Berenger Sauniere

You just made my point without realizing it. You're all wrapped up in the earth-bound Shroud of Turin, while you should be dealing with the abstract/metaphysical Shroud of Jesus. Those who were responsible for producing the former, were masters in the latter. And I offer my deepest apologies if I come off as a little spacey, but at least I know the identity of the man staring back at you from that inglorious sack-cloth.

katerina2

Léon,

Veillez lire ta messagerie privée merci

Gurdur

Sigh, I'll let you return to your shroud, which IMHO (no offense intended) is a deeply boring subject whether one is Christian, atheist or Buddhist; it is of interest only if one is into magic and "signs".

Bree

Forgive me if I'm wrong, here, but nowhere does Gurdur say that epilepsy makes one a specific religion (Christian or otherwise).

It seems to me that Gurdur is suggesting that pre-onset epileptic auras could be mistaken for (and probably have been several times in the past by several different people) as "mystical" experiences.

If I'm wrong, slap me.

leonarde

Posted by Berenger: Okay, Berenger, but here I'm not
interested in the "metaphysical" as you put it:
there are plenty of threads at II for that type of disputation. HERE I'm interested in the very concrete stuff: blood presence, blood type, wounds and their physiological correctness as determined by forensic pathologists etc. For the
purposes of archaeology this could be the shroud
of......Barabas(!!!).....(and perhaps it almost was!).
So perhaps, Berenger, I'll meet you on another
thread dealing with metaphysical matters but a centuries-old shroud is a PHYSICAL thing and its
authenticity will be proved or disproved based of
physical facts about it.
Cheers!

leonarde

Posted by Bree: No you aren't wrong
and I'm not slapping-prone. Perhaps I was overly
dismissive of Gurdur's point: I DID read years ago
in one or more Dostoevsky biography that these
not-quite-normal-not-quite-a-seizure states COULD
leave one with something like a trance and for someone with a very religious outlook that could be combined with/interpreted as a religious experience.
However, I want to avoid oversimplifying believers
and unbelievers alike by attributing their theological stances and/or "religious experiences" to one or two factors. To me that is
an all-too-facile dismissal of same.

IN GENERAL Eastern Orthodoxy has a deeply mystical
side which is not readily accessible to Protestants or those strongly influenced by Protestantism. Russian Orthodoxy is what I am most
familiar with and it has a strong vein of such mysticism, perhaps most famously----and infamously
------publicized by the "Mad Monk" Rasputin. Since
there was a strong connection between R. Orthodoxy
the Russian state, and the Russian monarchy it isn't surprising that Dostoevsky was numbered in
the 19th Century among the Slavicists (ie people
who believed in a special God-given role for the
Slavs in general and the Russian people in particular)as opposed to the most Western-oriented
contemporaries like the novelist Turgenev. The
Russians are famous for believing in the specialness of the "Russian soul" and again this
is a mystical idea (ie an idea connected with religion but NOT inexorably tied to it). Alexander
Kerensky was lecturing people in the West on the
"Russian soul" decades after he lost power to the
Bolsheviks, yet Kerensky was by most measures a
progressive, even a socialist of sorts). For all
his eloquence Solzhenitsen seems to have a mystical streak as well.

I very much like Dostoevsky as an author. In the
1970s and 80s he was my favorite author. But I certainly wouldn't want to be put in a position of
defending ALL his religious OR political beliefs
and I felt myself having to consider that role
in responding to Gurdur.
So yes, there is a lot of truth in what Gurdur says but it is difficult to quantify and for a
novelist the truest effect of his epilepsy/mysticism seems to have been his ability
to depict both the mysticism and the epileptic
experiences in his works.
Cheers!

[ May 12, 2002: Message edited by: leonarde ]</p>

leonarde

Quasi-literary note for Kat: No, Sancho Panza's
last adventure ended quite some time ago.
Cheers!

Gurdur

This is getting really dumb and ridiculous.

First off:


1) I talked about the specific writer's epileptic attacks, the fact he described mystical experiences with stongly religious overtones in pre-onset auras, and the fact I would like to see some discussion of this.


2) Leonarde replied along the lines that it didn't explain all religion (something that I didn't even bring up).


3) I re-emphasized the writer's specific epileptic experience, and its possible overall effect on the writer's Weltanschauung.


4) Leonarde replied that he (more or less) just didn't know enough about it (obviously), or that enough was known about epilepsy (untrue in the sense Leonarde implied it - what is true is that Leonarde himself doesn't know enough about it), and that such things don't explain all religion (never in question; one wonders why Leonarde feels the need to keep on reiterating that).


The only all-too-facile dismissal here is Leonarde's; he should have simply admitted he just doesn't know enough about either epilepsy or the writer's own epilepsy and left it at that, rather than struggling around in empty self-justifications and a haze of smoke-screens as he does.

Leonarde , because of his own ignorance, does not wish to discuss the subject.
Fair enough, but he should admit it plainly.

[ May 13, 2002: Message edited by: Gurdur ]</p>

Oresta

I admit to skimming the last three pages, so if the point I make here has already been made, ignore this post.
The SoT was exposed as a fraud almost immediately after it surfaced in the 16th (date?) century by the bishop, who got the con artist to admit to his scam. Furthermore, carbon dating verifies the age of the shroud with the date it first shows up. The image is not a true negative. If it were "printed" out, the image would have white hair. The beard is styled in the fashion of the time the SoT shows up. Et., etc, etc. I recntly purged my files and all I had on this sybject is gone. I'm too lazy to go searching again. But trust me, Lenny, it's a fake.

leonarde

Trust me, Oresta, you are at least a generation
behind in Shroud research. Read Ian Wilson's book;
it is the easiest way to catch up.