‘I, As A Hindu, As A Believer, Am Horrified By This Ideology’

[zebra7]

It is easy to infect these uneducated muslims by Mullah with religious poison.

Anyone could be poisoned even the educated one. There is a phrase that if you tell lie 100 times to someone repeatedly to someone that it becomes truth to him.

 

[dray]

Rajiv Gandhi justified riots with "ped girta hain to....." all she did was form a People’s Union for Civil Liberties and made a report on atrocities committed then came shah bano self claimed feminist madam was quite, then 1989 bhagalpur riots 1000 ppl died mostly muslim her trust on the govt was intact (maybe family matters are best kept inside ),now one incident and she has declared govt fascist communal just incidentally after ED filled case against her relatives before bihar elections .

Is it?

 

[lightoftruth]

Is it?

ED Registers Case Against Congress Leaders Sonia and Rahul Gandhi -

 

[The_Showstopper]

Lest all convert to Islam and make the Muslims of India feel safe and happy.

Not all, Sanghis can stay put. Sorry we already have our basket full, no more loons allowed in here

 

[dadeechi]

You fail to understand what is the issue its not for eating FOOD but killing of some animal which is scared to some other society/religion. Does without BEEF you would die or don't get your belly fulll.

One perception is why should muslim not eat Beef because its democracy and he have his right

Another perception is why should muslim eat Beef because they are living in the country where Hindus don't like that animal to get killed for food. They don't want Muslim to worship cow they want them to leave their scared animal, cow.

One hindu leader stands up and stated to fuel the emotions and sentiments and call for teaching the so called person who have killed and eaten the cow by themself and take the law in their hands.

Another Muslim Engineer gives the Beef party openly to show that he don't fear anything but doesn't know by doing that not only deepening the boundaries but fueling the hatred among people.

Then what is the solution make a definite Law whether eatable or not eatable and applicable to all, and all means all and
implemented strictly to all the states. There is a law, which protect the Peacock, which 6 year imprisonment, then why not beef, eat anything else mutton, chicken, cockroach, mosquito anything.

Very balanced post and Fair argument.

The constitution says India is Sovereign Socialist Secular Democratic Republic

Constitution of India | National Portal of India

(May be it is time to add the word Capitalistic too )

What we are seeing is a fight between the Democracy and Republic in the name of Secularism for the sake of Capitalism.

Few points to ponder:

If we go down this slippery slope that Majority's wishes should always override the wishes of the minority (which BTW is fair play as per Democracy), Is there a possibility that India may end up as a tyrannical country?

If yes, do we want that?

If no, why? The answer may lie in the fact that Hinduism by it's foundational nature is non tyrannical. The fact is major portions of the Hindus themselves oppose imposing their beliefs on others.

Also, There is reason why America considered itself to be a republic and not a democracy. Even a small state like Hawaii has the same number of senators as the biggest state like California.

 

[Samudra Manthan]

Very balanced post and Fair argument.

The constitution says India is Sovereign Socialist Secular Democratic Republic

Constitution of India | National Portal of India

(May be it is time to add the word Capitalistic too )

What we are seeing is a fight between the Democracy and Republic in the name of Secularism for the sake of Capitalism.

Few points to ponder:

If we go down this slippery slope that Majority's wishes should always override the wishes of the minority (which BTW is fair play as per Democracy), Is there a possibility that India may end up as a tyrannical country?

If yes, do we want that?

If no, why? The answer may lie in the fact that Hinduism by it's foundational nature is non tyrannical. The fact is major portions of the Hindus themselves oppose imposing their beliefs on others.

Also, There is reason why America considered itself to be a republic and not a democracy. Even a small state like Hawaii has the same number of senators as the biggest state like California.

Oh yes, Hindus are so tyrannical that we must give our minority Muslims and Christians a whip to lash us with. After all being ruled by benevolent Muslims and Christians for 1000 years is how we have managed to keep our tyrannical nature under control. So lest the world is exposed to the pox that is Hindus, minorities must have the veto on everything this country decides.

Also unless we are copying that great beacon of human well being - US of A, we are all animals not evolved yet.

 

[vsdave2302]

Anyone could be poisoned even the educated one. There is a phrase that if you tell lie 100 times to someone repeatedly to someone that it becomes truth to him.

But there is a difference. You need some logic or bases to poison the educated mind. Uneducated minds can be poisoned with any fake reason such as 72 hoors.

 

[zebra7]

But there is a difference. You need some logic or bases to poison the educated mind. Uneducated minds can be poisoned with any fake reason such as 72 hoors.

History shows that the poisoned mind was hallucinated with unreasonable, fake, untrue, and baseless fact which he don't want to defend at any cost my friend.

 

[dadeechi]

Oh yes, Hindus are so tyrannical that we must give our minority Muslims and Christians a whip to lash us with. After all being ruled by benevolent Muslims and Christians for 1000 years is how we have managed to keep our tyrannical nature under control. So lest the world is exposed to the pox that is Hindus, minorities must have the veto on everything this country decides.

In your excitement to respond to me you may have missed this statement of mine.

If no, why? The answer may lie in the fact that Hinduism by it's foundational nature is non tyrannical. The fact is major portions of the Hindus themselves oppose imposing their beliefs on others.

Also unless we are copying that great beacon of human well being - US of A, we are all animals not evolved yet.

We should avoid painting everyone with the same brush. There are many sects in Christianity too. Specifically I would like to mention the Seventh-day Adventist Church which follows vegetarianism and strongly opposes Papacy and RCC.

Living a healthful life
The Seventh-day Adventist Church recognizes the autonomy of each individual and his or her God-given power of choice. Rather than mandating standards of behavior, Adventists call upon one another to live as positive examples of God’s love and care.
Part of that example includes taking care of our health—we believe God calls us to care for our bodies, treating them with the respect a divine creation deserves. Gluttony and excess, even of something good, can be detrimental to our health.
Adventists believe the key to wellness lies in a life of balance and temperance. Nature creates a wealth of good things that lead to vibrant health. Pure water, fresh air and sunlight—when used appropriately—promote clean, healthy lives.
Exercise and avoidance of harmful substances such as tobacco, alcohol and mind-altering substances lead to clear minds and wise choices. A well-balanced vegetarian diet that avoids the consumption of meat coupled with intake of legumes, whole grains, nuts, fruits and vegetables, along with a source of vitamin B12, will promote vigorous health.
Such health is a gift from a loving God who wants us to live life in its abundance. When we benefit from such love, we feel a sense of gratitude and appreciation toward our creator.
Because of this, Adventists choose to praise God with joyful living.

