[Serious] Book reports

[Fake Messiah]

Oh yeah, Christianity was so pro science that it needed a thousand years to re-discover Heliocentrism and then it found it too controversial.


Can you guess how many times this book mentions Index Librorum Prohibitorum? Yes, you guessed it: zero times. Yet another book whitewashing Christianity for gullible delusional religious zealots.

on page 206: 

Abelard, defying the rule that required religiones never to leave a monastery
without express permission, had returned to the road. Variously, he had lived as
a hermit, as an abbot on the wild Atlantic coast, and as a teacher once again in
Paris. His charisma, despite the passing of the years, remained undimmed. So
too his capacity for attracting mingled hostility and adulation. Finally, in his
seventh decade, there came the gravest crisis of all: his formal condemnation as
a heretic. The terms of his punishment were expressed in two letters sent from
Rome in the summer of 1140. Christendom’s most brilliant scholar was
sentenced to have his books burned ‘wherever they may be found’;33 its most
brilliant orator to submit to perpetual silence.

on page 226:

Anxieties in Paris were heightened by the discovery in 1210
of various heretics whose reading of Aristotle had led them to believe that there
was no life after death. The reaction of the city’s bishop was swift. Ten of the
heretics were burned at the stake. Various commentaries on Aristotle were
burned as well. Aristotle’s own books on natural philosophy were formally
proscribed. ‘They are not to be read at Paris either publicly or in private.’36

on page 275:

Luther, precisely because he scorned to think of himself
as a lawyer, took for granted much of what, over the course of long centuries,
had been achieved by the very legal scholars whose books he had so publicly
burned. Rulers who embraced Luther’s programme of reformatio had little
option but to do the same.

on page 294:

In 1542, an inquisition
modelled on the Spanish example had been established in Rome; in 1558, it had
drawn up a lengthy index of prohibited books; a year later, ten thousand volumes
had been publicly burnt in Venice. Simultaneously, beyond the seas, in the new
worlds opened up by Spanish and Portuguese adventurers, great harvests of souls
had been reaped by Catholic missionaries.

on page 303:

Dressed in the white robe
of a penitent, and kneeling arthritically before his judges, he abjured in a shaking
voice all his heresies. His book was placed on the index of books that it was
forbidden Catholics to read. Galileo himself was sentenced to imprisonment at
the pleasure of the Inquisition. Spared their dungeons by Urban, the most
celebrated natural philosopher in the world spent the remaining nine years of his
life under house arrest.

These are a few of the anecdotes about banned or burned books. There are lots more stories about banned or burned people, too.

Here you go what? That it took Christianity a thousand years to re-discover Heliocentrism? No thanks. I don't need that kind of organizations in charge of anything, let alone science.