Wednesday, 3 March 2010
MADPRIEST'S THOUGHT FOR THE DAY
Far more scientists, who were later proved to be right, have been hauled up before academic inquisitions and then crucified than have been hauled up before religious inquisitions. Galileo had it easy. At least his persecutors weren't a bunch of nobel prize chasing bitches.
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Aye, fundamentalism is all about fear and you find that in all walks of life.
ReplyDeleteI have the feeling that Galileo's announcement went down fine with the church for several years and didn't cause any problems until he a) offended the Pope by calling him stupid and b) started saying he had proved his theory (when technically in scientific terms he hadn't, even though he was obviously eventually proved right). Having taken offence, the Pope ensured he was told to recant. I might be wrong here though.
ReplyDeleteMadpriest, how are you! Don't you know scientists are the embodiment of truth and reason and are never sullied by such imperfections like prejudice and bias as the rest of us poor, unenlightened members of humanity?
ReplyDeletePS. And yes, considering just how dodgy some of Galileo's proofs were, he was indeed lucky he wasn't around today. He certainly wouldn't be in the New Scientist top 10.
Sigh. Time to bash the scientists, again, is it?
ReplyDelete--IT (one of them)
Please give a list of those killed in the Wars of Science.
ReplyDeletePlease give a list of those killed in the Wars of Science.
ReplyDeleteI'm afraid I don't know all their names, Brad. But many of them lived in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Hmm, I wonder about all those academic inquisitions. To be sure, it doesn't take a whole lot to outnumber the actual suppressions of science by the Holy Church, but I still wonder.
ReplyDelete(Take Geneva as well as Rome, and I'm not absolutely sure you can count more than 2 of the real thing.)
I do recall there was a piece of nastiness about misconduct a few years ago that involved David Baltimore (accused, not Inquisitor) but then (a) he was officially cleared, and it clearly hasn't hurt his curriculum vitae, so it's not quite Galilean and (b) for all that, it was a pretty darn dodgy affair.
Really, I'm trying to think of more, but it's hard to come up with victims of stick-in-the-mud opposition (Wegener and the like) who experienced anything that begins to approach what the Holy Church and others did, even discounting the HMC's power (and Calvin's) to credibly threaten torturing the victim to death.
BTW Galileo is accused of calling the Pope a fool, which does not mean that actual historians generally accept that story. And if someone can quickly name a few of his really bad arguments, and not start with his one famous acknowledged failure about the tides, I'll be grateful.
Lemme do some looking it up, Porlock, and I will see where I found that story. As I said above, I was unsure how true it was.
ReplyDeleteTherapy is good for masochism, I'm just saying...
ReplyDeletewv = fibulati - Is that significant I wonder?
Fluff, fibulati would be "guys who pin things", possibly tailors. Mimi isn't the only one who studied Latin.
ReplyDeleteNot latin - Latinos. Mimi studied Latinos back in the 1950s.
ReplyDelete