Health: The Official Site of the Seventh-day Adventist world church



Seventh Day Adventists
Ellen G. White (1827-1915)

Ellen White was one of the founders of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. She was a vegetarian health reformer, and vegetarianism and other health teachings of the Adventists are due to her efforts. She believed that the human body represented God`s temple and therefore it should not be abused. She also denounced tobacco and alcohol.
About fifty percent of Adventists today are lacto-ovo vegetarians. The Seventh-Day Adventists are strong promoters of good health. They have their own publishing company and produce many books and other publications. They also have many hospitals, natural food stores, and vegetarian restaurants. In addition, they have an institution of higher education, Loma Linda University.
Several studies have found that Adventists are significantly healthier than the general population. Vegetarians owe much to Seventh-Day Adventists, since much of what is now known about health effects of vegetarianism comes from their studies.
- Richard Schwartz
more info at www.adventist.org
Quotes (sources unkown, there seem to be a lot in this format on SDA websites):
God gave our first parents the food He designed that the race should eat. It was contrary to His plan to have the life of any creature taken. There was to be no death in Eden. The fruit of the trees in the garden was the food man's wants required. - 1864
The majority of the diseases which the human family have been and still are suffering under, they have created by ignorance of their own organic health, and work perseveringly to tear themselves to pieces, and when broken down and debilitated in body and mind, send for the doctor and drug themselves to death. - 1866
The diet of animals is vegetables and grains. Must the vegetables be animalized, must they be incorporated into the system of animals, before we get them? Must we obtain our vegetable diet by eating the flesh of dead creatures? God provided fruit in its natural state for our first parents. He gave to Adam charge over the garden, to dress it, and to care for it, saying, "To you it shall be for meat." One animal was not to destroy another animal for food. - 1896
Let our ministers and canvassers step under the banners of strict temperance. Never be ashamed to say, "No thank you; I do not eat meat. I have conscientious scruples against eating the flesh of dead animals. - 1901
As I preach the gospel to the poor, I am instructed to tell them to eat that food which is most nourishing. I cannot say to them, "You must not eat eggs or milk or cream. You must use no butter in the preparation of food." The gospel must be preached to the poor, and the time has not yet come to prescribe the strictest diet. -1901

Parents should discard everything that endangers the moral and physical health of their children. They should not place flesh-meat on the table. And if they allow their children to eat meat freely, use butter and eggs, disease in some form will surely result, impairing the health of mind and body. Thus spirituality is weakened and often destroyed. - 1902

Flesh was never the best food; but its use is now doubly objectionable, since disease in animals is so rapidly increasing. - 1902
Animals are becoming more diseased and it will not be long until animal food will be discarded by many besides Seventh-day Adventists. Foods that are healthful and life sustaining are to be prepared, so that men and women will not need to eat meat. - 1902
Vegetables, fruits, and grains should compose our diet. Not an ounce of flesh meat should enter our stomachs. The eating of flesh is unnatural. We are to return to God's original purpose in the creation of man. - 1903
The moral evils of a flesh diet are not less marked than are the physical ills. Flesh food is injurious to health, and whatever affects the body has a corresponding effect on the mind and the soul. Think of the cruelty to animals meat-eating involves, and its effect on those who inflict and those who behold it. How it destroys the tenderness with which we should regard those creatures of God! - 1905
Animals are often transported long distances and subjected to great suffering in reaching a market. Taken from the green pastures and traveling for weary miles over the hot, dusty roads, or crowded into filthy cars, feverish and exhausted, often for many hours deprived of food and water, the poor creatures are driven to their death, that human beings may feast on the carcasses. - 1905
It is a mistake to suppose that muscular strength depends on the use of animal food. The needs of the system can be better supplied, and more vigorous health can be enjoyed, without its use. The grains, with fruits, nuts, and vegetables, contain all the nutritive properties necessary to make good blood. These elements are not so well or so fully supplied by a flesh diet. Had the use of flesh been essential to health and strength, animal food would have been included in the diet appointed man in the beginning. - 1905
Those who eat flesh are but eating grains and vegetables at second hand; for the animal receives from these things the nutrition that produces growth. The life that was in the grains and the vegetables passes into the eater. We receive it by eating the flesh of the animal. How much better to get it direct by eating the food that God provided for our use! - 1905
The time will come when we may have to discard some of the articles of diet we now use, such as milk and cream and eggs; but it is not necessary to bring upon ourselves perplexity by premature and extreme restrictions. Wait until the circumstances demand it, and the Lord prepares the way for it. - RH MAR.03,1910

History of Vegetarianism - Ellen G. White (1827 - 1915)

 

[Samudra Manthan]

In your excitement to respond to me you may have missed this statement of mine.

If no, why? The answer may lie in the fact that Hinduism by it's foundational nature is non tyrannical. The fact is major portions of the Hindus themselves oppose imposing their beliefs on others.

No, that was not what you conveyed. If Democracy wins, why would it be a "slippery slope" if as you say Hinduism is not tyrannical? Major portions of Hindus would not like cows being killed and they want Sickulars to stop killing cows. If you consider that tyrannical, so be it. Hindus would welcome that sort of tyranny.

What America is or not is has no bearing on what India should be. By bringing in the example of republican America in this discussion, you perhaps wanted to convey that the vote of minorities (Muslims, Christians, and Sickular) should carry the same weight as that of Hindus, the majority. This was the argument which led to the partition of India when Muslims at 25% demanded parity with Hindus at 75%. Now after having given away two countries from the landmass that was India to form their own country where they could kill and desecrate all animals and temples as they wish, you want India to implement Muslim Leagues plan of having parity between Christians/Muslims and Hindus in this part of the land too?

