Keith Hudson wrote:
[snip]
> For most of their history, religions have guarded their power as implacably
> as any government. In 1600, Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome
> by the Christian Church for his "obstinate and pertinacious heresies". He'd
> conjectured: "There are countless constellations, suns and planets; we see
> only the suns because they give light; the planets remain invisible, for
> they are small and dark. There are also numberless earths circling around
> their suns, no worse and no less than this globe of ours."
I believe this is not quite right. I believe there
is at least some evidence that Bruno may have been a political
secret agent, and that he did not exactly try to keep from
being burned.
I have no fondness for the Roman Catholic Church, but that
does not justify oversimplifying matters. I have confidence
that the Church's reputation will not greatly benefit from
any advance in historical knowledge.
But the facts seem to remain that the reason Galileo
got into trouble were that he made a point of
making a fool of a pope who had been his friend and
supporter, and that he did it in Italian and not Latin.
The Church let scientists entertain all sorts of
ideas in Latin. Kepler's main problem, I believe,
was to keep his mother from being burned as a
witch. tHE Roman Catholic Church in Bruno's time,
as I understand it, was not so much interested in
astronomical revolutions as in terrestrial
ones.
Should Galileo have proclaimed the Copernican theory
in the vernacular as proven truth? I have even Galileo
himself had doubts about the theory's correctness.
The proofs cane only at the start of the 18th century.
Until then, Copernicanism was only one hypothesis,
and the really radical innovation may not have been
with Copernicus but with Kepler, who finally
gavfe up the notion of circular orbits -- but
even Kepler cast horoscopes and believed in the
geometrical perfection of the cosmos. "We have
never yet been really modern".
>
> And the situation today is not a great deal better in many parts of the
> world. Islamic women are still being stoned to death and Hindu women are
> still being burned alive for reasons of breaking religious codes.
And let us not forget religious and ethnic genital mutilation
of children.
[snip]
>
> But at the end of the day, even the metaphors of science are insufficient
> because they themselves reveal that there are problems that cannot be
> explained. That we are aware of insoluble problems and that we are
> conscious of limits to our knowledge are, to my mind, the greatest
> mysteries of all.
>
> Keith Hudson
I think that man (woman, etc.) is a "narrative creature". We
live by the stories we tell ourselves and each other. One
story that can inspire persons who have been oppressed by
religion is the story of scientific debunking. But for
children who would grow up in a straightforwardly
nurturing social world, I think the story that would
appeal to them would be the story of persons straightforwardly
nurturing each other politically/economically/personally, and
what we call "the sciences" would find their place in that context.
Maybe I am wrong about the appeal of this story (which
obviously appeals to myself...), for others.
\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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