“The Shroud of Turin is a fake. It has been demonstrated repeatedly both in dating and in the science required to make it.”
You are so wrong. You should do some more critical reading.
The shroud is not an idol, and it is not worshipped.
Read the thread before you make such a claim.
I know of no one who believes the Shroud is authentic whose faith would be weakened in the slightest if it could be definitively proved that it is a fake.
You just don’t get it. Those who believe it is genuine do so because of the EVIDENCE. Absent the overwhelming evdence in favor of authenticity, we’d say, “can’t be sure whether it’s a fake or not, so fugeddaboudit.” For most of its history that was the attitude of most people, including most devout Catholics and including the hierarchy.
But then new evidence, sriking evidence, came to light in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The shift from “ho-hum” to “man-alive, I think this just may be Jesus’ burial-shroud” came in DIRECT RESPONSE TO NEW SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE after 1900, especially in the last half of the 20th century.
This whole thing has always been evidence-driven. Some of those most strongly convinced of its authenticity were once skeptics who set out to prove it a fake. Many of them were and still are unbelievers.
I have offered you evidence why your snippy attitude is based on pre-judice rather than evidence. Have you ever even studied any of the evidence on this issue? Somehow I doubt it. But never let facts keep you from pontificating. It’s more fun to shoot from the hip.
The answer is "no".
That's not the correct question, though. The correct question is why non-believers such as those who funded these "experiments", find relics to be such a challenge and go to such lengths to try and discredit them?
We may not need relics to support our faith but atheists certainly need to discredit them to support their lack of faith.
As for the Shroud itself, science proves nothing. If the Shroud was genuine then it would have been witness to an event unprecedented in the annals of human and natural history; the resurrection of a dead body.
What physical and scientific phenomena accompany such an event? Is light and/or radiation emitted? Could this impact dating methods used to assess the age of the Shroud? We simply don't know. If you think science has all the answers to the Shroud, you're wrong.
Science is investigating an event which went beyond the normal laws of nature. In these situations it is blind.
Show me the people who say that they only believe Jesus is the crucified and Resurrected Son of God if his burial cloth is in a church in Torino.
I'll wait.
God Bless you.
Even if it were the actual burial shroud, so what. My faith is in Jesus. I don't need a physical object to believe.