Would that include lekatt?
You know, if a whole bunch of your participations in threads seem to end this way, you might just want to explore your subjective reality and try to figure out why.
-Joe
If we paw through the Da Vinci Code, the parts that couldn’t be decoded…?
Yeah, well, that’s what happens when your posts are largely unintelligible.
Where God is acid jazz isn’t.
Where God is Spongebob isn’t.
Where God is blue isn’t.
God is with those who feign belief in him.
Infinite possibilities is not a lot of possibilities. It’s an absence of possibilities.
Bottomless is not a long way down. It’s an absence of down.
Endless buffet is not a lot of food. It’s an absence of food.
Touch me and you shall know. Pay me and you shall become enlightened. I don’t take plastic.
But those kinds of places get better tips.
I can’t help it, there is something wrong with my brain.
I think you left out the part where God sticks you on the end of a fork and roasts you over His fireplace. When you become cracklin, He pops you into His mouth and swallows.
I am really enjoying this, more, more.
So what part of your little mind wrote this “I must leave this thread, it has been hi-jacked enough. If someone wants to discuss the definitions of God for themselves, start a new thread. I won’t start a thread because that would require too much of my time tending it. I have other chores.,” the part that lacks all integrity?
Let’s not get back into personal insults, here.
And given the number of people killed or crippled by the Inquisition, there’s a fair argument to be made that religion has assaulted science.
Not really, since very few people subjected to the Inquisition were judged over scientific issues. The poster boys for such matters are, typically, Galileo, who was dragged up before the Inquisition after he attempted to force changes in doctrine, and Giordano Bruno, who was actually executed for his religious beliefs regarding the divinity of Jesus and whose scientific works did not enter into the Inquisitorial trial.
The argument can be made, however, that the Inquisition and witchcraft trials stymied the progress of medical sciences. Midwives and women who used herbs in healing were sometimes accused of witchcraft, especially if their methods met with a suspicious amount of success.
My understanding was both Bruno’s docetism and his support for the Copernican model were factors in his trial. The latter first drew the Inquisition’s attention and got him excommunicated, at any rate, or so I thought. If I remember correctly, after years of imprisonment, he was defiant and wouldn’t recant or shut up about his heresies, so they literally nailed his tongue down and burned him at the stake.
To the extent that the Inquisition interfered with medicine, it probably had far more to do with rules against desecrating bodies than midwifery. The places that happened to persecute midwives (when that happened) tended to be in the Protestant countries away from the Inquisition. In Catholic countries, you were more likely to wind up in a witch trial if you were a wealthy burger or a heretical law student.
I have found no evidence that his support for the Copernican model had anything to do with his imprisonment or trial. (Recall that Galileo was out discussing the Copernican model with the Jesuits quite happily over fifteen years after Bruno’s execution and it took Galileo’s personal enemies three tries (including doctoring his papers to look bad) before they could get the Inquisition to even summon Galileo in for a talk. That is hardly the sort of scenario I would expect to find if the Inquisition was wandering around looking to nail anyone who voiced support for the Copernican model.)
And this has what to do with you, exactly?
From Dava Sobel’s Galileo’s Daughter
Then there’s this guy’s take on Bruno:
According to the Wikipedia entry:
Then there’s this admittedly hagiographic summary:
It’s clear that, despite no explicit proscription of the Copernican model directly by the Church (which did not occur until after Galileo had died), it was nonetheless of serious concern to various official bodies acting under the auspices of the Church, and hence the unanimous vote in 1616 by eleven church theologians, at the request of Pope Paul V (being eager to promote the Council of Trent reforms), that the Copernican system was “formerly heretical” and “erroneous in faith”. This led directly to Galileo’s first omenous warning, in a meeting on Feb. 26th of that year with Cardinal Bellarmino (one of Bruno’s inquisitors), who admonished him to abandon the notion the Earth moved around the sun. On March 5th, the Congregation of the Index declared in an edict that the Copernican model was “false and contrary to Holy Scripture” and halted publication of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus until it could appropriately edited, in light of the conflict. It’s true neither Paul V in 1616, nor Urban VIII in 1633 evoked Papal infallibility in their explicit support for the edict and Galileo’s trial, respectively, it does seem that being a public exponent of Copernican astronomy could get you into serious trouble even before it became an official heresy in the eyes of the Church itself.
