Ignorance & Cruelty

A productive partnership over many centuries.

Category:

Travel & Events

Tags:

• Girodano
• Bruno
• papacy
• science
• astronomy
• heresy
• christianity

[SpiritKeeper]

Earliest memory?

There was a bright light, then someone hit me.

:)

[tenneral]

@SpiritKeeper Well, of course, I might believe you, but then again . . . . !

[Asciarius]

Cardinal Ballarmino was notorious in protestant northern Europe. There's a type of 17th century stoneware jug that has the image of a bearded face on the neck of the vessel, fragments of which turn up on most 17th century archaeological sites I've worked on. These are often called Bellarmine Jugs, sometimes called Bartmann Jugs. A useless fact that might interest.

[tenneral]

@Asciarius Most true. My family used to own such a thing, turned into a table lamp.

[wimsweden]

My mother bought one of those balls for my son. Pretty neat. I think she got it at Blokker (a chain of stores in the Netherlands and Belgium). Only thing is: How do you change the battery? ;-)

[tenneral]

@wimsweden Sadly, it had a label saying that once the battery dies, the whole toy must be replaced.

[fradiavolo11]

i found the "cruelty" part quite weak. cruelty is a human trait that goes well beyond religious beliefs. You can say that those who never doubt of their convictions are less likely to restrain themselves, but this applies to religious believers as well as many other "believers" (e.g. ss, khmer rouge, zionists, western troops operating in iraq & afghanistan).

I am not 100% convinced also about the reason for the execution of Bruno. As far as I know, his pantheist beliefs were the main reason.

[mardastheEitheist]

In my catholic school hangs a paper:

"We help orphans of AIDS deaths. Donate us!"

It's so cynical and so cruel both...

[morgathing]

Bravo sir Bravo.

[ProfMTH]

LOL  Then Bellarmine would have made a ring out of it.

[Tridhos]

@tenneral It's interesting that in 1942 Cardinal Mercati who discovered the lost documents relating to Bruno's Roman trial, declared that the Church had been perfectly right to burn Bruno because he had deserved it. Also that Galileo's own trial followed because there were those in the Vatican that viewed him as a resurrected Bruno. What is amazing is that a Cardinal of the Catholic Church would regard burning an individual as appropriate for whatever crime in the 20th century.

[PlayfulGibbon]

A quote I have used in conversations with fundamental christians.

"To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin"

Cardinal Bellarmino 1615, during the trial of Galileo.

Makes one confident in thinking that if he was so wrong about the first part, he could very well be wrong about everything.

[LynxChan]

@tenneral hmmm I wonder. The feeling that things are getting worse or pining for mythical "good old times" seems universal. I bet Romans 2000 years ago thought much the same thing.

200 years ago, a fair proportion of the population couldn't read. By any measure, that is worse. I think maybe the difference today is that ignorant people, thanks to the internet, have a much bigger platform to exhibit their lack of education for all the world to see. They're louder, not more numerous, perhaps.