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

[Fake Messiah]

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.

LOL! Yeah don't trust Tyson but a woman who claims Bruno was a magician.

[Belacqua]

LOL! Yeah don't trust Tyson but a woman who claims Bruno was a magician.  

Do you think women shouldn't be trusted? 

Frances Yates was an important scholar who published thoroughly-researched books of history. Though various details have been disputed by later scholars, all of whom are standing on her shoulders, what she says of Bruno in the passage I quoted has been confirmed by later writers. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Yates

I think you should check these scholarly sources, more than you should trust cartoons from Fox. 

Bruno was not executed due to his scientific views. He was executed because he wanted to replace Christianity with an equally ridiculous supernatural religion based mostly on fake-Egyptian tablets. With himself as the boss, of course. 

I don't think he should have been executed. But if he'd limited himself to scientific studies, he wouldn't have been. And if he had stayed in northern Europe, instead of traveling back to Italy for the purpose of replacing the Pope, he would have been fine.

[vulcanlogician]

We can only guess at how much scientific progress may have been stifled 

Emphasis on "only guess."

There are plenty of examples of high-quality scientific or mathematical work being done with the support of the church. Even Galileo had elite support within the Vatican, which would have let him avoid trouble if he'd been the least bit diplomatic.

So OK -- history could have been better. But it's pure ideology to pretend that it's simply religion against science.

I thought I worded my statements to allow room for what you are saying. I know that the church supported many important intellectual endeavors. I know there are two sides to the coin.

Islamic cultures (especially in the Golden Age) produced many great advancements. But such cultures frustrated free thinking... outlawed atheism... and I hold it very much against them. The Athenians (obvious contributors to the body of knowledge) executed Socrates, and I hold it very much against them. I think it's great that the church pursued science. But it doesn't excuse them for suppressing (out of fear and an urge to maintain dominance) ideas that were incongruent with their dogma.

Look at the ancient and medieval world and anti-intellectualism is everywhere. And everywhere it is wrong. It still rears its head in modern times, and still under the guise of service to Christ. I'm not about to excuse it now, and I'm not going to excuse it in the medieval period. The church weren't a bunch of sinister mustache-twirlers, true. But I think you give them too much credit.

[Belacqua]

Look at the ancient and medieval world and anti-intellectualism is everywhere. And everywhere it is wrong. It still rears its head in modern times, and still under the guise of service to Christ. 

Sometimes it appears under the guise of service to Christ. 

And sometimes it appears under the guise of opposition to religion. Yet among atheists, this latter type is much more likely to be given a pass. 

Just because we oppose the falsehoods of religion, doesn't mean we should repeat different falsehoods against religion.

[Fake Messiah]

Do you think women shouldn't be trusted?

Yeah, especially those that believe in magic. Church rejected Bruno because he agreed with Copernicus which was against the Bible and thus they felt it was against them. Just as Pope Pius XII in 1950 was against evolution because it was against Chruch's teachings, so he wrote in his encyclical Humani Generis:

When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism [our descent from ancestors beyond Adam and Eve], the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.

But it's pure ideology to pretend that it's simply religion against science.

So how do you call this?



https://shareblue.com/trump-end-medical-...al-tissue/

What are religious people here against if not science? Are they against human beings? Or against health? Where is that religious pro science agenda now?

[Belacqua]

From a review by John Gray of a new book by Felipe Fernández-Armesto, in the latest New Statesman magazine:

"In one sense, science begins with a form of
scepticism: mistrust of the senses. It aims to penetrate
surface appearances and expose underlying truths.” Modern
science received another stimulus from a tradition of
empirical thinking that emerged from Christian theology. St
Thomas Aquinas “was part of what can properly be called a
scientific movement – perhaps even a scientific revolution
or renaissance – in high medieval
Europe”. In Thomistic theology, God was bound by
natural laws; the study of the natural world was therefore a
religious obligation. Rational theology led to the idea that
science was the discovery of a rational order in the universe.
In the comic-book history of ideas that is promoted by
rationalists today, Isaac Newton is revered as one of the
authors of “the Scientific Revolution”. In fact, as Fernández-
Armesto points out, “Newton was a traditional figure: an
old-fashioned humanist and encyclopaedist, a biblical
scholar obsessed by sacred chronology – even, in his wilder
fantasies, a magus hunting down the secret of a systematic
universe, or an alchemist seeking the Philosopher’s Stone.”

It is not the first time Newton has been seen in this way.
John Maynard Keynes, in a lecture titled “Newton, the Man”
– meant to be given on the tercentenary of Newton’s birth in
1942, but delayed by the Second World War and delivered
after Keynes’s death by his brother in 1946 – wrote:
“Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the
last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and
Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the
visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those
who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less
than 10,000 years ago.”

Having been the first person to have seen some of Newton’s
manuscripts that had been kept secret until they were sold
in 1936, Keynes had solid evidence for this claim. Yet it has
not dented the rationalist view of modern science as the
product of something called “the Renaissance” – supposedly
a movement that rejected mysticism and magic in favour of
reason. Fernández-Armesto is unusually caustic on this
subject: “If I had my way, we would drop the word
‘Renaissance’ from our historical lexicon. It was invented in
1855 by Jules Michelet, a French historian who wanted to
emphasise the recovery or ‘rebirth’ of ancient learning,
classical texts, and the artistic heritage of Greece and Rome
in the way people thought about and pictured the world.”

