The Galileo Gallery Launches

Welcome to The Galileo Gallery. This blog is planned to be a gallery of analysis of issues (old and new) important to the Secular community.

WHAT IS THIS?

I have been an atheist all my life, but recently (the last few years) I have started to realize that I can no longer simply think of people’s religious views as harmless. Day after day I read news stories from around the world that highlight the evils done in the name of one or more gods. Today, for example, IRA rebels killed two british soldiers near Belfast after 12 years of “peace.” Combining the regularity of such stories with the soon-to-be-reality of miniaturized weapons of mass destruction makes ridding the world of irrationalism (religious or other) the number one priority for humanity. While this seems painfully obvious to me and many others in the Secular community (see The End of Faith, by Sam Harris for a similar theme) it doesn’t seem too important to the media.

It is a rare thing that anyone reporting on such stories does any analysis of the root causes. In fact, there seems to be an unwritten code among many journalists to avoid implicating religion in their stories, even when it is THE story. Instead of “religious violence” we read about “sectarian violence.” (EG: I googled “sectarian violence news” and got “about 609,000” hits. Of the top ten hits, 5 of the articles did not have the word religion in them anywhere. Of the other five, only two of them used the word “religion” or “religious” in connection with “violence” and those two did so in the last one or two paragraphs.) I have decided to comment on these stories (and any other issues that may be of importance to the Secular community).

WHY BOTHER?

My friends have asked me why I would bother. As I have told them before when they asked me why I bother to study the scriptures of some of the major monotheistic religions of the world, I firmly believe that there is a continuously increasing number of people who teeter on the borderline between theism and atheism. Many of these people, at least in the United States where I live, have been raised to believe that even to question their religious instructions is evil and atheists spread a disease that, if caught, will condemn them to an eternity of pain and suffering. These people struggle against using their brains. They are hungry for explanations but every single one they get from their church is filled with inconsistencies and illogic. They notice this but live in fear of pointing out these problems. I want these people to know 1) they are not alone, and 2) that a life lived without a god as your master is a much more fulfilling and happy life than you can imagine.

WHY IS IT CALLED “THE GALILEO GALLERY?”

I named the blog after Galileo Galilei (and took his initials as my moniker out of fear of the violent hostility directed at secular people around the world) because his life demonstrates why humanity should care about the effects of religious beliefs on each and every one of us.

Considered the Father of Modern Physics, Galileo was tried and imprisoned for the rest of his life by Christians for asserting that the Earth moved around the Sun. During his Inquisition, he was forced to recant his assertions under the threat of death. While some may argue that these events are so ancient as to be irrelevant on our modern lives. I ask those of you who feel this way to consider the following:

On 15 February 1990, in a speech delivered at the Sapienza University of Rome, Cardinal Ratzinger (later to become the current Pope, Benedict XVI), quoted the philosopher Paul Feyerabend as saying “The Church at the time of Galileo kept much more closely to reason than did Galileo himself, and she took into consideration the ethical and social consequences of Galileo's teaching too. Her verdict against Galileo was rational and just and the revision of this verdict can be justified only on the grounds of what is politically opportune.” He added, "It would be foolish to construct an impulsive apologetic on the basis of such views.”

Think about that for a second.

In the year 1990 – the year when the Hubble Space Telescope was launched aboard Space Shuttle Discovery – a highly-placed Cardinal who later become Pope 1) indicated that the Church’s actions against Galileo were “rational and just,” 2) seemed to think that it was a GOOD thing that the church considered not only the evidence of facts of heliocentrism but also “the ethical and social consequences of Galileo's teaching too,” and 3) said that it would be “foolish” to apologize for the church’s actions merely because it was “politically opportune” to do so.

This man is now the Pope and holds tremendous sway over one sixth of the world’s population. (This is the same guy who lifted the excommunication of a traditionalist bishop who denied the Holocaust without insisting that the bishop change his views.)

I should note that there IS a silver lining. In 1992; 350 years after Galileo, blind and imprisoned in his own house, died; and two years after Hubble was launched, the Catholic Church finally officially recognized that the Earth moves around the sun.

GG

UPDATE: After a technical issue and an absence, I have had to re-post all of my old posts. As a result there will be many posts listed as published today, Dec 3, 2009, that were posted sometime earlier in the year, but I do not know the exact date. this post is one of them.