The truth shall set one free!


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I posted the following among the comments at http://www.frontporchpolitics.com/ in response to so may comments i read there in which people expressed their view that they knew that God knows best and that is why Obama is allowed to destroy America which is approaching the end times, but that they know how that ends! The comments were to an article suggesting that Palin should register as a Democrat and challenge Obama for the presidency.

<"I assume you all have grown up and no longer believe in the fairy tales of childhood such as the existence of Santa Claus. Now I wonder when you are going to get over the fantasy of the existence of a supernatural deity who you will get to see after you die! I do admit it is appealing to believe you will see dead loved ones in an afterlife. That is probably why you allow yourselves to go on giving money to an institution which was responsible for the Inquisition which tortured and killed anyone guilty of the heresy of using their own judgment.

Galileo was imprisoned for the last years of his life for looking through a telescope which the Inquisition considered to be an instrument of the Devil. The Inquisitors were invited by Galileo to see for themselves but refused to look. If they had they wold have seen the four moons of Jupiter revolving around an object other than the Earth. Their religious dogma taught that the Earth stands still and that everything else in the entire universe revolves around the motionless Earth.

Giordano Bruno confirmed the Copernican theory with his own observations and wanted the Church to be right about everything. Bruno taught the Copernican theory all over Europe and England but was lured back to Venice by the Inquisition which imprisoned him for eight years before tying him to the stake for using his own judgment. They offered to garrot him before setting the stake on fire but he refused to recant saying: “I would rather live a spirited life than die a cowardly death!” The year was 1600.

Nowadays we are revolted by the fact that militant, radical Islamic zealots threaten to kill any infidel who doesn’t accept their religious beliefs. But Christianity was guilty of the same nonsense. Read Deuteronomy 13:7.

If a con man offered to sell you a mink coat if you gave him a hundred bucks and told you to wait on a street corner for an hour for him to come back with the coat, it would only take an hour before you realized that you had been conned.

In return for the promise of continuing to exist in an afterlife for eternity, only if you sacrifice your judgment and accept someone else’s judgment regarding what is true and what is moral, in other words an entire philosophy of life which holds that you should be willing to sacrifice your life and your judgment in all matters, you would discover you had been had in the grave.

There is a rational comprehensive integrated view of existence which you might have the courage to explore before you give up the irrational view you were raised to believe. It was created by a young girl who grew up in Russia before the Bolsheviks established the Communist totalitarian State. She was inspired by certain characters in literature who were heroic and wanted to become a writer to create such characters of her own. She realized that it would not be possible to be allowed to do so in a State which glorified the collective and was opposed to the individual whom they held should be willing to sacrifice his life to the good of the State.

She managed to get permission to leave to visit relatives in Chicago and never returned. She studied human psychology and history in order to achieve the goal of her writing. Her focus was on discovering the truth about what it would take for a person to be heroic. She knew a hero is someone who is loyal to his values but what values does it make sense to be loyal to?

I have let you know that there is a rational view of existence. I will let you find it out by reading the works of Ayn Rand. Read The Objectivist Newsletter, Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, We The Living, The Virtue Of Selfishness, For The New Intellectual, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, etc.

Andrew Dickson White cofounded Cornell University and raised money for it by lecturing. Read his : The History of the Warfare Between Science and Theology in Christiandom.

Read Christopher Hitchen’s God Is Not Great ; Sam Harris’ The End of Faith; Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusion; and Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason.

Read George H. Smith’s Atheism: The Case Against God

Enjoy!">

In the hope that someone reads it and decides to explore and to discover the world as we know it.

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Galileo was imprisoned for the last years of his life for looking through a telescope which the Inquisition considered to be an instrument of the Devil. The Inquisitors were invited by Galileo to see for themselves but refused to look. If they had they wold have seen the four moons of Jupiter revolving around an object other than the Earth. Their religious dogma taught that the Earth stands still and that everything else in the entire universe revolves around the motionless Earth.

Giordano Bruno confirmed the Copernican theory with his own observations and wanted the Church to be right about everything. Bruno taught the Copernican theory all over Europe and England but was lured back to Venice by the Inquisition which imprisoned him for eight years before tying him to the stake for using his own judgment. They offered to garrot him before setting the stake on fire but he refused to recant saying: “I would rather live a spirited life than die a cowardly death!” The year was 1600.

First, Bruno hypothesized that there were worlds other than Earth and the cosmos was infinite or much, much larger supposed by the Aristotelians. He did not have the means to confirm Copernicus model since without a telescope the phases of Venus could not be observed nor could the 4 large moons of Jupiter be seen. Also Bruno did not have the naked-eye equipment that Tycho had to observe that the true motions of the planets were other than circular. Kepler did get a hold of the numbers and figured that the motion of Mars cold not be resolved into circular elements.

Second, Galileo get into trouble because he stated his Copernican conclusions -as fact- rather than as a hypothetical that could "save the appearances". Had Galileo done so, the scholars would have disagreed with him and scolded him but the Church management would never have gotten on his case. In point of fact there were astronomers in the Church who were happy to get a hold of Galileo's telescopes since they could use them to calculate the dates of Easter and Passover more accurately. A leading scholar in the Church, Fr. Clavius (after whom a crater on the Moon is named) encouraged Galileo in his astronomical pursuits and the admiration between Clavius and Mr. G. was mutual. Galileo was convicted of heresy because of the way he expressed his findings, and not because of the findings themselves. If he had advocated the Copernican model as a better calculating tool rather than as a fact, he would have died of old age as a free man. What really cooked Galileo's goose was that in his first Big Book on the Two World Systems he mocked Pope Urban VIII by putting simple minded Aristotelian positions in the Pope's mouth. He modeled his character Simplicio (in the dialogues) after Urban (Mafeo Barberini). That really pissed the Pope off. He made Barberini look like a jerk, which in fact he was not. Barberini was a scholar and a rather sophisticated man. Galileo was convicted of heresy, not because of his telescope and his findings, but because he was a smart-ass.

