Recycling subject lines saves trees (was Re: Stop editing the damn subject (was Re: The End Of Western Civilization (was Re: RoadRunner nonsense (was Re: fwd: RE: STFU RE))

[Leo Mauler]

--- Luke -Jr <luke at dashjr.org> wrote:

> On Monday 10 March 2008, Leo Mauler wrote:
> > --- Luke -Jr <luke at dashjr.org> wrote:
> > > On Friday 07 March 2008, Leo Mauler wrote:
> > > > While "it's traditional!" often leads to
> > > > bad things like the burning of astronomer
> > > > "heretics"
> > >
> > > You say that like it's happened, or that it
> > > would be a bad thing if it did.
> >
> > Well, I don't know if its actually happened
> > (though Galileo definitely got lifetime house 
> > arrest over "heretical astronomy").
> 
> I'm sure his arrest was merely "until he repented 
> of his heresy" and quite justified. The heresy, 
> of course, has little to do with the astronomy 
> and rather was his add-on claim that his findings 
> proved Holy Scripture to be errant.

The astronomy proved the Holy Scripture to be errant. 
Without the astronomy Galileo had committed no heresy.
 The heresy had *everything* to do with the astronomy.
 

Heresy can be undocumented, as in a claim of
geocentrism "just because you feel like it's true",
but there's every indication that Galileo wanted to
follow all the Christian dogma up until the point
where his astronomy forced him to break geocentrism to
avoid breaking a Commandment ("thou shalt not lie").

Our difference of opinion is that I'm saying *any*
astronomy which contradicts a dogma is "heretical", be
that dogma the Galileo astronomy which proved that the
Earth moved around the Sun, or the more recent Venus
astronomy which challenged the notion that
Uniformitarianism Geology could be applied to planets
other than Earth (I saw an old documentary recently on
the Magellan probe), or even the very recent
astronomical opinion which stripped Pluto of its
status as a planet, something which has made me very
unhappy about astronomers in general.


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