Thread by @TimONeill007

@Bellerophon77 @RationalityRule Completely. This @RationalityRule person is another lazy anti-theist who peddles memes about history without bothering to check his facts. To start with, the letter in question is dated August 19, 1610. So it has absolutely nothing to do with any "incessant attempts to censor ...

@Bellerophon77 @RationalityRule ... his helicentric observations" by the Church, given that they didn't care at all about either his "observations" or his belief in heliocentrism prior to 1615. In fact, in 1610 they *celebrated* his observations and in 1611 they invited him to Rome for audiences with ...

@Bellerophon77 @RationalityRule ... various cardinals, and with Pope Paul V, as well as the leading scientists and Jesuits scholars, Christopher Clavius, Christoph Grienberger, Paolo Lembo and Odo van Malecote, who had constructed a telescope of their own and confirmed several of his key findings. ON May 13 ...

@Bellerophon77 @RationalityRule ... these scholars awarded him an honorary degree and threw a lavish banquet in his honour. Does any of this sound like the actions of people who were trying to "censor" him? Speaking of censors - in 1613 he wrote his *Letters on Sunspots* in which he made a number of ...

@Bellerophon77 @RationalityRule ... arguments based on heliocentrism. This work was submitted to the Roman Inquisition's censors for approval and they passed it for publication without batting an eyelid. The claim that this 1610 letter was written in the face of "incessant attempts" at censorship ...

@Bellerophon77 @RationalityRule ... of his ideas is boneheaded ignorance of the worst kind.
So who were these terrible people with the "stubbornness of an asp" who Galileo complains about? The quote itself makes that clear - he refers to "the principal philosophers of this academy". He's talking about the ...

@Bellerophon77 @RationalityRule ... academic philosophers of the universities who clung to Aristotelian orthodoxy in the face of new evidence. He even specifically refers to "Pisa, Florence, Bologna, Venice, and Padua" - all cities with universities - but makes no mention of Rome. That's because the Jesuits ...

@Bellerophon77 @RationalityRule ... of the Collegium Romanum embraced the "new philosophy", made their own telescopes and confirmed his findings. And then celebrated and honoured him for them. He's not talking about "the Church", he's talking about the conservative philosophical academic establishment.
And ...

@Bellerophon77 @RationalityRule ... it was members of that establishment who worked to get him into hot water with the Inquisition in 1615 when Galileo started dabbling in theology - something the Church did *not* approve of for a non-theologian like Galileo. Even then he was only told he couldn't teach ...

@Bellerophon77 @RationalityRule ... heliocentrism as fact, just as a theory, because at that stage it *wasn't* established fact and he couldn't prove it.
So this "Rationality Rules" person has taken a quote that he doesn't understand completely out of context, hasn't bothered to check what it was about or ...

@Bellerophon77 @RationalityRule ... when it was written or why, slapped some moronic sneering commentary on it and present it as history. "Rationality Rules" is an irrational idiot.

@Bellerophon77 @RationalityRule The letter can be found below, including the elements that the meme left out - the clear reference to the universities of "Pisa, Florence, Bologna, Venice, and Padua" and the specific reference to "the faculty at Pisa". He's not talking about the Church at all:

@Bellerophon77 @RationalityRule famous-trials.com/galileotrial/1…