Thank you for your kind response. I don't know if I'm talking to O'Neill1 or an alias.
What? I've been posting here on and off under this profile for almost a decade. Why would this be an "alias"? You have some very strange and irrational ideas about many things.
I guess it's the real O'Neill because he gets really angry because I told him I don't like his blog. I don't like it. What can you do? You should endure the criticism with more stoicism.
You said "I don't think Tim O'Neill's blog is excellent" and my response was "I see". Wow - that's some white hot anger. "I see". That's almost making the screen melt it's so angry. More irrationality.
I don't consider you an atheist. I use the traditional sense of the word: an atheist is one who claims that gods do not exist. I would call you an agnostic: neither affirm nor deny.
OH FFS ... Let us know you you emerge from down that "No True Scotsman" rabbit hole.
It seems that what bothers you about atheists or Gnostic atheists, new atheists or whatever you want to call them, is that they are "aggressive" in matters of religion.
More garbage. They can be as "aggressive" as they want - I don't care. I only bat an eyelid when they mangle history.
So, if you attack atheists with arguments similar to theists, you run the risk of being confused with one of them.
Yes, by stupid people. Everyone else can see I make no argument made
only by theists. See if you can work out why that key element is significant.
Okay, maybe "link" wasn't the right word. I meant that Copernicus did not directly confront the Catholic hierarchy and the scholastic
This is gibberish. He
did "confront" the scholastic/peripatetic synthesis with Aristotelianism - that was the whole point of what he was doing. He didn't "confront the Catholic hierarchy" because prior to 1616 this issue had no dogmatic or doctrinal impediments to it. You just don't understand the historical context at all.
--he even use some Aristotelian concepts to calm the church--
Utter crap. If there are any "Aristotelian concepts" in his stuff it was because he was a man of his time and they were part of the warp and weft of how cosmology was done in this period. But if you can back up this amazing mind-reading-of-a-historical-figure act you're trying to do, let's see your evidence. Please draw on your extensive knowledge of Copernicus' writings, his letters and those of his circle and show us him doing this to "calm the Church. This will be funny to watch.
Why do people like you think they can bluff and bluster their way through this stuff?
because he took care not to disturb them too much by delaying the publication of his work on the solar system until he was about to die.
Absolute garbage. He'd be circulating his
Commentariolus since 1512 - that's 31 years before his death. His student Widmanstadt presented his thesis in the Vatican gardens in front of two cardinals, a senior bishop, the Curia and the frigging Pope (!!) in 1533 - that's 10 years before his death. He corresponded with Cardinal Nikolaus von Schönberg about it in 1536 - that's 7 years before he died. And he was discussing all this with his friend and sponsor Bishop Tiedemann Giese for the whole of this 30+ years. For a guy who was taking care not to let the Church know what he was doing, he did a really bad job. Your claim is utterly absurd and irrational.
Luther's attacks are not there to reassure. He benefited from a time when the attitude of the Catholic Church was a little more tolerant than it later was.
*Chuckle* Yes, he can have his ideas presented to the Pope in the Vatican Gardens and have the Pope shower them with praise and you somehow interpret this as the Catholic Church being "a little more tolerant than it later was". This stuff is so bizarre it would make a Christian apologist blush.
It happened with Galileo as well. But already at the time of his death the harsh persecution that was to come later was expected, which caused Osiander --perhaps-- to publish a conciliatory prologue saying that heliocentrism was a mere speculative hypothesis.
Osiander was concerned at the reaction of "the Perpatetics". It was the reaction of fellow scholars that worried these guys, not Church persecution. And Osiander's letters show that he was not present it as "a mere speculative hypothesis". The tactic was to open the discussion that way and then make it clear that it was much more than that as the book went on. Again, you just don't know the source material. More importantly - you don't care. You have your fairy story version and mere facts and evidence are of no interest to you. Like all fundamentalists.
What it was not. I hope that in your demystifying eagerness you don't want to "demystify" also by denying that Copernicanism was persecuted from the 16th century onwards. Or that the church's attitude face to heliocentrism was criminal.
*Yawn* Again, no. Your problem is that you don't understand (and don't want to understand) why an idea that had not been a problem to anyone suddenly became one in the first decades of the seventeenth cenury (I assume that's what you meant by "the 16th century onwards" - please try to get the basics right)
Gibbon and Sagan don't look very impressive to me as a bible on Hipatia. I haven't read much about this woman, but I would recommend Maria Dzielska: Hypatia of Alexandria, which you can find at Archive.org. It is not a very well known book -in Spain at least-, but it is seriously documented and relatively recent. You will find it "demystifying" for sure.
This is hilarious. You think I don't know Dzielska's book? You seriously think I have not read one of the key monographs on Hypatia several times already? Even more funny - Dzielska debunks the myth that Hypatia was some kind of "martyr for science" or was killed because of her learning. Perhaps
you should read her book.
However, even if you demystify the Volterian version of Hypatia, you cannot deny that she was an enlightened woman barbarously murdered by the most savage Christian fundamentalism.
She was assassinated in a political struggle. Neither religion nor learning had anything to do with it. Read Dzielska.
Indeed, atheism has its myths, like any other way of thinking. The problem with obsessing over them, as seems to be your case, is that you leave intact the myths of the other side that are far worse.
There are plenty of people debunking the myths of the other side. Show me any other atheist who is holding our side to account on this stuff.
Amenábar’s film you quote -Agora- was historically unsustainable and ideologically weak on some points, but its defence of freedom of thought against intolerance seems to me rather more sympathetic than religious intransigence. Isn't it the same for you?
An admirable theme. It's just a pity they made up a pseudo historical fairy tale to pursue it. There are plenty of real stories they could have told instead, but now every time I come across anything online about Hypatia it's riddled with nonsense that can be traced back to that stupid movie. Idiots, you see, don't read books.
)
When you mention the incompatibility of miracles and justice, do you mean "how could a just God perform a miracle to, for example, save one person's life, while remaining inactive while another dies"? If I understand you well, I can relate to that challenge. I think faith necessitates letting go of the demand to understand everything, but that's still a hard one.
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