous. And you can certainly see their desperation in trying to disguise and misrepresent the circumstances of the alleged contaminant. It seems they'll do a lot to convey the impression of a scientific test of its origin. Just no actual science.

 

[Mojo]

"Current Activity: Replying to Thread Miracle of the Shroud IV - The Phantom Image"

 

[Filippo Lippi]

Hugh has looked in at least twice today

 

[wollery]

Very rare...unlike its isomorph, "Travestine Antagonite". Very common.

Travesty antagonist?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Mojo]

Jabba's gone again now. He was replying for well over ten minutes.

 

[Filippo Lippi]

Jabba's gone again now. He was replying for well over ten minutes.

Thereby increasing the amount of undocumented history revealed in the thread

 

[Craig4]

I'm a little perplexed by the compound term "Travertine Aragonite", as search results on that phrase only return Shroud websites.... hmmmmm... Could it be that the term is unique to Shroud sites because they're referencing an invalid term from a specific paper?

Short answer: yes

Travertine is a variety of limestone, extremely common throughout Italy in particular.

Aragonite refers a naturally occurring mineral of calcium carbonate and is the main mineral of shells and corals, but is also found in caves and as sands comprised of decayed/broken shells.

Neither are rare or unusual.

I'm calling BUSTED.

The point of Shroud Science seems to be to use lots of big sciencey sounding words and hope no one calls them on it. Sort of a variation on the Emperor's New Clothes.

 

[catsmate]

- Some evidence for authenticity based upon the limestone found on the shroud:<snip>

Complete rubbish. You have shown no evidence for the authenticity of the cloth.

 

[The Sparrow]

If I had a 'metaphysical' belief I wanted to preserve, here is the last place I would come.
If, on the other hand, I actually wanted to test the validity of a hypothesis I was entertaining, I would come here, and I would listen and learn.

 

[JayUtah]

If I had a 'metaphysical' belief I wanted to preserve, here is the last place I would come.
If, on the other hand, I actually wanted to test the validity of a hypothesis I was entertaining, I would come here, and I would listen and learn.

Suppose you had a metaphysical believe that you wanted to preserve, but at the same time wanted to pretend it had a degree of intellectual support. Would you come to a place like this and carry on a faux debate in order to trump up the appearance that you had put your beliefs to the test, and try very hard to create the illusion that your critics were irrational and hateful?

 

[Stuart]

Suppose you had a metaphysical believe that you wanted to preserve, but at the same time wanted to pretend it had a degree of intellectual support. Would you come to a place like this and carry on a faux debate in order to trump up the appearance that you had put your beliefs to the test, and try very hard to create the illusion that your critics were irrational and hateful?

Nope - to me that would be disingenuous (to be kind) at best.

 

[Humots]

Suppose you had a metaphysical believe that you wanted to preserve, but at the same time wanted to pretend it had a degree of intellectual support. Would you come to a place like this and carry on a faux debate in order to trump up the appearance that you had put your beliefs to the test, and try very hard to create the illusion that your critics were irrational and hateful?

Direct Hit!

 

[The Sparrow]

Suppose you had a metaphysical believe that you wanted to preserve, but at the same time wanted to pretend it had a degree of intellectual support. Would you come to a place like this and carry on a faux debate in order to trump up the appearance that you had put your beliefs to the test, and try very hard to create the illusion that your critics were irrational and hateful?

I could not fool myself that way.

 

[JayUtah]

I could not fool myself that way.

Many people can, but at the same time it's a deliberate, conscious act. There's fooling going on only in the loosest sense. It takes a fair amount of mental effort to maintain the debate at a faux level. For example, one must carefully word the non-concessional concessions so that it's difficult to interpret them unequivocally as a real concession. This is done consciously, expressly to avoid precluding the ability to reset that point later.

The reason Hugh's approach was so puzzling was that he's using the same techniques, but toward a different end. He wants to be the Scholar of the Shroud. I'm fully prepared to believe he is a non-authenticist, but his approach is, "The shroud is not authentic, not because you say it is but because I say it is." That necessitates casting aspersions on competitors' methods and conclusions. Unfortunately, as we saw, the ego can get badly in the way of an otherwise good argument. The point at which he said no one else could match his knowledge of the cloth was where many rightly wrote him off. That he later got caught faking what he hoped would be an erudite display pretty much made sure no one here would ever be able to take him seriously again.

The point in both cases is not the debate over the cloth, but the debate over who's the best debater of the cloth. Fringe theorists realize, either consciously or not, that they'll never prevail in the objective sense. They just want to make what they think is a good showing. For Jabba that means "laying the foundation" of his debate -- for four long years. It also means replaying that debate at his own web site, in his own way, with his own version of the facts and events. That's the only reason anyone would need to selectively report a discussion that anyone can already read for themselves. He's reliving the debate there, only in a way that he wins. Pure ego reinforcement, nothing to do with science or history.

 

[godless dave]

One behavior I sometimes see is "%artifact% is not authentic, but it's worth taking the question of authenticity seriously. Your arguments against authenticity are flippant and dismissive. My inquiries are serious and reverent."

 

[jond]

While we all await Jabba's next attempt to forget Slowvehicle's dismembering of his blood claims, may I offer some amusing reading? There's a fun new novel from Christopher Buckley titled "The Relic Hunter" about a couple guys attempting to forge the CIQ.

 

[JayUtah]

One behavior I sometimes see is "%artifact% is not authentic, but it's worth taking the question of authenticity seriously. Your arguments against authenticity are flippant and dismissive. My inquiries are serious and reverent."

Indeed, a very common pattern of fringe argumentation begs the question of its own legitimacy. This occurs in two flavors. First is the exact sentiment you report: the presumption that every question, simply by virtue of its being raised, is worth ongoing discussion and enjoys prima facie credibility.

This is essentially the principle behind the fringe reset and, in the larger sense, the cyclical nature of all fringe debate. No, we really don't have to continually reopen the same questions with the same data, over and over again. The fifth iteration of the blood debate isn't going to be any different than the previous four. It never is. But if someone complains that we're going to go through it all again, then he's written off as "dismissive" or "prejudiced." When you consider that the purpose of fringe debate is rarely to arrive at a conclusion, and far more often simply to prolong the discussion and maintain a sense of relevance, you see how this works. It shames people for wanting to make progress and not repeat past arguments.

The second is embodied by Jabba's pretentiously-voiced Italian signature quote. (It's grammatically corrected, just so formally worded as to be comical in context.) It says basically that those who employ the least sarcasm should get the most attention.

But this presumes one's argument doesn't merit mockery. Some arguments legitimately do. One doesn't get to say that one's argument is reasonable simply because he has made it. As we've seen, Jabba gets many reasonable and well-reasoned answers to his posts. The first post is the one that merits a reasonable response. But when he ignores the responses, his subsequent resets merit less and less careful attention. After four years of resetting the same claims over and over again, mockery from those who have suffered for years through them is all Jabba can reasonably respect.

Demanding unflinching cordiality and dispassion from one's abused critics becomes just another poor excuse to avoid the debate.

 

[John Jones]

[...]
The second is embodied by Jabba's pretentiously-voiced Italian signature quote. (It's grammatically corrected, just so formally worded as to be comical in context.) .

Jabba has repeatedly claimed that his sig is Latin, and AFAICT, has never retracted that claim.