I haven’t picked on the Vatican and their Catholicism lately but the Pope keeps on making pronouncements so we have to let him know what we think about his learned pronouncements.
This one is especially interesting because it deals with history and how the Church has been trying to deal with it in our time, without seeming to re-write history in their favor or, god forbid, admit to any errors of judgment in the past; the Church is infallible, right?
The issue here is Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). He is the famous telescope inventor and star gazer. Copernicus (Polish monk 1473-1543) was the first (Catholic) to posit that the earth circled the sun and not visa versa. The official Vatican position has always been that the earth is the center of the world because god made it that way and everything else just circled mother earth because to them earth represented the center of the universe. They based all this on Holy Scripture where there was nothing and then god made earth and then everything else. To think otherwise was heresy punishable by death (burned at the stake) – so there! Actually the issue is more complicated then what I make it out to be but hey, it would take too much time and space to explain.
Copernicus was able to avoid punishment for his heretical thinking because he published his book on the day he died even though his theory had been discussed for years. Initially, there was no big deal made about his work until later when certain, full of the spirit, monks called for the theory to be condemned as heresy because it challenged Holy Scripture. The Pope had no choice but to go along.
Galileo, who had empirical evidence that Copernicus was right (he saw through his telescope) and defended his theory. That pissed the Vatican off and he was brought to trial and sentenced to jail for life and later changed to house arrest forever.
The whole affair was more political than religious but the deed was done and that’s that.
In 1992, Pope Paul II (The Polish Pope) had enough balls to say that the Church ruling against Galileo was an error due to “mutual” miscommunication?
Anyway, the current Pope, Benedict XVI is really trying to show that the Church is not against science but is a “friend” of science and that science and religion (faith & reason) can go hand in hand.
But when Benedict had to cancel a speech to an Italian university because professors there said he was anti-science because the Galileo affair is still not resolved, Benedict knew he had to do something big.
The year 2009 has been declared “Year of Astronomy” by the United Nations because it will be the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s invention of the telescope. What better year than to heal the Galileo issue.
Now the Vatican is declaring Galileo as a man of deep faith who “ saw nature as a book authored by God”. A heretic one day, a saint the next.
My point here is to draw attention to the fact that the Vatican, the Catholic Church or the Popes, make pronouncements with solemn authority as if they heard it from God himself and then years later, see how stupid and unrealistic and un-defendable some of their pronouncements were and in my opinion, are.
Sane people must finally see how absolutely “human” these Church leaders and institutions are. Church leaders, any church, made and make things up as they go along in response to some perceived need at the time. And because these are all humans and because there is no higher being influencing their decisions, some of those decisions, in time, turn out to be absurd.
If there really was a Catholic god leading the Catholic Church, we would expect him not to make his Church look so stupid, so many times throughout history and into the present.
This one is especially interesting because it deals with history and how the Church has been trying to deal with it in our time, without seeming to re-write history in their favor or, god forbid, admit to any errors of judgment in the past; the Church is infallible, right?
The issue here is Galileo Galilei (1564-1642). He is the famous telescope inventor and star gazer. Copernicus (Polish monk 1473-1543) was the first (Catholic) to posit that the earth circled the sun and not visa versa. The official Vatican position has always been that the earth is the center of the world because god made it that way and everything else just circled mother earth because to them earth represented the center of the universe. They based all this on Holy Scripture where there was nothing and then god made earth and then everything else. To think otherwise was heresy punishable by death (burned at the stake) – so there! Actually the issue is more complicated then what I make it out to be but hey, it would take too much time and space to explain.
Copernicus was able to avoid punishment for his heretical thinking because he published his book on the day he died even though his theory had been discussed for years. Initially, there was no big deal made about his work until later when certain, full of the spirit, monks called for the theory to be condemned as heresy because it challenged Holy Scripture. The Pope had no choice but to go along.
Galileo, who had empirical evidence that Copernicus was right (he saw through his telescope) and defended his theory. That pissed the Vatican off and he was brought to trial and sentenced to jail for life and later changed to house arrest forever.
The whole affair was more political than religious but the deed was done and that’s that.
In 1992, Pope Paul II (The Polish Pope) had enough balls to say that the Church ruling against Galileo was an error due to “mutual” miscommunication?
Anyway, the current Pope, Benedict XVI is really trying to show that the Church is not against science but is a “friend” of science and that science and religion (faith & reason) can go hand in hand.
But when Benedict had to cancel a speech to an Italian university because professors there said he was anti-science because the Galileo affair is still not resolved, Benedict knew he had to do something big.
The year 2009 has been declared “Year of Astronomy” by the United Nations because it will be the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s invention of the telescope. What better year than to heal the Galileo issue.
Now the Vatican is declaring Galileo as a man of deep faith who “ saw nature as a book authored by God”. A heretic one day, a saint the next.
My point here is to draw attention to the fact that the Vatican, the Catholic Church or the Popes, make pronouncements with solemn authority as if they heard it from God himself and then years later, see how stupid and unrealistic and un-defendable some of their pronouncements were and in my opinion, are.
Sane people must finally see how absolutely “human” these Church leaders and institutions are. Church leaders, any church, made and make things up as they go along in response to some perceived need at the time. And because these are all humans and because there is no higher being influencing their decisions, some of those decisions, in time, turn out to be absurd.
If there really was a Catholic god leading the Catholic Church, we would expect him not to make his Church look so stupid, so many times throughout history and into the present.
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