Some Advice from Stephen Jones: My response to Dan Porter

Here is my response to another Dan Porter post about me. Please note that I have NEVER posted about Porter except as a response to one of his posts about me. If Porter can restrain himself from attacking me publicly in his posts then I won't respond to him. Quite frankly I have better things to do with my time than bother about Porter! Again Porter's words and quoted words of mine are in bold.

Some Advice from Stephen Jones
April 25, 2014

You might want to read the whole thing. I wish I hadn't encountered this in the morning. Coffee isn't strong enough. A couple shots of 100 proof Virginia bourbon would help with the reading of this. Interesting. I have a glass of wine at about 5PM most days (including today after my response to Porter) but I have never felt the need to drink alcohol to respond to a

[Right: "Red wine glass," Amazon.com]

post, or a problem. I must be bothering Porter, which is good for his sake (2Cor 7:10).

Stephen warns:

If Jesus caused His scourged, crowned with thorns, and crucified and speared in the side image to be imprinted on His burial sheet and then has preserved it against all the odds down to this day, then it is highly likely (to put it mildly) that He expects those who become aware of His image on the Shroud, to repent and believe in Him and His death on the cross to pay for their sins. So those who become aware of the evidence for the Shroud's authenticity, yet refuse to believe in Jesus and His death for them, will, like Chorazin and Bethsaida receive a more severe judgment than if they had never heard of the Shroud.

It is noteworthy that Porter does not comment on the above. As a non-Christian he no doubt finds it incomprehensible, and even "nutty" (see below). But does he really think that the Shroud has survived down to the present day, against all the odds, is just an accident?:

"However the image was formed, we may well be entranced by the fourteen-foot length of linen in Turin. For if the author's reconstruction is correct, the Shroud has survived first-century persecution of Christians, repeated Edessan floods, an Edessan earthquake, Byzantine iconoclasm, Moslem invasion, crusader looting, the destruction of the Knights Templars, not to mention the burning incident that caused the triple holes, the 1532 fire, and a serious arson attempt made in 1972. It is ironic that every edifice in which the Shroud was supposedly housed before the fifteenth century has long since vanished through the hazards of time, yet this frail piece of linen has come through almost unscathed." (Wilson, I., 1979, "The Shroud of Turin: The Burial Cloth of Jesus Christ?," Revised edition, p.251).

And that the Shroud's only purpose today is to titillate 21st century dilettantes like him?

Stephen writes mostly about me:

[Because] Mt 7:22-23. "22 On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?' 23 And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.'"

In the context I wrote that I regard Porter as just one of the MANY who Jesus warned THOUGHT they were Christians but found out too late that they were not, because they had no PERSONAL relationship with Him.

I hasten to add that it is OK to be a non-Christian in the Shroud discussion. Barry Schwortz and Thomas de Wesselow are two non-Christians who think the Shroud is authentic. But according to Jesus' words above (which Dan will probably dismiss as a mere "metaphor," it is NOT OK to be a non-Christian and especially a non-Christian who THINKS he is a Christian when he isn't.

Whether it is metaphor or poetic hyperbole or a prophetic vision understood literally, the interpretation is nutty. Porter confirms my expectation that he finds it incomprehensible, indeed "nutty," that Jesus meant what He plainly said. That's Porter's problem.

Stephen is also closing in on evidence that the carbon dating results were fraudulently changed by computer hackers. (I continue to leave out the names of people he blames but you can read them on his blog): It is interesting that the `open-minded' Porter has a completely closed mind on the possibility of my "Were the radiocarbon dating laboratories duped by a computer hacker?" proposal being true. It is also hypocritical of Porter to claim he is concerned about "the names of [two] people" (Timothy W. Linick and Karl Koch) who have been dead for 25 years, yet he has continually provoked me to name them, not to mention his allowing me, a live person, to be continually defamed on his blog!

I have since found documentary evidence of how Zurich and Oxford's AMS control console computers could have been accessed remotely by [so and so] (with the help of [another so and so] who confessed he had hacked for the KGB) and their programs changed, yet them never having been connected to Arpanet or the Internet. And that would explain why [the so and so and the other so and so] unexpectedly `committed suicide' within days of each other.

Again no comment by Porter. His "[so and so]" (for Timothy W. Linick and Karl Koch) is cute. Does Porter not consider that his continually posting about my hacker proposal on his blog will cause his members to read their names on my blog? If Porter really was concerned about those two long-dead individuals (one of whom, Karl Koch, was a self-confessed hacker who worked for the KGB):

"Karl Werner Lothar Koch (July 22, 1965 – ca. May 23, 1989) was a German hacker in the 1980s ... Koch was loosely affiliated with the Chaos Computer Club. He worked with the hackers known as DOB (Dirk-Otto Brezinski), Pengo (Hans Heinrich Hübner), and Urmel (Markus Hess), and was involved in selling hacked information from United States military computers to the KGB. ... Pengo and Koch subsequently came forward and confessed to the authorities under the espionage amnesty, which protected them from being prosecuted. Koch was found burned to death with gasoline in a forest near Celle, Germany. The death was officially claimed to be a suicide. However, some believe there is little evidence supporting suicide and many believe that Koch was killed in order to keep him from confessing more to the authorities. Why Koch would be targeted, and not Pengo and Urmel, is unknown. Koch left his workplace in his car to go for lunch [on 23 May 1989]; he had not returned by late afternoon and so his employer reported him as a missing person. Meanwhile, German police were alerted of an abandoned car in a forest near Celle. When they went to investigate [on 1 June 1989], they found an abandoned car, that looked like it had been there for years, as it was covered in dust. Near to the car they found a burned corpse (Koch). His shoes were missing and have never been found. There was a patch of burned ground around him, which although it had not rained in some time and the grass was perfectly dry, was controlled in a small circle around the corpse. It is thought to be highly unlikely that this type of controlled burning could have been achieved by Koch himself which leads many to believe that his death was not suicide." ("Karl Koch (hacker)," Wikipedia, 30 March 2014. Footnotes and comments omitted. My emphasis).

being defamed, he would not write anything about my hacker proposal on his blog.

In fact I would be happy if Porter didn't write anything about what I post on my blog. One thing that Colin Berry and I agree on is that we both regard Porter as a type of scavenger, who doesn't post much, if any, original material on his blog, but mostly appropriates the original material of others, and then editorialises on it.

I have asked Stephen for examples of how he was defamed on my blog – that is one of his complaints about me. He explains that since he no longer reads the comments about him he cannot do so. That is the truth. I did not keep copies of the defamatory comments against me by Porter's members on his blog, and I wrote in my final comment on Porter's blog that I would not read comments on it anymore. So even if I wanted to post those defamatory comments against me on Porter's blog (which I don't), if I now went into his blog and copied those defamatory comments then Porter could accuse me of going back on my word. But Porter (and his members) KNOW that I was being continually defamed on his blog, under posts about my hacking proposal, and despite me pointing out that the comments were defamatory, Porter never lifted a finger to protect my freedom of speech. The final straw which caused me to leave Porter's blog for good was when he edited out the names of these two long-dead hackers, presumably on the grounds that it was defamatory of them, yet Porter never did anything about the defamatory comments made by some of his members against me, a live person!

Posted 25 April 2014. Updated 25 March 2023.