Poet/Philosopher George Santayana is credited with saying: “Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it.”

Many, perhaps most people are disinterested and bored by history and consider it a waste of time. Yet, sports enthusiasts devote hours of their time and grey matter to memorizing the records of their favorite football, basketball, hockey, soccer and baseball players and teams. Baseball, for example, is a game in which statistics are meticulously maintained, compared and quoted. But talk about history in human events and they couldn’t be less interested.

However, history does repeat itself, and we would do well to pay attention to the mistakes of the past in order to avoid making them again, or at least try. Case in point: Obama’s health care bill that was recently passed by Congress. In the run-up to the Congressional vote, the issue was hotly debated, and both sides trotted out statistics and projections to buttress their arguments, both pro and con.

Perhaps the most compelling argument against Obama’s health care bill is the federal government’s own record in managing the various major social programs that have been adopted in the past. The following summary (circulated on the Internet) highlights the gap between government promises and delivery:

• The U.S. Post Service was established in 1775. The government has had 234 years to get it right and it is broke.
• Social Security was established in 1935. The government has had 74 years to get it right and it is broke.
• Fannie Mae was established in 1938. The government has had 71 years to get it right and it is broke.
• War on Poverty started in 1964. The government has had 45 years to get it right; $1 trillion of our money is confiscated each year and transferred to “the poor” and they only want more.
• Medicare and Medicaid were established in 1965. The government has had 44 years to get it right and they are broke.
• Freddie Mac was established in 1970. The government has had 39 years to get it right and it is broke.
• The Department of Energy was created in 1977 to lessen our dependence on foreign oil. It has ballooned to 16,000 employees with a budget of $24 billion a year and we import more oil than ever before. The government has had 32 years to get it right and it is an abysmal failure.

Every “government service” that has ever been shoved down our throats has failed. Three additional examples illustrate the point:

• The Post Office lost $3.8 TRILLION in the 2009-10 fiscal year.
• Social Security and Medicare have a combined unfunded liability (deficit) of $107 trillion. That’s seven times the size of the entire U.S. economy and ten times the amount of the nation’s outstanding national debt.
• Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation has pointed out that “welfare spending today is 13 times greater than it was …(when the War on Poverty was initiated). Means-tested welfare spending was 1.2 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in 1964; by 2008, it had reached 5 percent of GDP.”

AND PEOPLE WANT US TO BELIEVE THE GOVERNMENT CAN BE TRUSTED TO RUN THE NATION’S HEALTH CARE SYSTEM?

IT’S NOT ABOUT THE NEED FOR GOOD HEALTH CARE, IT’S ABOUT TRUSTING THE GOVERNMENT TO RUN IT.

No government program ever operates on or under budget and none ever will.

© 2010 Harris R. Sherline, All Rights Reserved

Read more of Harris Sherline’s commentaries on his blog at www.opinionfesst.com

The Shroud of Turin is a 14 foot piece of cloth, stored at the current Cathedral in Turin, Italy, which has a faint image on the front and the back of a man who appears to have been crucified. The claim is that this is the burial shroud of Jesus Christ. I have been fascinated by the amount of evidence presented by scientific researchers indicating that the Shroud is, indeed, genuine, and not a forgery by a medieval artist, as has been claimed by its detractors.

Here, I would like to present the evidence supporting the proposition that the Shroud is genuine. I do this because I find the subject interesting, and hope to share it, but also because there is a conclusion to be drawn from the evidence that gives new insight into the story of Jesus’ life and death…and a possible explanation of why the Church seems so anxious not to have the Shroud proven to be genuine..

First, a very brief history of the Shroud. The historical record dates from 1349, when Geoffrey de Charny, a French knight, writes to Pope Clement VI reporting his intention to build a church at Lirey, France. It is said he built St. Mary of Lirey church to honor the Holy Trinity who answered his prayers for a miraculous escape while a prisoner of the English. He is also already in possession of the Shroud, which some believe he acquired in Constantinople. He donates this Shroud to the Church, as a holy relic.

Before this historical record of the Shroud, itself, displayed in Lirey, we have a long history  of another cloth similar to this. In 544 AD, a burial cloth was discovered ‘above the gate’ in the walls of the city of Edessa, located in Mesopotamia, now in Turkey. This cloth was displayed for centuries as the burial cloth of Jesus. In 944, Emperor Romanus I sent an army to remove the Edessa Cloth and transfer it to his capitol in Constantinople. There it remained until 1204 when it disappeared during the sacking of the city by the crusaders of the Fourth Crusades. There is good evidence that the Edessa Cloth was taken to Athens.