Oh good you brought in the example of Seventh Day Adventist to prove how broad the Christian faith is. The fact though is the ideals of SDA is a direct copy from Hindu doctrines and has no foundation in Christianity whatsoever. Its less than 200 year history should have told you that plus the reasons given for vegetarianism. This is digestion of Hinduism into Christianity without as much as a thanks for the Hindu belief system.

To summarize, according to Mrs. White, meat in your diet will do the following to you:

• Clouds the brain
• Benumbs the intellect
• Enfeebles and deadens the moral nature
• Weakens the higher powers
• Lessens spirituality
• Renders mind incapable of understanding truth
• Causes insubordination
• Stimulates lustful propensities
• Strengthens the lower passions
• Animalizes you, strengthens the animal appetites
• Interferes with the religious life
• Causes you to miss out on companionship with heavenly angels
• May cause God to decide not to heal your sickness
• Causes sickness and disease
• Endangers physical, mental, and spiritual health

You claimed to be a Brahmin somewhere if I remember correctly, pity you did not recognize your own religion being repackaged and sold as Christianity.

 

[dadeechi]

No, that was not what you conveyed. If Democracy wins, why would it be a "slippery slope" if as you say Hinduism is not tyrannical? Major portions of Hindus would not like cows being killed and they want Sickulars to stop killing cows. If you consider that tyrannical, so be it. Hindus would welcome that sort of tyranny.

What America is or not is has no bearing on what India should be. By bringing in the example of republican America in this discussion, you perhaps wanted to convey that the vote of minorities (Muslims, Christians, and Sickular) should carry the same weight as that of Hindus, the majority. This was the argument which led to the partition of India when Muslims at 25% demanded parity with Hindus at 75%. Now after having given away two countries from the landmass that was India to form their own country where they could kill and desecrate all animals and temples as they wish, you want India to implement Muslim Leagues plan of having parity between Christians/Muslims and Hindus in this part of the land too?

Oh good you brought in the example of Seventh Day Adventist to prove how broad the Christian faith is. The fact though is the ideals of SDA is a direct copy from Hindu doctrines and has no foundation in Christianity whatsoever. Its less than 200 year history should have told you that plus the reasons given for vegetarianism. This is digestion of Hinduism into Christianity without as much as a thanks for the Hindu belief system.

To summarize, according to Mrs. White, meat in your diet will do the following to you:

• Clouds the brain
• Benumbs the intellect
• Enfeebles and deadens the moral nature
• Weakens the higher powers
• Lessens spirituality
• Renders mind incapable of understanding truth
• Causes insubordination
• Stimulates lustful propensities
• Strengthens the lower passions
• Animalizes you, strengthens the animal appetites
• Interferes with the religious life
• Causes you to miss out on companionship with heavenly angels
• May cause God to decide not to heal your sickness
• Causes sickness and disease
• Endangers physical, mental, and spiritual health

You claimed to be a Brahmin somewhere if I remember correctly, pity you did not recognize your own religion being repackaged and sold as Christianity.

My point was that Democracy (where majority overrides minority opinion) by its very nature is a slippery slope but may not be slippery slope in case of India as India has Hinduism in majority.

In case of SDA being repackaging Hinduism, I would say it is not a recent phenomenon and goes back all the way to Jesus himself.

 

[Samudra Manthan]

My point was that Democracy (where majority overrides minority opinion) by its very nature is a slippery slope but may not be slippery slope in case of India as India has Hinduism in majority.

In case of SDA being repackaging Hinduism, I would say it is not a recent phenomenon and goes back all the way to Jesus himself.

I would not be so eager to embrace everything the West puts out there about Jesus being in India as a fact unless you are eager for India to turn into the next holy land the Christians carry out their crusades for. Veracity of Jesus being a historical figure too is in contention.

Christianity is not repackaged Hinduism and has never been until recent, SDA being the case, and many other instance when the church finding itself losing against science started copying and incorporating all elements of Hinduism into its faith while at the same time attempting to defame and run down Hinduism.

 

[Prajapati]

I would not be so eager to embrace everything the West puts out there about Jesus being in India as a fact unless you are eager for India to turn into the next holy land the Christians carry out their crusades for. Veracity of Jesus being a historical figure too is in contention.

Christianity is not repackaged Hinduism and has never been until recent, SDA being the case, and many other instance when the church finding itself losing against science started copying and incorporating all elements of Hinduism into its faith while at the same time attempting to defame and run down Hinduism.

 

[dadeechi]

I would not be so eager to embrace everything the West puts out there about Jesus being in India as a fact unless you are eager for India to turn into the next holy land the Christians carry out their crusades for. Veracity of Jesus being a historical figure too is in contention.

Christianity is not repackaged Hinduism and has never been until recent, SDA being the case, and many other instance when the church finding itself losing against science started copying and incorporating all elements of Hinduism into its faith while at the same time attempting to defame and run down Hinduism.

Well you have to differentiate the teachings of Jesus from RCC. RCC totally hijacked both history and the message for its own political purposes. Hinduism is based on foundations of freedom and science while RCC was always opposed to science as they were all worried that it's empire would collapse once it's followers are exposed to the reality.

