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

[Dirk Bruere]

BillK wrote:

>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.
>
>  
>
Perhaps you'd like to compare this with the fate of Wilhem Reich.
http://www.hermes-press.com/reich.htm

In 1947, following a vicious smear article in the /New Republic/ by 
Mildred Edie Brady, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) began an 
investigation into Reich's orgone energy accumulator. The Brady article 
claimed that Reich was conducting a sex racket, and the FDA assumed that 
his books must be pornographic literature. The FDA gestapo were 
uninterested in scientific information concerning the accumulator, and 
when Reich refused to cooperate with their witch hunt, the investigation 
bogged down, lacking any evidence against the accumulator.

 In 1954, during the Joe McCarthy era, the American feds decided to go 
after Reich again. Without any proof whatsoever, the Food and Drug 
Administration succeeded in having a federal court brand the accumulator 
a fraud, with the added dictum that orgone energy does not exist, and 
the order that all literature even mentioning orgone energy should be 
burned. The FDA placed a ban on transporting or using Reich's orgone 
boxes. Because one of Reich's co-workers continued to transport the 
orgone boxes, Reich was imprisoned. He died of a heart attack in prison 
at the age of 60 in 1957, the day before he was to go up for parole.

______

There is also a subtext that is not often mentioned in that various US 
agencies, from the USAF to the CIA, wanted the 'secrets' of Orgone 
energy. His mistake was to tell them to take a hike.

And let's not forget that this was not set in the Galileo era but in my 
lifetime.

-- 
Dirk

The Consensus:-
The political party for the new millenium
http://www.theconsensus.org



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