the shroud of turin

i was just watching a documentary about the shroud of turin on the history channel the other day...

this particular relic has always vexed me, entirely.

do any of you have any opinions as to it's authenticity?

personally, i think it's a painting.

you can't wrap a blanket around a three-dimensional, and moderately angular form, and get a straight-on portrait of the object.

the image you see on the shroud looks like a scanned image of a human body.

now, what it SHOULD look like is a texture map from a videogame. all warped, and distorted. christ's face should be roughly twice as wide.

ya' get my drift?

of course, the believers would have an answer for why it doesn't look that way, right?

please, throw in your two cents...

It's possible that it's real.  I think Jesus must have existed, it can't ALL just be made up.  But at the time of his death, he wasn't such a 'big deal'.  He was an insignificant crucifee.  So I think that (given all the fake religious relics that were drifting around Europe in the dark ages) it's fake.

Anyway, Jesus wasn't the son of God, so who cares whether or not it's genuine?

how could it be genuine?

think about this:

if you paint a ball red, and then wrap it in a blanket, the ball isn't going to leave a red circle on the blanket.

why? why? because it's a three-dimensional object with more than one surface, and as the blanket covers all of it's contours, it's going to record a distorted image.

i'd love for someone to use an image of the shroud to extrapolate a model of what sort of twisted, pole thin, sickly, un-human form would result in the image left on it.