Two Views of the Universe
Galileo vs. the Pope

A Copernican map of the universe published in 1660 features the sun at the center. Galileo's advocacy of this theory incurred the wrath of Pope Urban VIII. (Image From the Granger Collection, New York)

By Hal Hellman
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, September 9, 1998; Page H01
On June 22, 1633, Galileo Galilei was put on trial at Inquisition headquarters in Rome. All of the magnificent power of the Roman Catholic Church seemed arrayed against the famous scientist. Under threat of torture, imprisonment and even burning at the stake, he was forced, on his knees, to "abjure, curse and detest" a lifetime of brilliant and dedicated thought and labor.
By then an old man of 69 who in his defense referred to his "pitiable state of bodily indisposition," Galileo was charged with "vehement suspicion of heresy." He had to renounce "with sincere heart and unfeigned faith" his belief that the sun, not Earth, was the center of the universe and that Earth moved around the sun and not vice versa, as ecclesiastical teaching dictated.
Because he was willing to do this, at least verbally, the more serious of the threats remained only that. As one of his punishments, for example, he was to recite the seven penitential psalms once a week for three years. He also was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life.
Finally, his book, Dialogue on the Great World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican (1632), which lay at the heart of the trial, was added to the index of banned books, Index Librorum Prohibitorum, maintained by the Inquisition.
Ten cardinals sat in judgment of Galileo. Pope Urban VIII was not present in person, but he was there in spirit, for his personal feelings of anger and frustration were the driving force behind the extraordinary proceedings. Urban recognized just how seriously Galileo's new science challenged established church doctrine. Worse, Galileo had declared that the book of nature was written in the language of mathematics, not in biblical terms.
Cardinal Maffeo Barberini had taken the name Urban VIII in 1623 at age 55. Until then, he was, by all accounts, a warm, compassionate, intelligent human being and one of the few with whom Galileo felt that he could discuss his work intelligently.
During one of Galileo's visits to Rome soon after Urban's election, the famous scientist was granted six audiences, each lasting more than an hour, an extraordinary allocation of the pope's time. In fact, it was largely because of Urban's election that Galileo began to think he could safely write the Dialogue.
Both men had been born and raised in Florence and attended the University of Pisa, where Galileo studied medicine and Urban took a law degree. As a cardinal, Barberini had even interceded on Galileo's behalf during a confrontation with church authorities in 1616 when Galileo had been warned that his support of the concept of a sun-centered universe could bring trouble.

The Roman Catholic Church dictated that Earth, not the sun, was the center of the universe. This classical, or Ptolemaic, view is represented in an engraving from 1660. (Image From the Granger Collection, New York)

Galileo was told then that he could consider the concept as a hypothetical idea. He was not to present it as a reality, however, and should not even think of it in that way.
By 1632, about 16 years after that foreboding event, Galileo was a widely known and respected scientist and the official astronomer and philosopher at the court of the grand duke of Tuscany.
After deciding to publish the Dialogue, Galileo had followed strict protocol. He had his book scrutinized by church censors and received the church's official imprimatur. He had clearly fooled all of the officials into thinking that his ideas were being presented only as hypotheses. He had almost gotten away with publishing a heretical work without provoking papal fury.
A Loyal Son
Galileo, however, was no scoffing atheist nor angry escapee from religion. He had attended Catholic school, both of his daughters had become nuns and, most important, he considered himself a loyal son of the church. He felt that he was trying to save, not hurt, the church. He was trying to prevent the church from having to defend a doctrine that he thought subject to disproof.

Galileo demonstrates his telescopic discovery of Jupiter's moons to the councilors of Venice in 1610. (Image From the Granger Collection, New York)

