A Skeptical Response to Raymond N. Rogerson on the Radiocarbon Sample from the Shroud of Turin

Refers to McCrone as Sturp

Your First Link is to Picknett and Prince book on their theory that Leonardo Da Vinci created the shroud by photography, using silver nitrate and a camera obscura (using his own face) because he was a joking atheist. Right. Sure. Of course, the fact that Leonardo was born 95 years after the first display of the Shroud in Lirey, France, in 1357 means that first he had to invent his famous time machine. These little flaws in their thesis might give some clues as to the weight one should give to their writings.

Your Second Link is merely a cut-and-paste from Wikipedia which states that McCrone participated in STURP's research. No one has argued differently. We just disagree on the degree of that participation.

The Third Link is another cut-and-paste from a Wikipedia article, (albeit done apparently by Shroudie—Daniel Porter) that repeats McCrone's claim of membership. Porter parenthetially corrects the record at the end of the article.

Your Fourth Link is from a blog of a skeptic calling himself 80, who thinks that failed magician and English teacher Joe Nickell is qualified to critique scientific articles. He also accepts every word that McCrone wrote, ignoring and dismissing as "psuedoscience", as do you, everything that disagrees with his uninformed opinion. His McCrone/STURP connections are merely quotations from the error filled articles of Nickell and the vitriol filled ones from Schafersman, both of whom quote McCrone's self serving claims of membership.

Your Fifth Link shows that late coming researchers were were not members of STURP are susceptible to the McCrone/STURP canard, quoting from what appears to be sentences taken without attribution from the Wikipedia article again. Garbage facts in supposed authoritative sources resorts in garbage repeated.

Your Sixth and last Link not only repeats the false McCrone claim but also confabulates Gary Habermas into STURP membership and implies by juxtaposition that Baiama Bollone is a STURP member as well to attempt to show a non-existent disunity in the group. Neither of these two men were STURP members and never have been. His claim:

Members of the team were forced to sign an oath of secrecy, preventing them from publishing results before the report came out in 1980. By that time, there was no sign of a report and individual team members had published their results elsewhere. And those results were controversial: team members disagreed with each other over the significance and meaning of what they had found in a war of words that was conducted in public."

is made up completely. Members of STURP did agree to publish together; no one was "forced" to sign. The only scientist who broke his agreement, who although not a STURP member was contractually bound to submit his work to peer review with the group and violated that contract by publishing his findings in his magazine The Microscope, was Walter McCrone. The author of your website blog then tries to make controversy—where there was—none by including Habermas, Stevenson, and Bollone as other STURP members in revolt against the foot-dragging group. They were not. Stevenson, of IBM, was one of the founders and funders of STURP. Your web page authors, Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews and James Doeser, try to include Habermas' and Stevenson's best-selling 1981 book, Verdict on the Shroud: Evidence for the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, into the some kind of in-your-face, publishing pissing match that supposedly took place in 1979 and 1980 between STURP members. The fact is that the only pissing match was started by McCrone and his failure to live up to his agreements. The STURP report was released in late-1980, on schedule, after two years of intense research.

In other words I was right that these sources stated he was a member of STURP. Again, I don’t even care.

You shouldn’t waste your valuable time on chasing these citations. I was merely pointing out that I had my reasons for believing he was part of STURP. I didn’t know they had membership cards, secret handshakes and the like.

I mentioned pseudoscience, because I see pseudoscience, not because I disagree with the findings, but because the findings often arise out of supposition, violation of scientific method and lack of experimental rigor.

All the things exhibited by McCrone and Schaeferman.

McCrone said it -- I believe it -- that settles it!

I won’t be talking much for a while. I made the cut and am going to Nationals for my Buffalo wing sauce on the 31st.

Wish me luck...or pray for me ;).

Like, *dude*.

I thought I had wished you well on another thread about it, but I spent 20 minutes looking for that thread, and my reply, in vain.

Absolutely double-plus-good on the wing sauce.

Oceania is behind you!

Cheers!