A Funny Thing Happened on the way to the forum....

[Belacqua]

And also many theologians from Aquinas on advocated the killing of heretics as hardly an endorsement of freethinking is just a myth.

You should be more careful in your attacks. 

The killing of heretics was bad. But it was not anti-science, it was anti-heresy. No one was ever killed because of scientific beliefs. 

In fact it was Aquinas' revival of Aristotelian science which persuaded people that the study of how God works in the physical world is something we ought to study. Without this shift, the scientists and pre-scientists of the Renaissance would not have done their work.

Yes, some Christians opposed things that we think are good. Yes, they used methods that modern people abhor. But it's not as simple as you're portraying it. Did you read the wikipedia page I linked to, about the "conflict thesis"? It's not just religious people making these claims; it's reputable historians who have rejected the simple-minded science vs. religion myth.

"Freethinking" doesn't automatically mean "scientific." You are making a kind of stew of Christian opposition to various things, and claiming it is an intrinsic opposition to science. It isn't, and never has been.

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Here is an example of the kind of ideological attack I'm thinking of.

In his recent series Cosmos, Neil Degrasse Tyson claimed that Giordano Bruno was a martyr for science, killed for advocating Copernican heliocentrism. This is false. It is known to be false.

Here is a passage from page 453 of Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, by Frances Yates, published in 1964:

Ever since Domenico Berti[2] revived him as the hero who died rather than
renounce his scientific conviction of the truth of the Copernican theory, the
martyr for modern science, the philosopher who broke with medieval
Aristotelianism and ushered in the modern world, Bruno has been in a false
position. The popular view of Bruno is still roughly as just stated. If I have not
finally proved its falsity, I have written this book in vain.
For what is the truth? Bruno was an out-and-out magician, an “Egyptian” and
Hermetist of the deepest dye, for whom the Copernican heliocentricity heralded
the return of magical religion, who in his dispute with the Oxford doctors
associated Copernicanism with the magic of Ficino's De vita coelitus
comparanda, for whom the Copernican diagram was a hieroglyph of the divine,
who defended earth-movement with Hermetic arguments concerning the magical
life in all nature, whose aim was to achieve Hermetic gnosis, to reflect the world
in the mens by magical means, including the stamping of magic images of the
stars on memory, and so to become a great Magus and miracle-working religious
leader. Sweeping away the theological superstructure which the Christian
Hermetists had evolved, using Cabala only as subsidiary to Magia, Bruno is a
pure naturalist whose religion is the natural religion of the pseudo-Egyptian
Hermetic Asclepius. Bruno's world view shows what could be evolved out of an
extension and intensification of the Hermetic impulse towards the world.
Through a Hermetic interpretation of Copernicus and Lucretius, Bruno arrives at
his astonishing vision of an infinite extension of the divine as reflected in nature.
The earth moves because it is alive around a sun of Egyptian magic; the planets
as living stars perform their courses with her; innumerable other worlds, moving
and alive like great animals, people an infinite universe.

The fact that Tyson didn't know this, and made a historical howler on national TV, shows just how far historical knowledge has fallen.