[extropy-chat] Famous author self destructs in public! Filmateleven.

BillK pharos at gmail.com
Sun Jun 5 13:33:35 UTC 2005


On 6/5/05, Charlie Stross wrote:
> 
> Urban legends don't aid the debate. Galileo was to a very large extent
> *protected* by the then Pope, who was a friend of his; what got him
> into trouble was court politics, aggravated by his inability to keep
> his mouth shut at the right time. You will note that Galileo was *not*
> burned at the stake despite this being a fairly common outcome for
> heretics at the time ... and that the reason for the draconian response
> to heresy was that it had political implications: religious doctrine
> was then the accepted way of understanding how the world works, and
> questioning its veracity raised implications for the way state policy
> was formed. That's *never* a safe or easy thing to do; we can see it
> today in the way the Bush administration treats science funding in
> areas that don't appear to support their preconceptions.
> 

Hmmmn.  Stretching a bit here, I feel.
The Catholic Church is very keen nowadays to distance itself from the
Galileo affair and claim that they are not really anti-science.
See - we didn't burn him at the stake. We're nice guys really.

But the facts are still there. What they try to do is spin them another way.
Galileo was forced to recant under the threat of torture and placed
under house arrest for the rest of his life.
Now while this may be due to Galileo upsetting church politics, (and
the Catholic church is a very political bureaucracy), the message that
this sent out to the public was - Galileo is 'nearly' a heretic,
imprisoned and his books banned. Do as the church says or you're next.


Quotes:
His book was to immediately receive wide acceptance and circulation,
only to be suddenly barred by order of the pope himself. Urban moved
quickly to appoint a commission to determine possible charges for the
Office of the Inquisition. Galileo was warned "the sky is about to
fall" by his friend the Duke of Tuscany. The commission found ample
evidence of charges for heresy. Galileo was at this time 70 years old
and wanted to have the charges heard in Florence. He was losing his
eyesight, had severe arthritis and suffered from bouts of colitis. He
only agreed to go to Rome after officers of the Inquisition threatened
to transport him there in chains.
He was given time to re-read his "Dialogues", and, after being shown
the instruments of torture, encouraged to write a judicial confession.
Galileo wrote that he would weaken his theories so that they would
lack any force. This was not good enough for the Inquisition, who
wanted him to admit that he knew of the injunction and chose to ignore
it. Galileo acquiesced. He was found "vehemently suspected of heresy"
and was sentenced to imprisonment at the pleasure of the Office of
Inquisition.
Pope Urban allowed the repentant heretic to depart the bleak
accommodations of the Office of Inquisition in Rome and take up house
arrest under strict conditions, first in the village of Sienna, and
then later in his native Tuscany.
For the rest of his life Galileo remained under house arrest. He was
not allowed to take any extensive trips or to entertain many guests.
Following the death of his favourite daughter in 1634, he lived a
lonely life and became blind in 1637. Despite the attempt to isolate
him from the world, his fame grew — such noted figures as Thomas
Hobbes and the poet John Milton went out of their way to visit him
shortly before his death in 1642. In 1757 after the accuracy of his
research had been established beyond reasonable doubt, the Inquisition
removed the ban on all books that taught the earth moves except those
by Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler. The fallout from this continued to
have a ripple effect all over Europe. The unshackled search for
scientific truth was frequently accompanied by hostility to spiritual
and religious truth.
End quotes.


BillK



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