Nonetheless, the mere mention of Galileo's name provoked fury in Urban. At one point before the trial, the Tuscan ambassador to Rome, a good friend of Galileo's, merely entered the pope's chamber and was met by an angry blast: "Your Galileo has ventured to meddle with things that he ought not to and with the most important and dangerous subjects that can be stirred up these days."
Galileo was far from the first to challenge authority.
In 1543, the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus had proposed the heliocentric (sun-centered) system. A canon in the Polish Catholic Church, he had recognized the possibility of trouble and delayed publication for many years. It is likely that he far overestimated the impact of his writing, which turned out to be one of history's major unread works.
As long as the doctrine lay shrouded in Latin, just another long-winded academic treatise that few read or cared about, the church could safely ignore it. The book never made the index, a sure sign of impotence -- at least not until 1616, when Galileo's support of the doctrine forced the church to recognize the fertility of Copernicus's revolutionary idea.
The traditional view had been codified about 150 A.D. by Ptolemy of Alexandria, an astronomer and geographer who put together an astronomical system to explain the apparent motion of the night sky. Ptolemy's solution was a system in which Earth was at rest in the center of the universe, with the moon, sun, planets and stars revolving around it, all embedded in a system of concentric, crystal spheres.
The advantage of Ptolemy's system was that it worked, enabling astronomers to predict with some accuracy the motions of heavenly bodies. For the calculations, Ptolemy assumed that all such bodies moved in circular paths.
To help these match observed activity, which is much more complicated, he added a set of additional smaller circular orbits called epicycles. The result was a very complex geometry, but it was the best there was.
Copernicus's idea stood Ptolemy's on its head. Copernicus considered the Ptolemaic system too complex. He hypothesized as follows: Suppose that the sun is at rest, and Earth has a twofold motion. It rotates once a day on its axis and revolves around the sun once a year.
Ptolemy and Aquinas
Copernicus was not the first to advance this heliocentric idea. Several ancient Greeks, including the astronomer Aristarchus of Samos, had proposed it about 260 B.C. Like Galileo, he was denounced for impiety but apparently unharmed. Aristarchus could advance no proof for the heliocentric idea, however, and it went into hibernation.
Ptolemy's system was the first thorough enough to deal with the observed mass of celestial motions. It matched what people "saw with their own eyes."
Later, Ptolemy's description of the universe became entrenched in Catholic Church teachings, largely through the work of Thomas Aquinas, a 13th-century theologian and philosopher. The centrality of mankind, for example, is an important part of Christian teaching and meshes nicely with an Earth-centered (geocentric) cosmology.
The Christian idea of heaven and hell also melded beautifully with the geocentric system, which saw the heavenly bodies as perfect and immutable. In other words, everything in heaven is eternal and incorruptible, whereas growth and, especially, degeneration and decay are restricted to Earth, punishment for the sins of our biblical forebears.
Astronomical references are not difficult to find in the Bible. For example, Psalm 19: "The heavens are telling the Glory of God, and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. . . . In [the heavens] he has set a tabernacle for the sun, which comes forth like a bridegroom leaving his chamber and like a strong man runs its course with joy. Its rising is from the end of the heavens and its circuit to the end of them."
What could be clearer? Also, how could Joshua have made the sun stand still if it had not been moving?
In such an atmosphere, a heliocentric universe was a jarring concept because of the implication more than the theory itself. As brave a turnabout as the Copernican theory was, it did not offer significant gain in simplicity or accuracy.
Copernicus remained hung up on the idea that the orbits of heavenly bodies must be circular because circular motion was the most "perfect" type. This fixation on circular orbits forced him to move the center of the system away from the center of the sun, where it belongs, thus depriving his system of the basic simplicity that otherwise would have been its major advantage.
Copernicus's beliefs differed from contemporary beliefs in other ways. For instance, what made the heavenly bodies move across the sky? Angels, Aquinas said. No, Copernicus said, it is in the nature of perfect circles to rotate forever.
The basic reason for his belief in his heliocentric theory also is instructive: There can be "no better place than the center for the lamp that illuminates the whole universe." It remained for Johannes Kepler, a German astronomer, physicist and mathematician, to move the heliocentric juggernaut onto the right track, mainly through his discovery that planetary orbits were elliptical, not circular.
Strangely, although Galileo and Kepler were contemporaries and had corresponded, and although Kepler was one of few other major scientists who supported the heliocentric idea, Galileo never made use of his work. Galileo, too, clung to circular orbits, indicating the difficulty of breaking an old mold.
Objections to the heliocentric theory still had to be answered. After many years of argument, Galileo finally recognized that something more substantive was needed, but he found no existing evidence that he could use.
A significant part of Galileo's evidence was based on his own observations with a telescope that he designed and built. Answering scholastics' objections that a body cannot have two simultaneous motions, he produced Jupiter's satellites, which clearly moved around Jupiter while Jupiter moved around Earth or the sun -- it really doesn't affect the argument. Dealing with the traditional claim that heavenly bodies are perfect, Galileo showed that the sun has spots and the moon has mountains.
As for the objection that Copernican doctrine required Venus to show phases, not hitherto seen, Galileo said his observations also showed Venutian phases. These sightings, however, were being made mainly in the years 1609 and 1610 through very primitive telescopes. A practiced eye was needed to make sense of them, and many of Galileo's contemporaries saw nothing but jiggling blurs of light.
Still, his Letters on the Solar Spots (1613) offered the first published statement that only the heliocentric theory fit his telescopic observations. He concluded triumphantly, "And perhaps this planet [Saturn] also, no less than horned Venus, harmonizes admirably with the great Copernican system, to the universal revelation of which doctrine propitious breezes are now seen to be directed toward us, leaving little fear of clouds or crosswinds."
Trouble was brewing in the Catholic Church, however. By 1616, Galileo was being warned by Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, an influential Jesuit theologian, that he was on dangerous ground. Bellarmine made the church's position very clear in a letter.
Commenting on a work by the Rev. Paolo Antonio Foscarini, a Carmelite who supported the Copernican system, Bellarmine wrote, "I say that, if there were a true demonstration that the sun was in the center of the universe . . . then it would be necessary to use careful consideration in explaining the Scriptures that seemed contrary. . . . But I do not think there has been any such demonstration."
Bellarmine was correct. All of Galileo's evidence, specifically the telescopic observations, showed that Earth could be revolving around the sun but did not prove that it was. If such a demonstration were available, it would shred a significant portion of church doctrine. Church authorities had felt it far better to maintain the status quo in hopes that the disturbing situation would evaporate.
Had Galileo not thought of doing the Dialogue, tension might have eased, at least for a while. The book was clever, lively and very readable. Moreover, it was in Italian rather than Latin, the choice of Copernicus, so it was widely read and discussed.
The Dialogue
Its 500 pages are structured as a series of conversations over four days among three participants -- Salviati, Sagredo and Simplicio.
Salviati, named for an old friend of Galileo's who had died in 1614, speaks for Galileo. Sagredo, named in memory of another deceased friend, is the intelligent, impartial moderator, a man of high rank and of the world. Simplicio is a composite of all of Galileo's opponents.
Galileo's technique is to build his opponents' arguments through Simplicio, adding some of his own, and then to demolish those assertions with powerful arguments and often devastating satire.
Simplicio, for instance, reflects a common belief of the time that the sun, moon and stars, "which are ordained for no other use but to serve the Earth, need no other qualities for attaining that end save only those of light and motion."
"What's this?" Sagredo argues. "Will you affirm that nature has produced and designed so many vast perfect and noble celestial bodies, invariant, eternal and divine, to no other use but to serve this changeable, transitory and mortal earth? To serve that which you call the dregs of the universe and sink of all uncleanliness?"
But all of his arguments, Galileo knew, required evidence. In fact, the early part of his Dialogue is really just a softening-up operation for what Galileo feels are his devastating blows -- the evidence.
Toward the end of the book, Salviati has just explained a connection between Earth's motion and its tides. To Galileo, this is the clincher: Earth's waters move. That much is known. Through a long series of arguments, developed slowly and logically, he shows that this movement of waters is evidence that Earth does indeed move.
Sagredo breathes in wonderment: "If you had told us no more, this alone, in my judgment, so far exceeds the vanities introduced by so many others that my mere looking on them nauseates me, and I very much wonder that among men of high intelligence . . . not one has ever considered the incompatibility that is between the motion of the water contained and the immobility of the vessel containing it."
Ironically, Galileo also takes a potshot at Kepler, who had suggested that something in the heavenly bodies somehow caused tides. Kepler thought, however, that this heavenly cause was magnetism.
In the Dialogue, Salviati accuses Kepler of having "given his ear and assent to the moon's predominance over the water and to occult properties and such-like trifles." This sort of action at a distance seems to Galileo an example of Kepler's mystical bent.
Not until much later was Kepler's inspired guess borne out, for the tides indeed are caused by the moon's and, to a lesser extent, sun's gravitational (though not magnetic) pull. They are not caused by Earth's motion. This is a good example of Galileo's power with words, for even when wrong, he was convincing.
Clearly, in order to persuade readers, Galileo had to make solid, powerful arguments. To make them obvious and perhaps to vent some spleen, he used Simplicio as a foil. But the more foolish Simplicio's arguments are, the more clear is Galileo's real objective. He resolved to take this chance, and through most of the book, it works.
At the end, however, carried away perhaps by excessive zeal and secure in his conviction that he had found a way to vent without personal danger, he lets Simplicio sum up the church's position on the impossibility of obtaining true knowledge of the physical world.
Galileo's Intent
If God had wanted to make Earth's waters move in a way other than by making Earth move, Simplicio says, He certainly could have done so -- "Upon which I forthwith conclude that, this being granted, it would be an extravagant boldness for anyone to limit and confine the Divine power and wisdom to one particular conjecture of his own." The "particular conjecture" to which Simplicio is referring, of course, is the Copernican system.
Simplicio's closing statement doesn't sound very explosive. It seems likely that Galileo felt the same way. Yet Galileo's enemies later convinced Urban that, if the statement came from Simplicio's mouth, Galileo's intent must have been to make fun of it and, worse, of Urban himself.
Galileo was strong-minded but not stupid. The problem was that Simplicio's assertion had been a standard papal argument and censors had directed Galileo to include it in the book. Clearly, in Galileo's thinking, the argument had to come from Simplicio. Conceivably, Galileo forgot that the argument had been Urban's.
When Urban saw the result, he was furious and unforgiving. Even after Galileo's death in 1642, Urban refused to relent. The grand duke of Tuscany, Galileo's patron for many years, wanted to hold a suitable public funeral and erect a monument over Galileo's grave at the Church of Santa Croce in Florence.
Urban warned that he would consider such action a direct insult. So the remains of one of history's great scientists were quietly hidden in the basement of the church bell tower for almost a century.
Finally, permission was given for Galileo's remains to be interred under a large monument at the church entrance, where they lie today. Nearby are the tombs of two other famous Florentines: Michelangelo and Machiavelli. The Dialogue was not released from the Index until 1822.
In fall 1980, Pope John Paul II ordered a new look at evidence in Galileo's trial. In 1992 came acquittal. But the basic conflict between established religion and modern science is still being played out.
Hal Hellman is the author of "Great Feuds in Science: Ten of the Liveliest Disputes Ever" (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1998), from which this article is excerpted.

