Christianity's Valuable Contributions to Humanity: An Examination of Militant Atheism

[Belacqua]

For one thing, you shouldn't spread the lie that Copernicus' books were burned by the church. 

Here is an article from Physics Today, a publication of The American Institute of Physics, describing the true story. 

https://joelvelasco.net/teaching/3330/si..._myths.pdf

I'm not finding where in your article it says that they did not burn Copernicus' books.  Could you provide the page and quote the passage?

It doesn't specify that they were never burned. It also doesn't specify that they were never chewed up and spit out by donkeys. If you have any reliable source saying that one or the other of these things happened, I would be interested to see it. 

Copernicus had supporters and detractors within the church. They finally put the book on the Index of Prohibited Books about 70 years after it was published, but of course by this time it was in wide circulation. And remember that the Index was only enforceable in the Papal States. In other countries bans were almost always enforced by secular authorities, if at all. In Spain, even at the height of the Inquisition, Copernicus was never banned and his book was taught by priests at the university in Salamanca throughout. Even in the Protestant world, book bans were regularly flouted by samizdat editions. If you know of any cases in which people were punished for reading the books I would be interested to hear about them. 

The Index is often exaggerated. Every edition contained instructions on how to read a banned book if you really needed to. My father spent years in a Catholic hospital instead of going to high school. (He was not Catholic, but they were the only ones who would take a patient with no money.) He got a copy of the Index, and used it as a reading list. (It was still in effect then, and included Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and many others.) He enjoyed arguing with the nurses, who were all nuns. The nuns got permission to read many of the banned books so they could better argue with a patient. So it's clear that the bans were hardly absolute, and did not include burning.