It turns out Galileo pushed the notion that the earth rotated because of his theory of the tides, which was completely wrong. Galileo had a notion that the tides existed because the earth rotated once a day. He modeled tides after water sloshing about in a moving tub. He could only account for one tide a day (there are two). When Kepler suggested to Mr. G. (the two corresponded by letter) that the tides were an effect of the Moon, Galileo chided Mr. K for believing in magic. Action at a distance! Absurd!. But this is exactly what made Isaac Newton famous, 50 years after Galileo died. Galileo did not have "killer proof" of Eartht's rotation in hand. Ironically he -invented- just the mechanism to provide the proof, to wit, the pendulum. It was in 1851 that Focault used a very heavy pendulum to give nearly direct evidence of the earth's rotation, Another irony. Galileo invented just the instrument (the telescope) to show the aberration of light which proves the earth revolves around the sun. This was done by Bradley in 1729. Mr. G. just did not know enough to use that trick. So Galileo invented the very instruments that would have proved the relative motions of the earth, but used a bogus theory of tides mistakenly. In a way, the Church folk were right. Galileo did not have the grounds for asserting the Copernican hypothesis as fact, since the phases of Venus could be accounted for by the Tycho model - the earth is still and the sun and other planets revolved about a fixed earth. All the -other- planets revolved around the sun, and the phases of Venus would have been accounted for. Bottom line: Mr. G. was premature in asserting Copernicus hypothesis as fact. On top of that Copernicus was badly mistaken in that he insisted the motions of the planets were -circular- (they are not) and uniform in rotational velocity (they are not). It was not until Kepler came up with elliptical orbits and the three Kepler Laws that the Copernican approach finally got traction. Please see: http://en.wikipedia....lanetary_motion

Ba'al Chatzaf

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Ba'al,

I appreciate your clarification of my rudimentary understanding of Galileo's problems with the Church and his misunderstanding of Copernican notions of planetary motion. Regarding his attitude about "action at a distance" I think I read that even Newton found the concept to be hard to fathom regarding gravity.

I was expecting criticism of my naive attempt to enlighten the unenlightened who have been indoctrinated since birth to accept religious dogma we view as irrational wishful thinking based on faith which we consider to be wrongheaded as a means of understanding the facts of reality in the realms of metaphysics as well as the realm of ethics.

Your comments flesh out the historical facts regarding Galileo's conflicts with the Church and his own misunderstanding of planetary motion.

I read Harzani's The Star Gazer as a ten year old and have subsequently become aware of the existence of a shelf of books about Galileo's plight but have not made the time to read them. I am aware that Kepler enhanced our understanding of the nature of the orbits of the planets. I appreciate your comments and will look up more on the subject.

Whether anyone is encouraged to check their premises if they encounter my post we more than likely will never know.

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I posted the following among the comments at http://www.frontporchpolitics.com/ in response to... Now I wonder when you are going to get over the fantasy of the existence of a supernatural deity ...

Galileo was imprisoned for the last years of his life for looking through a telescope .... Read The Objectivist Newsletter, Atlas Shrugged, ... Read Christopher Hitchen’s God Is Not Great ...

Well, you probably did not win any converts. A lot has been written about attitude formation. How and why people come to ideas and leave them is understood to be largely non-rational. "You cannot logically argue a man out of a position he was not logically argued into." At some level, Gulch, much of what you post here is religion of a different sort, with a crusading appeal to authoritative works. We all believe what we do. Facts make a difference mostly when you already share the context of theory.

About Galileo and the church, just to amend some of Bob's history.

The Earth was not proved to orbit the Sun until Friedrich Bessel's measurements of parallax in 1838. Galileo did not invent the pendulum. The Foucault Pendulum showed finally that the Earth rotates in 1851.

Seeking to test Aristarchus's theory that the Earth oribts the Sun, Archimedes attempted to measure parallax, but could not. So he concluded that either the Earth is at the center or else the universe is far larger than we can imagine. But, the idea of Earth at the Center was tested and the experimental results were taken for what they showed. It was not superstition or religion. At the same time, everyone knew that the Earth is a sphere.

Also, the fact that the moons of Jupiter orbit that planet was only, at best, inferential. It was not proof of anything. Neither were the phases of Venus proof for the heliocentric universe. An acceptable model was that the sun orbits the Earth, and that Mercury and Venus orbit the sun.

Ba'al is right in that the medieval church was greatly interested in astronomy. Timing Easter meant calculating the positiions of the sun and moon. They ran tables forward hundreds of years. And when the tables were wrong after only a few decades, they knew it. The astrolabe was embraced as a new tool in the 1000s or 1100s. They were open to anything that worked. They computed the size of the universe and guessed short, but still tried as best they could. The church was very open to astronomy. But Galileo's time was the start of what we now call the Thirty Years' War, following the Reformation. His problems were entirely political, not scientific or even religious, as Ba'al noted.

It is important to understand the history of the Roman Catholic Church as an institution. Perhaps studying China of the same times would help for comparison and contrast. They evolved.... over centuries... each century is three or four generations. I am 62. My grandmother was born in 1896. So, when you talk about the Church with broad language, you are encompassing very different times and places and people.

Read about Gerbert d'Aurillac.

Read Astronomies and Cultures in Early Medieval Europe by Stephen C. McCluskey.

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