holy relics wholly bollocks

Just to expand a bit on the cryptozoology/religion parallels drawn in the previous post, one of the dangers of making any sort of (even in theory) verifiable claim about the way the world works is that you have to come up with a defensive strategy in the event of science getting its mucky little hands on your claim and proving it to be false, assuming of course that abandoning your belief system isn't a palatable option. This is doubly dangerous for any bullshit claim that rests on the provenance of actual physical objects, since these are particularly well-suited to scientific analysis, whether you call them "holy relics" or "some bits of old hair and skin" or whatever.

The classic recent example of a religious relic is of course the Turin Shroud; those who rest some of their faith on the claim that it is the real burial shroud of Jesus Christ have had to do some hasty rationalising in the light of the revelation that it is most likely of 13th or 14th century origin. Same goes for Bigfoot; if you're saying he's a real ape-man and, moreover, this is his actual fur right here, you have to have a fallback strategy when science comes back, as it will, and says nah, this is just some dog hair off the carpet.

Faith-based belief systems are exceptionally resistant to having most or even all of the legs sawn out from under them by reality, though, whether it's the debunking of holy relics or just the mundane business of the sun coming up, moving across the sky and then setting again in the normal manner on a day when the world was supposed to be ending in one of any number of lurid and spectacular ways. Coincidentally today is the 169th anniversary of one of the canonical examples of such an occurrence, the Great Disappointment of 1844.