Washingtonpost.com: Horizon Section

The Criminal History of the Papacy

 

[Samudra Manthan]

Well you have to differentiate the teachings of Jesus from RCC. RCC totally hijacked both history and the message for its own political purposes. Hinduism is based on foundations of freedom and science while RCC was always opposed to science as they were all worried that it's empire would collapse once it's followers are exposed to the reality.

Two Views of the Universe
Galileo vs. the Pope

A Copernican map of the universe published in 1660 features the sun at the center. Galileo's advocacy of this theory incurred the wrath of Pope Urban VIII. (Image From the Granger Collection, New York)

By Hal Hellman
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, September 9, 1998; Page H01
On June 22, 1633, Galileo Galilei was put on trial at Inquisition headquarters in Rome. All of the magnificent power of the Roman Catholic Church seemed arrayed against the famous scientist. Under threat of torture, imprisonment and even burning at the stake, he was forced, on his knees, to "abjure, curse and detest" a lifetime of brilliant and dedicated thought and labor.
By then an old man of 69 who in his defense referred to his "pitiable state of bodily indisposition," Galileo was charged with "vehement suspicion of heresy." He had to renounce "with sincere heart and unfeigned faith" his belief that the sun, not Earth, was the center of the universe and that Earth moved around the sun and not vice versa, as ecclesiastical teaching dictated.
Because he was willing to do this, at least verbally, the more serious of the threats remained only that. As one of his punishments, for example, he was to recite the seven penitential psalms once a week for three years. He also was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life.
Finally, his book, Dialogue on the Great World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican (1632), which lay at the heart of the trial, was added to the index of banned books, Index Librorum Prohibitorum, maintained by the Inquisition.
Ten cardinals sat in judgment of Galileo. Pope Urban VIII was not present in person, but he was there in spirit, for his personal feelings of anger and frustration were the driving force behind the extraordinary proceedings. Urban recognized just how seriously Galileo's new science challenged established church doctrine. Worse, Galileo had declared that the book of nature was written in the language of mathematics, not in biblical terms.
Cardinal Maffeo Barberini had taken the name Urban VIII in 1623 at age 55. Until then, he was, by all accounts, a warm, compassionate, intelligent human being and one of the few with whom Galileo felt that he could discuss his work intelligently.
During one of Galileo's visits to Rome soon after Urban's election, the famous scientist was granted six audiences, each lasting more than an hour, an extraordinary allocation of the pope's time. In fact, it was largely because of Urban's election that Galileo began to think he could safely write the Dialogue.
Both men had been born and raised in Florence and attended the University of Pisa, where Galileo studied medicine and Urban took a law degree. As a cardinal, Barberini had even interceded on Galileo's behalf during a confrontation with church authorities in 1616 when Galileo had been warned that his support of the concept of a sun-centered universe could bring trouble.

The Roman Catholic Church dictated that Earth, not the sun, was the center of the universe. This classical, or Ptolemaic, view is represented in an engraving from 1660. (Image From the Granger Collection, New York)

Galileo was told then that he could consider the concept as a hypothetical idea. He was not to present it as a reality, however, and should not even think of it in that way.
By 1632, about 16 years after that foreboding event, Galileo was a widely known and respected scientist and the official astronomer and philosopher at the court of the grand duke of Tuscany.
After deciding to publish the Dialogue, Galileo had followed strict protocol. He had his book scrutinized by church censors and received the church's official imprimatur. He had clearly fooled all of the officials into thinking that his ideas were being presented only as hypotheses. He had almost gotten away with publishing a heretical work without provoking papal fury.
A Loyal Son
Galileo, however, was no scoffing atheist nor angry escapee from religion. He had attended Catholic school, both of his daughters had become nuns and, most important, he considered himself a loyal son of the church. He felt that he was trying to save, not hurt, the church. He was trying to prevent the church from having to defend a doctrine that he thought subject to disproof.

