Why an Atheist Thinks the Shroud of Turin is the Real Deal

The Real Flat Earth Society

At the time of the 1988 carbon 14 tests, when an Oxford researcher commented that anyone who now believed that the shroud was real must be a member of the Flat Earth Society, there really was a Flat Earth Society.

The Flat Earth Society was, and still is, a worldwide organization with a few members, headquartered in Lancaster, California. The worldview of its members is rooted in the tenets of the Universal Zetetic Society, which flourished in England in the nineteenth century. Charles K. Johnson, its president in 1988, had, as he saw it, “reduce[d] truth to factuality, either scientifically verifiable or historically reliable . . .” His history was right out of the King James Bible and from a collection of highly imaginative conspiracy theories, mostly in his head. “It’s the Church of England that’s taught that the world is a ball,” proclaimed Johnson. “George Washington, on the other hand, was a flat-earther. He broke with England to get away from those superstitions.” What is true, at least, is that in the late nineteenth century, a Yorkshire Church of England vicar, the Rev. M. R. Bresher, was so horrified by the Zetetic movement that he went about England strenuously arguing that the world was certainly round like a ball.