Monday, May 2, 2011

Chilling Effects of Religious Bigotry

The maltreatment of Galileo Galilei in the hands of the Church is well known (despite their far-too-little-too-late and backhanded apology) but what may be less well known is that Galileo got off easy compared to Giordano Bruno who was murdered by the Church.

Copernicus suppressed his research due to the church, Campanella was tortured by the church repeatedly for supporting Galileo, Rene Descartes suppressed his research due to Galileo's treatment, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Edmond Halley, Isaac Newton, Georges Louis Leclerc Comte de Buffon, William Buckland, Charles Lyell, Louis Agassiz, Adam Sedgewick, Robert Chambers, Charles Darwin... all scientists whose work was negatively affected by the actions of the Roman Catholic Church against the progress of science.

Why, might we ask, was the work of Galileo and Copernicus so feared by the Church and by the Popes Paul V and Urban VIII?

The answer is simple, if the earth was not the fixed center of creation then the Bible was FALSE. It was, and still is, that simple.

The force and weight of this realization requires an understanding of apostolic succession - the Pope is not claimed to be an ordinary man but a man who is in the direct line of succession from the original apostle Peter:
Mt 16:18 And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
These men KNEW what the bible said and what it meant better than anyone else and it was unquestioned that the earth was the fixed center of the universe (and they had absolutely no inkling of other galaxies). And, while I argue in the strongest possible terms that:
The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the Kingdom of God, who founded the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth and died to give His work its final consecration never had any existence ~ Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965, Nobel Prize 1952), Ph.D, Christian theologian and Dean of Theological College of Saint Thomas at the University of Strasburg; The Quest of the Historical Jesus: First Complete Edition, trans. W. Montgomery, et al., ed. John Bowden (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), page 478
I do believe these men, these Popes, believed what they wrote and that the Bible proclaims that the earth is 1 Chronicles 16:30 "...all the earth: the world also shall be stable, that it be not moved" and Psalm 93:1 "...the world also is stablished, that it cannot be moved".

The very idea of the firmament is the rigid and solid vault of the sky set upon the solid, immobile earth and diving the waters below from those above. But now we know that space is vast and filled with many other stars like our own. It is not a fixed dome upon which chariots of fire move, ridden by the angels (the planets).

It took hundreds of years to overcome the deep-seated bigotry of the Roman Catholic Church against science, and now we live in a world where even 5 year old children can grasp the basics of planetary motion, human beings have traveled to the moon and back to earth, and people can communicate around the globe in a blink of an eye.

Thankfully the stewards of the RCC have slowly come around and seen the error of their ways (although they now turn a blind eye to the obvious contradictions with reality) - unfortunately, their blind eye extends to the horrible actions of their own Priests, Bishops, Cardinals, and even their own Pope who was complicit in the cover up. Ye shall know them by their fruits indeed.

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