Danes feel Obama is greater than Jesus

[kandrathe]

The extenuating circumstances being that he put the church's position in the mouth of the Pope, thinly disguised, and called him an idiot? And so they put him before the inquisition and forced him to recant his scientific beliefs in favour of their dogma? Somehow, these "extenuating circumstances" don't seem very extenuating...

Consider at that time, the position of Pope held more power than most kings. <blockquote>"By 1616 the attacks on the ideas of Copernicus had reached a head, and Galileo went to Rome to try to persuade the Church authorities not to ban his ideas. In the end, Cardinal Bellarmine, acting on directives from the Inquisition, delivered him an order not to "hold or defend" the idea that the Earth moves and the Sun stands still at the centre. The decree did not prevent Galileo from discussing heliocentrism hypothesis (thus maintaining a facade of separation between science and the church). For the next several years Galileo stayed well away from the controversy. He revived his project of writing a book on the subject, encouraged by the election of Cardinal Barberini as Pope Urban VIII in 1623. Barberini was a friend and admirer of Galileo, and had opposed the condemnation of Galileo in 1616. The book, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, was published in 1632, with formal authorization from the Inquisition and papal permission." --wikipedia</blockquote>He inadvertently insulted and alienated his former advocate and the most powerful person in the known world. Oops. Had he done that to any number of kings of that era he would have been impaled, or drawn and quartered. This was hardly anti-science. The punishment he received was admittedly petty, and arbitrary, but also due to his disobedience and humiliation of the Pope.

Anyway, it had very little to do with Christianity, nor did it stop his continued writing, the publication or distribution of his works. Wrong? Yes. Impact on science? No. I don't see it.