It reminds me of efforts to prove the existence of a “soul” by weighing a body just before and just after death. If such a soul is of the spiritual realm, it would have no physical weight.
All of it goes to making life beyond, apparently subject to the physical, and thus itself physical. Almost a “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”-type view of the dead and demons. I enjoyed that show, while recognizing the flaw in its perspective there. It would be to say that the spiritual can actually be fought with the physical – that arms crafted by the hands of man could challenge that which is supposed to be beyond man. (I felt the same way about “Ghostbusters.”)
I am not one to insist on “faith” as requiring that there be NO evidence, as some skeptics and unbelievers will claim in order to silence people of faith. Rather, I would argue that the idea that we can measure physically the spiritual power and action of the Divine opens the way too much for temporal subjugation. Was it God or was it actually corporeal temporal aliens? Or ancient technology? Or a strange act of nature?
I don’t claim to know the explanation for the shroud. And my own “worldview” has plenty of room for the unusual, the paranormal, and the spiritual without this cloth being what it is purported to be by these “believers.” Each of you believe as you believe, but I will only adopt a religious dogma if the Man Himself – the One Who is the One – tells it to me in Person. (And that only with verification – Bones was wrong: you can ask the Almighty for his ID.) Anything else might be wrong.
