[MD] Galileo and the church

[118]

Hi Arlo,

I like your divide of the church.  I would divide it the same way.
There are those who truly believe in their God, and any kind of new
science would not be of any concern to them.  They would know that it
didn't matter one bit.  Then there are those who are in the Church for
reasons of power.  These are the evil ones in my book.  For them, they
need strict dogma to keep people a bay and retain power.  These are
the ones that were against Copernicus.

Actually, now that I reread your post, I guess this is what you said.
So, in summary, I agree with you Arlo.  Those that know are not
afraid, those that pretend are.

We see the same thing with Buddhists.  For example the current Dalai
Lama has no concerns what so ever on what science discovers since it
will not affect Buddhism one bit.  How could it?  At best, science
will soon discover that reincarnation occurs, and that the Tibetan
Book of the Dead is real.  At least that is what Philip K. Dick wrote
about in one of his books.  I forget the title, but once it was known
that people were on this path between lives it was still possible to
communicate with them until they reached some astral plane, and
companies were set up around this phenomenon.  You gotta love Philip
Dick!

Mark

On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 6:01 PM, ARLO J BENSINGER JR <ajb102 at psu.edu> wrote:
> [Arlo]
> However, Arlo, one very clear point Wallace makes is that the priests and
> religious factions within the church were enthusiastic about the discoveries of
> Galileo. Dining at their houses and showing them his telescope.  It was the
> entrenched bureaucratic  factions in the academic arm of the church which
> opposed Galileo because his ideas overthrew the existing power structures.
>
> [Arlo]
> Nowhere in the Inquisition against Gallileo do I see any mention of a
> non-academic wing of the religious factions that opposed the Inquisition.
>
> You are right in that the Church controlled the Academy during these years, and
> from the records of the Inquisition it is clear that the Church outright
> condemned any authority into describing the world other than its own.
>
> But rather than boringly pandering to anti-intellectual revisionism in modern
> culture, its clear that those holding an "esoteric" view of religion (the
> gnostics, the mystics, the mythologists, The Bible is A STORY), these people
> were the ones not threatened by Galielo, while those adhering to an "exoteric"
> view of religion (the fundamentalists, the literalists, the dogmatists, The
> Bible is THE WORD), these were the ones who were threatened.
>
> To suggest that were it not for "academics", the Church would have otherwise
> embraced Galileo is nonsense. However, were it not for fundamentalists and
> literalists, it very well may have.
>
> THAT is the divide that is critical here.
>
> The exact same divide that has fundamentalists claiming the earth is only 6000
> years old, dinosaurs rode on a big boat to survive a flood, and everyone who
> does not call god by a certain name is going to hell. THESE are the people
> threatened by advances in understanding made through observation.
>
> This whole "big bad academics" nonsense is really getting sad.
>
>
>
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