Quack
Posts: 1961
Joined: May 2007
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| Quote (Wesley R. Elsberry @ Mar. 11 2014,17:59) | DI EN&V:
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But there's one problem: Bruno's execution, troubling as it was, had virtually nothing to do with his Copernican views. He was condemned and burned in 1600, but it was not because he speculated that the Earth rotated around the sun along with the other planets. He was condemned because he denied the doctrine of the Trinity, the Virgin Birth, and transubstantiation, claimed that all would be saved, and taught that there was an infinite swarm of eternal worlds of which ours was only one. The latter idea he got from the ancient (materialist) philosopher Lucretius. Is it any surprise, then, that, as a defrocked Dominican friar denying essential tenets of Catholic doctrine and drawing strength from the closest thing to an atheist in the Roman world, he might have gotten in trouble with the Inquisition? Yet a documentary series about science and our knowledge of the universe fritters away valuable airtime on this Dominican mystic and heretic, while scarcely mentioning Copernicus, the Polish guy who actually wrote the book proposing a sun-centered universe.
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and
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Neil deGrasse Tyson does include a few hedges. While wandering the streets of modern-day Rome, he admits that Bruno wasn't a scientist and that his view of a sun-centered solar system was a "lucky guess." And during the animated dramatization of Bruno's sentence, the dark and menacing judge finds the brave Dominican guilty not just of being a Copernican, but of various theological trivialities which are never otherwise mentioned or explained. Despite these hints at nuance, not one viewer in a thousand could miss the real message: Christianity has been the enemy of science, and its henchmen tried to kill off the first brave souls who ventured a scientific thought.
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From the Cosmos narration by Tyson:
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Giordano Bruno lived in a time when there was no such thing as the separation of church and state, or the notion that freedom of speech was a sacred right of every individual. Expressing an idea that didn't conform to traditional belief could land you in deep trouble. Recklessly, Bruno returned to Italy. Maybe he was homesick, but still he must have known that his homeland was one of the most dangerous places in Europe he could possibly go. The Roman Catholic Church maintained a system of courts known as the Inquisition, and its sole purpose was to investigate and torment anyone who dared voice views that differed from theirs. It wasn't long before Bruno fell into the clutches of the thought police.
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The DI complains that Bruno wasn't killed for his views on cosmology alone. But the point that Tyson clearly laid out in Cosmos was that disagreeing with "traditional belief" could be, and sometimes was, fatal. I don't see any workaround for the lead-up that Cosmos *actually* used, rather than the one the DI would like people to think that they used. People could, and did, end up paying the ultimate penalty for expressing views that were not entirely compatible with "traditional belief". And the grounds upon which death could be served up were sometimes incredibly narrow. Regardless of whether the DI thinks Bruno was a negligible non-entity in the history of science or not, his death stands as a significant event in the annals of religious intolerance, just as Cosmos rightly pointed out.
Well, we've long known that the DI couldn't be troubled to read things for comprehension that they critique (see here for details), but now they can't even watch a TV show? |
Hear hear!
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Rocks have no biology.
Robert Byers.
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