To what extent exactly it cost Bruno his life will never be known, as the documents of the full verdict against him have apparently been lost.
However, none of your citations actually provides an ecclesiastical connection between Bruno and Copernican thought. While “the world of science” would like to claim Bruno as a martyr, the “world of science” seems singularly unable to provide any evidence for their claim. And, as I mentioned, the trial of 1616 was the result of three separate efforts to get Galileo hauled into the court. If Copernican thought was so threatening, why was it not a red flag to drag him in on the first pass?
In fact, it was Galileo’s insistence that the Church had to reshape Scripture (when Bellarmine had offered him a conciliatory middle path) that actually got him tried, finally. And in the first trial, he was simply ordered to not publish on the topic, not actually told to deny it. There is simply no evidence that the Church was seeking to suppress Copernican thought before Galileo raised the issue in the theological context. Once he pissed off the pope in 1632, the Church certainly screwed up in making it an issue, but even there, the trial of 1632 was actually based on a document discovered in his 1616 file which Galileo claims to have never seen and there has been serious speculation that it was fraudulently entered after the 1616 trial was closed. In other words, individuals within the church worked to destroy Galileo and the Copernican revolution was simply collateral damage.
I’m not sure where “the world of science” came into this. I was quoting a number of historians or other chroniclers, one of which (Sobel) has written a very even-handed account of the Galileo affair that does not shy from portraying the flaws of Galileo’s own impolitic role in the debacle. Are they all wrong? I guess it surprises me that they might be, as I’ve never read an account that said Bruno wasn’t in the hot seat for his cosmology, as well as his theology. There’s a massive fiction being promoted if what you say is correct, and yet Bellarmino, as Sobel notes, was himself of the oppinion that Copernicus was a heretic. This caused Prince Cesi of the Lyncean Academy, with whom Bellarmino discussed the subject, to speculate that De revolutionibus would never have been published had Copernicus been born after the Council of Trent. It seems not unreasonable, as Bellarmino had tried Bruno, that it factored in his execution, as every source I cited has claimed. But, out of fairness, Bruno had truly antagonized so many, for so many different reasons, it’s a wonder he stayed alive as long as he did in the climate of the day. At any rate, given that key documents from the trial of Bruno are missing, it’s not clear to me why the evidence that he was only condemned for docetism is any stronger.
I’ve never read anywhere that Galileo wanted to “rework scripture”, though he certainly took umbrage with the notion that he could not and should not offer his own oppinion on how it ought to be interpreted. In light of the cites above, I see no reason to conclude the only problem the Church had with Copernicus is that Galileo was his irritating champion. I really can’t understand this need to mitigate the culpability of the Church in its abuses because its adversaries were uppity or abrasive. It makes no difference in my mind whether Copernican astronomy bothered them as a scientific or theological concern, and I can’t see why it should matter. Moving to suppress it and censure and imprision those who championed it, merely because they voiced an opposition to an authority, was wrong. No doctrinal or purely philosiphical transgression of any thinker in that time ought to somehow even partially exonorate their oppressor, nor should so many generous excuses be made for it. Galileo and Bruno certainly had their failings (especially as a father, in G’s case, IMO, and I’d say he is as guilty of denying his daughters freedom as the Church was for denying his own), but what of it?
I simply cannot accept the notion that the Church wouldn’t have suppressed challenge, inquiry, science that contradicted scripture, and so forth, unless their noses were rubbed in it. Nothing about the Church’s history at that time suggests they required such provocation to act in the harshest manner, and Galileo and Bruno were themselves surprised out of their initial optimism for acceptance of their ideas by the responses to them, each having eventually legitimate reason to fear for their lives.