But Michelet saw the past in the terms of his own time,
when more pupils were learning Greek and Latin than ever
before. Following Michelet, we are told that the Renaissance
“dethroned scholasticism and inaugurated humanism”,
when actually Renaissance humanism grew out of medieval
scholastic humanism. We are taught that the Renaissance
was secular or pagan, but throughout the period to which
the term is commonly applied “the Church remained the
patron of most art and scholarship”. The popular idea of the
Renaissance, transmitted by legions of writers who inveigh
against medievalism and religion, is a phantom not a
historical reality.

[Fake Messiah]

Sure Belaqua, you can fool and lie to yourself all day long because Christians are very good at that, I mean what else can they do since they are so spineless to take any responsibility for their fanaticism.
But at the end of the day Christianity is directly responsible for this

[tackattack]

Sure Belaqua, you can fool and lie to yourself all day long because Christians are very good at that, I mean what else can they do since they are so spineless to take any responsibility for their fanaticism.
But at the end of the day Christianity is directly responsible for this

No, Trump is directly responsible for that as your article clearly states. He may hide behind a political shield of moral rightness of religion (which is false in and of itself) in this case instead of women's lib, or PETA supporters, but all of your points have been about accountability. As a Christian who knows many Christians, none would have supported this issue if it was just the issue. The fact is it's politics, and as we all know all politics are dirty. 

If you want to parse out partial blame, you are to blame for not starting a movement to stop this horrible thing, and Christians are responsible for voting in the orange Turd, and dolphins are responsible for taking all the plastic floating in the world to the bottom of the ocean. Give me a break, it's quite ridiculous, but perpetuate your galvanizing of sides, because it will just continue to work against any hope of peace and understanding you may have at the core of all that anti-religious sentimentality. </2 cents>

[The Grand Nudger]

It may not be possible for there to be a peace and understanding when religious extremists leverage their influence to exert unrepresentative control of government over manufactured controversies...and even if it were, why wouldn't anyone want that? They've made their ask, they've set their price for that peace and understanding, but why should anyone pay it?

Perhaps you should be pissed at your brothers in faith for doing this, not at anti-religious folks pointing out how fucked up it is or how inextricably linked to their religion?

Your massive caveat in defense of what I can only assume you intend for us to take as the good and polite and decent christians you know was only that they wouldn't have supported it -if- it was just the issue...if......but, apparently, whatever other motivator they have is worth it to them, to trade this for that.  I want food and water to be officially deemed a basic human right in our constitution.  I'm not willing to put up with fucking concentration camps to get it, lol.  I'm not going to trade in ridiculous lies and conspiracy theories in order to drum up support for what I want.   There is nothing about this issue from the religious extremists perspective and involvement that isn't completely and utterly disgusting.

This has been the constant excuse, though, for every horrid thing any trumpist has traded for their pet projects since before the man was elected - and for every person looking to excuse those trumpists before or after the fact.  There is principle, and there is the pretext of principle as an excuse for cruelty.  You tell me, which one are we looking at here...and are you really going to go to bat for them if it's the second..or imply that there's something wrong with being frustrated by infuriating and duplicitous shit?

Your boys are rotten. That you can't accept their own assessment for why this is, or the informed recognition of that assessment from an outside party is no one else's issue but your own.

[Fake Messiah]

No, Trump is directly responsible for that as your article clearly states. 

What article clearly says is that Trump is doing this in an effort to appease religious extremists.

As well as:

Banning fetal tissue research has long been a goal of anti-abortion extremists, who championed deceptively edited propagandavideos of Planned Parenthood to rally conservatives against the idea of using fetal tissue for medical research.

As did Bush Jr. to appease Christians. When Obama lifted the ban he was considered antichrist.

Give me a break, it's quite ridiculous, but perpetuate your galvanizing of sides

What is ridiculous is how much you lie to yourself to be Christian. You clearly see this as monstrous and yet remain part of the organization that is responsible for this monstrosity by lying to yourself.

Here's what Vatican is saying on stem cell research

No end believed to be good, such as the use of stem cells for the preparation of other differentiated cells to be used in what look to be promising therapeutic procedures, can justify an intervention of this kind.  A good end does not make right an action which in itself is wrong.

 For Catholics, this position is explicitly confirmed by the Magisterium of the Church which, in the Encyclical Evangelium Vitae, with reference to the Instruction Donum Vitae of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, affirms:  AThe Church has always taught and continues to teach that the result of human procreation, from the first moment of its existence, must be guaranteed that unconditional respect which is morally due to the human being in his or her totality and unity in body and spirit: >The human being is to be respected and treated as a person from the moment of conception; and therefore from that same moment his rights as a person must be recognized, among which in the first place is the inviolable right of every innocent human being to life'"
http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontif...li_en.html