Galileo demonstrates his telescopic discovery of Jupiter's moons to the councilors of Venice in 1610. (Image From the Granger Collection, New York)

Nonetheless, the mere mention of Galileo's name provoked fury in Urban. At one point before the trial, the Tuscan ambassador to Rome, a good friend of Galileo's, merely entered the pope's chamber and was met by an angry blast: "Your Galileo has ventured to meddle with things that he ought not to and with the most important and dangerous subjects that can be stirred up these days."
Galileo was far from the first to challenge authority.
In 1543, the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus had proposed the heliocentric (sun-centered) system. A canon in the Polish Catholic Church, he had recognized the possibility of trouble and delayed publication for many years. It is likely that he far overestimated the impact of his writing, which turned out to be one of history's major unread works.
As long as the doctrine lay shrouded in Latin, just another long-winded academic treatise that few read or cared about, the church could safely ignore it. The book never made the index, a sure sign of impotence -- at least not until 1616, when Galileo's support of the doctrine forced the church to recognize the fertility of Copernicus's revolutionary idea.
The traditional view had been codified about 150 A.D. by Ptolemy of Alexandria, an astronomer and geographer who put together an astronomical system to explain the apparent motion of the night sky. Ptolemy's solution was a system in which Earth was at rest in the center of the universe, with the moon, sun, planets and stars revolving around it, all embedded in a system of concentric, crystal spheres.
The advantage of Ptolemy's system was that it worked, enabling astronomers to predict with some accuracy the motions of heavenly bodies. For the calculations, Ptolemy assumed that all such bodies moved in circular paths.
To help these match observed activity, which is much more complicated, he added a set of additional smaller circular orbits called epicycles. The result was a very complex geometry, but it was the best there was.
Copernicus's idea stood Ptolemy's on its head. Copernicus considered the Ptolemaic system too complex. He hypothesized as follows: Suppose that the sun is at rest, and Earth has a twofold motion. It rotates once a day on its axis and revolves around the sun once a year.
Ptolemy and Aquinas
Copernicus was not the first to advance this heliocentric idea. Several ancient Greeks, including the astronomer Aristarchus of Samos, had proposed it about 260 B.C. Like Galileo, he was denounced for impiety but apparently unharmed. Aristarchus could advance no proof for the heliocentric idea, however, and it went into hibernation.
Ptolemy's system was the first thorough enough to deal with the observed mass of celestial motions. It matched what people "saw with their own eyes."
Later, Ptolemy's description of the universe became entrenched in Catholic Church teachings, largely through the work of Thomas Aquinas, a 13th-century theologian and philosopher. The centrality of mankind, for example, is an important part of Christian teaching and meshes nicely with an Earth-centered (geocentric) cosmology.
The Christian idea of heaven and hell also melded beautifully with the geocentric system, which saw the heavenly bodies as perfect and immutable. In other words, everything in heaven is eternal and incorruptible, whereas growth and, especially, degeneration and decay are restricted to Earth, punishment for the sins of our biblical forebears.
Astronomical references are not difficult to find in the Bible. For example, Psalm 19: "The heavens are telling the Glory of God, and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. . . . In [the heavens] he has set a tabernacle for the sun, which comes forth like a bridegroom leaving his chamber and like a strong man runs its course with joy. Its rising is from the end of the heavens and its circuit to the end of them."
What could be clearer? Also, how could Joshua have made the sun stand still if it had not been moving?
In such an atmosphere, a heliocentric universe was a jarring concept because of the implication more than the theory itself. As brave a turnabout as the Copernican theory was, it did not offer significant gain in simplicity or accuracy.
Copernicus remained hung up on the idea that the orbits of heavenly bodies must be circular because circular motion was the most "perfect" type. This fixation on circular orbits forced him to move the center of the system away from the center of the sun, where it belongs, thus depriving his system of the basic simplicity that otherwise would have been its major advantage.
Copernicus's beliefs differed from contemporary beliefs in other ways. For instance, what made the heavenly bodies move across the sky? Angels, Aquinas said. No, Copernicus said, it is in the nature of perfect circles to rotate forever.
The basic reason for his belief in his heliocentric theory also is instructive: There can be "no better place than the center for the lamp that illuminates the whole universe." It remained for Johannes Kepler, a German astronomer, physicist and mathematician, to move the heliocentric juggernaut onto the right track, mainly through his discovery that planetary orbits were elliptical, not circular.
Strangely, although Galileo and Kepler were contemporaries and had corresponded, and although Kepler was one of few other major scientists who supported the heliocentric idea, Galileo never made use of his work. Galileo, too, clung to circular orbits, indicating the difficulty of breaking an old mold.
Objections to the heliocentric theory still had to be answered. After many years of argument, Galileo finally recognized that something more substantive was needed, but he found no existing evidence that he could use.
A significant part of Galileo's evidence was based on his own observations with a telescope that he designed and built. Answering scholastics' objections that a body cannot have two simultaneous motions, he produced Jupiter's satellites, which clearly moved around Jupiter while Jupiter moved around Earth or the sun -- it really doesn't affect the argument. Dealing with the traditional claim that heavenly bodies are perfect, Galileo showed that the sun has spots and the moon has mountains.
As for the objection that Copernican doctrine required Venus to show phases, not hitherto seen, Galileo said his observations also showed Venutian phases. These sightings, however, were being made mainly in the years 1609 and 1610 through very primitive telescopes. A practiced eye was needed to make sense of them, and many of Galileo's contemporaries saw nothing but jiggling blurs of light.
Still, his Letters on the Solar Spots (1613) offered the first published statement that only the heliocentric theory fit his telescopic observations. He concluded triumphantly, "And perhaps this planet [Saturn] also, no less than horned Venus, harmonizes admirably with the great Copernican system, to the universal revelation of which doctrine propitious breezes are now seen to be directed toward us, leaving little fear of clouds or crosswinds."
Trouble was brewing in the Catholic Church, however. By 1616, Galileo was being warned by Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, an influential Jesuit theologian, that he was on dangerous ground. Bellarmine made the church's position very clear in a letter.
