Giordano Bruno: Freethinker extraordinaire

Discussion in 'History' started by Magical Realist, Sep 21, 2015.

  1. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    There was a time when thinking outside the box, independently from the conventional view of the majority, could land you in prison and get you burned at the stake. Since the birth of democracy freethinkers do not need to fear such harsh consequences to the free expression of their ideas and beliefs. But repercussions still occur for the freethinker, perhaps in the form of academic ostracization, public shaming and slander, and even blatant censorship. Noone likes their boat rocked. We all like to believe the status quo, the established and traditional paradigm of our own culture, is the absolute and unquestionable truth. It behooves us then to remember one Giordano Bruno, who's mere conviction that the universe was infinite and teeming with lifeforms and transhuman intelligences, got him roasted for the crime of heresy.
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    "Smack in the center of the Rome's fashionable Campo de Fiori is a statue of Giordano Bruno, philosopher. Bruno held that God was present in nature and that the universe and life was infinite. The Catholic Church burned him at the stake, right where his statue is today. Bruno and his deadly heresy was a major focus of Neil deGrasse Tyson during last night's episode of "Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey."

    "The general opinion is not always the perfect truth..." Giordano Bruno is still quoted. Such remarks produced expensive, bitter consequences: On 17th of February 1600 he publicly was burnt at the stake after eight years of torture and dungeon detention. Today the Piazza Campo dei Fiori where this statue stands has become a monument to free thinking; adjacent to the statue, is the "Fahrenheit 451" bookstore, named after Ray Bradbury's 1953 novel expounding freedom of thought.

    As the Spanish physicist Beatriz Gato-Rivera wrote, Bruno "claimed that the sun was only one star among the many thousands, and therefore, like the sun, many other stars also have planets around them and living beings inhabiting them." Gato-Rivera goes on to note that to "appreciate the genius of Bruno one has to take into account that he lived at a time when more than 99% of the intellectuals believed that the Earth was the center of the Universe, and a few others, like Copernicus and Galileo, believed that it was the Sun, instead, at the center of the Universe, and the stars being some bright heavenly bodies of an unknown nature."


    "On February 18th, in the year 2000, cardinal Angelo Sodano, the undersecretary of state of the Vatican, expressed the "deep regret" of the catholic church (according to Zenith News Agency with regard to the death sentence against Giordano Bruno) in a letter to the participants of a congress in Naples, which took place for the memory of this Italian philosopher in the local theological faculty 2000. It was a "terrible death", the cardinal wrote 400 years too late, "a sad episode in newer Christian history".

    In Bruno's honor, a space-born laboratory the ESA's Darwin Mission- will dramatically expand humanity's ability to scientifically test Bruno's vision that life is pervasive throughout the universe. The search is well underway with the discovery the past couple of years of more than 1000 exoplanets (out of a universe of billions)."=====http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/201...yssey.html
     
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  3. river

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    Bruno's death was and is a crime against Humanity.
     
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  5. Futilitist This so called forum is a fraud... Registered Senior Member

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    I agree.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

    On 20 January 1600, Pope Clement VIII declared Bruno a heretic and the Inquisition issued a sentence of death. According to the correspondence of Gaspar Schopp of Breslau, he is said to have made a threatening gesture towards his judges and to have replied: Maiori forsan cum timore sententiam in me fertis quam ego accipiam ("Perhaps you pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it")

    I know. It is my avatar.



    ---Futilitist

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