Å: Better (very) Late than Never

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Better (very) Late than Never

From TimesOnline:

Vatican recants with a statue of Galileo
Four hundred years after it put Galileo on trial for heresy the Vatican is to complete its rehabilitation of the great scientist by erecting a statue of him inside the Vatican walls.
The planned statue is to stand in the Vatican gardens near the apartment in which Galileo was incarcerated while awaiting trial in 1633 for advocating heliocentrism, the Copernican doctrine that the Earth revolves around the Sun.
(more)

... and I suppose this is expected to make it all better now? Token repentance four centuries after the crime? Now that's setting a great example, isn't it?

The church still routinely takes irrational stands in the face of reality, often with devastating human and environmental consequences. Unless it is somehow able to relinquish its self-claimed monopoly on "truth", step into the present day, and begin to remodel itself in light of the world as it actually is, not as people millenia ago imagined it to be, the church will continue its slow, pathetic descent into irrelevancy.

"From this distant vantage point [from the Voyager Spacecraft outside the orbit of Pluto], the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Look again at that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

"The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

"Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

"The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

"It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot

"The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true. We have a method, and that method helps us to reach not absolute truth, only asymptotic approaches to the truth — never there, just closer and closer, always finding vast new oceans of undiscovered possibilities. Cleverly designed experiments are the key." - Carl Sagan

Copyright Information

Content on this site may contain excerpts from material protected under copyright law without specific authorization by the copyright owner. Such material is quoted and/or linked here without profit for purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting and education, to spur critical thinking and discourse. This constitutes "fair use" of such material under U.S. Copyright Law, 17 U.S.C. §107.

Opinion and editorial material on this site is protected under US Copyright Law. Permission is hereby granted to reproduce such material from this site in whole or in part provided such reproduction includes a link back to the original source.