The Catholic Church violently suppressed scientists and Enlightenment reason it now claims to champion
Evidence
It is also significant that Pope Benedict, in denouncing Islam for lacking reason, failed to bring up the Catholic Church’s hostile opposition to the scientific revolution and to the birth of nonreligious and rational ways of understanding the world. The scientific revolution, and more broadly, the Enlightenment, stood in opposition to Christian dogma and were viewed as a threat by the Church. Scientists who employed reason and rationality to explain the physical world were severely punished. Perhaps as significantly, Giordano Bruno, who extended the Copernican model, was imprisoned for eight years by the Roman and Venetian Inquisitions for refusing to recant his beliefs around the same time that Akbar published his treatises on reason and nondenominational rule in India. Bruno was later burned at the stake. Galileo was similarly brought before the Inquisition and placed under house arrest for the rest of his life after he recanted his scientific theories. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 342
Categorization
Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims
- QUESTION: The synchronized comparison of Giordano Bruno’s imprisonment with Akbar’s reason-based Islamic-tolerance treatises is striking — worth chasing whether Mugal India’s religious tolerance genuinely contrasted with Inquisition Europe.
- SEED: Angle: ‘the Church’s selective amnesia about punishing scientists’ — a rhetorical-strategy piece on how institutions denounce enemies for sins they themselves committed.
Related
- The Church actively persecuted science while the Pope denounced Islam as reasonless. (similarity 0.93)
- The Catholic Church suppressed rational science for centuries. (similarity 0.92)
- Pope Benedict’s attack on Islamic irrationality ignored Christianity’s own persecution of reason (similarity 0.88)
- The Catholic Church condemned Modernism in 1907 for engaging modern science and sociology (similarity 0.87)
- A pope resurrected the Orientalist equation of Islam with irrationality as recently as 2006 (similarity 0.84)
- Indian ruler Akbar advocated reason while Europe burned Bruno for the same stance (similarity 0.82)