Commenting on a work by the Rev. Paolo Antonio Foscarini, a Carmelite who supported the Copernican system, Bellarmine wrote, "I say that, if there were a true demonstration that the sun was in the center of the universe . . . then it would be necessary to use careful consideration in explaining the Scriptures that seemed contrary. . . . But I do not think there has been any such demonstration."
Bellarmine was correct. All of Galileo's evidence, specifically the telescopic observations, showed that Earth could be revolving around the sun but did not prove that it was. If such a demonstration were available, it would shred a significant portion of church doctrine. Church authorities had felt it far better to maintain the status quo in hopes that the disturbing situation would evaporate.
Had Galileo not thought of doing the Dialogue, tension might have eased, at least for a while. The book was clever, lively and very readable. Moreover, it was in Italian rather than Latin, the choice of Copernicus, so it was widely read and discussed.
The Dialogue
Its 500 pages are structured as a series of conversations over four days among three participants -- Salviati, Sagredo and Simplicio.
Salviati, named for an old friend of Galileo's who had died in 1614, speaks for Galileo. Sagredo, named in memory of another deceased friend, is the intelligent, impartial moderator, a man of high rank and of the world. Simplicio is a composite of all of Galileo's opponents.
Galileo's technique is to build his opponents' arguments through Simplicio, adding some of his own, and then to demolish those assertions with powerful arguments and often devastating satire.
Simplicio, for instance, reflects a common belief of the time that the sun, moon and stars, "which are ordained for no other use but to serve the Earth, need no other qualities for attaining that end save only those of light and motion."
"What's this?" Sagredo argues. "Will you affirm that nature has produced and designed so many vast perfect and noble celestial bodies, invariant, eternal and divine, to no other use but to serve this changeable, transitory and mortal earth? To serve that which you call the dregs of the universe and sink of all uncleanliness?"
But all of his arguments, Galileo knew, required evidence. In fact, the early part of his Dialogue is really just a softening-up operation for what Galileo feels are his devastating blows -- the evidence.
Toward the end of the book, Salviati has just explained a connection between Earth's motion and its tides. To Galileo, this is the clincher: Earth's waters move. That much is known. Through a long series of arguments, developed slowly and logically, he shows that this movement of waters is evidence that Earth does indeed move.
Sagredo breathes in wonderment: "If you had told us no more, this alone, in my judgment, so far exceeds the vanities introduced by so many others that my mere looking on them nauseates me, and I very much wonder that among men of high intelligence . . . not one has ever considered the incompatibility that is between the motion of the water contained and the immobility of the vessel containing it."
Ironically, Galileo also takes a potshot at Kepler, who had suggested that something in the heavenly bodies somehow caused tides. Kepler thought, however, that this heavenly cause was magnetism.
In the Dialogue, Salviati accuses Kepler of having "given his ear and assent to the moon's predominance over the water and to occult properties and such-like trifles." This sort of action at a distance seems to Galileo an example of Kepler's mystical bent.
Not until much later was Kepler's inspired guess borne out, for the tides indeed are caused by the moon's and, to a lesser extent, sun's gravitational (though not magnetic) pull. They are not caused by Earth's motion. This is a good example of Galileo's power with words, for even when wrong, he was convincing.
Clearly, in order to persuade readers, Galileo had to make solid, powerful arguments. To make them obvious and perhaps to vent some spleen, he used Simplicio as a foil. But the more foolish Simplicio's arguments are, the more clear is Galileo's real objective. He resolved to take this chance, and through most of the book, it works.
At the end, however, carried away perhaps by excessive zeal and secure in his conviction that he had found a way to vent without personal danger, he lets Simplicio sum up the church's position on the impossibility of obtaining true knowledge of the physical world.
Galileo's Intent
If God had wanted to make Earth's waters move in a way other than by making Earth move, Simplicio says, He certainly could have done so -- "Upon which I forthwith conclude that, this being granted, it would be an extravagant boldness for anyone to limit and confine the Divine power and wisdom to one particular conjecture of his own." The "particular conjecture" to which Simplicio is referring, of course, is the Copernican system.
Simplicio's closing statement doesn't sound very explosive. It seems likely that Galileo felt the same way. Yet Galileo's enemies later convinced Urban that, if the statement came from Simplicio's mouth, Galileo's intent must have been to make fun of it and, worse, of Urban himself.
Galileo was strong-minded but not stupid. The problem was that Simplicio's assertion had been a standard papal argument and censors had directed Galileo to include it in the book. Clearly, in Galileo's thinking, the argument had to come from Simplicio. Conceivably, Galileo forgot that the argument had been Urban's.
When Urban saw the result, he was furious and unforgiving. Even after Galileo's death in 1642, Urban refused to relent. The grand duke of Tuscany, Galileo's patron for many years, wanted to hold a suitable public funeral and erect a monument over Galileo's grave at the Church of Santa Croce in Florence.
Urban warned that he would consider such action a direct insult. So the remains of one of history's great scientists were quietly hidden in the basement of the church bell tower for almost a century.
Finally, permission was given for Galileo's remains to be interred under a large monument at the church entrance, where they lie today. Nearby are the tombs of two other famous Florentines: Michelangelo and Machiavelli. The Dialogue was not released from the Index until 1822.
In fall 1980, Pope John Paul II ordered a new look at evidence in Galileo's trial. In 1992 came acquittal. But the basic conflict between established religion and modern science is still being played out.
Hal Hellman is the author of "Great Feuds in Science: Ten of the Liveliest Disputes Ever" (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1998), from which this article is excerpted.

Washingtonpost.com: Horizon Section

The Criminal History of the Papacy

There is nothing in Christianity which is similar to Hinduism, be it any denomination. Any similarity you will find now is a result of revisions, innovations, and blatant plagiarism from Hinduism in the last couple of hundred years. Nothing to do with what Jesus said at all. The foundational doctrine of Christianity starts from the Nicene creed with man considered as a fallen being, a sinner, and his redemption only possible through the sacrifice of Jesus, the son of God.

Hinduism on the other hand considers man divine. A Hindu can claim he is God which is unthinkable in Christianity.