Thus, we have a connection between the Shroud Cloth and the Edessa cloth, but no real proof that the two are one and the same, though the coincidence is compelling.

Further evidence of the authenticity of the Shroud comes from the researchers who were given a week to scientifically examine the Shroud, in 1988. From these investigations, we are presented with the following information:

• The image on the Shroud is that of man of about 30. He has blood on his head, blood on his wrists, and blood on his legs, above the feet. The blood on the head corresponds to the Gospel account of the Crown of thorns. The blood on the wrists corresponds to the spot where the Romans were known to have nailed victims to the cross, instead of in the palms, as is suggested by most Medieval paintings.
• The victim’s back has 109 blood images that resemble a dumbbell. This corresponds to the 36 scourges the Romans were said to have given Jesus prior to the crucifixion; the Roman whips had dumbbell-shaped leather bars on the ends of the whip, three dumbbells per whip.
• The image on the Shroud has no thumbs. The reason for this anomaly was described in 1990, when a forensic pathologist discovered that a nail put through the wrist caused a nerve in the wrist to bring the thumb over onto the palm of the hand, hiding it from above.
• The image on the Shroud can be resolved by computer into a perfect three-dimensional image, which is what one would expect if it was an image of a human being, but not what one would expect if it was a painting.
• There is no paint or pigment on the Shroud. The images of the blood are, in fact, blood. Different scientists working independently conducted immunological, fluorescence and spectrographic tests, as well as Rh and ABO typing of blood antigens that prove it beyond any doubt
• Avinoam Danin, a botany professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a leading authority on the flora of Israel, along with Uri Baruch, a pollen specialist with the Israel Antiquities Authority, reported that the combination of pollen spores lodged in the Shroud’s surface, as well as floral images mysteriously “imprinted” on the face of the cloth, could only have come from plants growing in a restricted area around Jerusalem

There is much, much more, of course, and there are arguments against many of these points. However, the principle argument against the authenticity of the Shroud comes from a Carbon 14 dating of the Shroud, which yielded results indicating the Shroud was made in 1350, exactly what one would expect if the Shroud was a forgery. This result is the most disputed part of the entire Shroud history, and the source of the greatest amount of controversy expressed in Shroud Research.

 The scientific research group examining the Shroud had outlined a very specific sampling plan for this Carbon 14 dating, indicating various sections of the Shroud to be sampled, including blind samples from other similar pieces of cloth, and total anonymity to the laboratories doing the testing, to ensure no existed prejudice either way with the results.

Instead, the Church specified who was to take the samples, this person took samples from places not at all specified in the sampling plan, and sent them to different laboratories without controls and without anonymity. The Shroud researchers are confident that the samples were, in fact, instead of from random sections of the cloth, were instead taken from sections of the cloth that were repaired by Medieval artisans in the 14th century, and NOT from the original sections of the cloth. The Church will not allow additional sampling of the Shroud; this is understandable, considering the age of the Shroud, and its potential religious importance. However, its actions in this respect throw some doubt as to the Church’s eagerness to settle the question of the Shroud’s authenticity? Could  the Church be demonstrating a reluctance to focus on the issue of the ages of the Shroud of Turin and, if so, why would this be so?

One possible answer is suggested in Holger Kersten’s, book “The Jesus Conspiracy” Kersten suggests that the flow of blood evident on the Shroud indicates that the image on the Shroud is that of a living man, not a dead man. That is, Jesus survived the crucifixion, spent a day or so in the tomb, recovering from his experience on the Cross, and then left, leaving an empty tomb. If the Shroud can be shown to be genuine, the basic tenets by which the Church lives, that of the Resurrection of Christ, are subject to question.

This is not a new idea. As far back as 1917 the theologian E. Grimm wrote in his book Die Ethik Jesu (’The Ethics of Jesus’) about the Pauline idea of Salvation, ‘However much this teaching has become rooted among the Christians, the real Jesus knew nothing about it.’ There is widespread agreement in theological research today that the tradition of the story of the empty tomb is historically older than the legend of the resurrected man. At first the report that the tomb of Jesus was empty circulated in the early communities, and only later did Paul tell the story of the miraculous Resurrection of the Lord. In ‘ his early accounts Paul only spoke of a revealing, a seeing or appearance of the ‘Son of God’. Only afterwards did he formulate his theology of the resurrected man

From an historical perspective, these are all interesting questions, the answers to which we shall probably never be certain. The possibility that the Shroud is genuine provides an important historical link to the past and, and possible new insights as to the events that began the largest religion in the world. For an historian, this is very exciting.