What some people call the clash of civilizations is not a fight between Islam and the West but between science and faith. The religious rightists in America may want us to believe that they are different from the theocrats of Iran and the fundamentalist of Al Qaeda who teach their suicide bombers that they are targeting “infidel” Christians or Jews, but in fact, the dogmatically religious have more in common with each other than with non-believers.

We live in an age of intense materialism in which scientists are on the verge of understanding how the universe was formed, but we also live at a time of resurgent faith that remains as hostile to science as when Galileo was locked up for observing the centrality of the sun.

The Shroud of Turin, place back on exhibit this week in Turin after eight years, predates Galileo but is one of the most scientifically analyzed religious relics in history. It is said to have come from Jerusalem, possibly brought over by the Knights Templar, a monastic Christian fighting sect formed to protect pilgrims to the Holy Land in the twelfth century. The Shroud is the most well-known of Europe’s thousands of relics. No cathedral worth its arches and gargoyles was ever complete without one of these objects, delivered through fantastic peril from the Holy Land, and ranging from the picturesque — the Virgin Mary’s four-inch-wide green onyx wedding ring in Perugia, Italy, for example — to macabre bits of saints’ bones and enough skulls of John the Baptist to populate a very large choir.

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X News Now

Roopkund, better known as “Skeleton Lake,” is one of those enticing, far away places with mysterious, strange-sounding names. Located in the Indian state of Uttarakhand in an uninhabited corner of the Himalayan Mountains, the area is known for its enormous grave of between 300-600 skeletons, which carbon-testing originally dated back to the 12th to 15th centuries.

First discovered by a park ranger in 1942, this frozen lake has since been revisited in recent years, when a team of European and Indian scientists converged on the area at the behest of the National Geographic Channel. The site is so isolated that it requires about four days travel from the nearest human settlement.

Their research has uncovered new theories and facts. DNA testing placed the dead into two distinct physical categories; one of short stature and the other significantly taller (perhaps royalty). Their findings also contradicted earlier radio-carbon testing, as it is now known that the skeletons are even older than previously thought, ascribed to the 9th century.

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Weird Asia News

I follow The Daily Grail for a several reasons – it’s a font of of all manners of interesting, amusing and delightfully random news (specifically referring to its mostly-daily News Briefs feature), it’s home to some interesting writing and articles and presents a variety of viewpoints that I find, if not always relevant to my personal interests, at least useful to gain a more wide-ranging viewpoint of things.

However, the paranormal- and supernatural-themed website’s oft-resentful and bellicose attitude towards skeptics, especially more prominent ones such as Phil Plait from Bad Astronomy, is not one of them.

Here’s a good example of this rather irritating and at times downright misleading tone, from webmaster Greg Taylor’s latest post, forebodingly titled “Skeptics <3 the Paranormal”, which is itself a response to the Bad Astronomer’s excellent post regarding skeptics’ role(s) and attitude(s) towards the Catholic Church and its dealing with the mounting clerical child sex abuse scandal...

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Preliator Pro Causa

Canadian archeologists in Turkey have unearthed an ancient treaty that could have served as a model for the biblical description of God´s covenant with the Israelites.

The tablet, dating to about 670 BC, is a treaty between the powerful Assyrian king and his weaker vassal states, written in a highly formulaic language very similar in form and style to the story of Abraham´s covenant with God in the Hebrew Bible, says University of Toronto archeologist Timothy Harrison.

Although biblical scholarship differs, it is widely accepted that the Hebrew Bible was being assembled around the same time as this treaty, the seventh century BC.

“Those documents . . . seem to reflect very closely the formulaic structure of these treaty documents,” he told about 50 guests at the Ottawa residence of the Turkish ambassador, Rafet Akgunay.

He was not necessarily saying the Hebrews copied the Assyrian text, substituting their own story about how God liberated them from slavery in Egypt on the condition that they worship only Him and follow His commandments.

But it will be interesting for scholars to have this parallel document.

“The language in the [Assyrian] texts is [very similar] and now we have a treaty document just a few miles up the road from Jerusalem.”

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Red Ice Creations