| ...sounds like the Goddamn Spanish Inquisition"[Monty Python] |
In an effort to clear its conscience, cluttered by past aberrations, the Vatican plans to open part of its inquisition/index files for the year 2000.
A first step had been the redemption by the Catholic Church of Galileo Galilei and Giordano Bruno, 360 years after their revolutionary scientific discoveries. The non-catholic world has had its laugh at this belated confirmation of the truth.
By its sluggishness to accept progress in cosmology, laid open to them during the past century, the Catholic Church squanders its credibility to an increasingly basic slice of its followers as public awareness of the cosmos around us grows.
The great astronomical findings since Galileo reveal an astonishing trend: Earth and the human race continue to be moved further away from their place at the centre of Everything. (Unless you subscribe to the anthropic principle*, that is.)
While Ptolemy had to construct a complicated system of rings to keep the earth at the centre of the solar system and the Church happy, Galileo centered the sun and made our home planet just one among others.
After our home in the solar system was identified to be really within an enormous wheel of millions of stars, called the Milky Way, another blow to the homocentric image of man was about to appear. The sun was found to be located not in the centre of the Milky Way, but about two thirds out in a side arm.
More shocks to the egocentric attitude of humans were in store when, in 1923 Hubble confirmed that the Milky Way is just one many galaxies in an expanding Universe.
Later researchers showed that there are really thousands of millions of galaxies.
After that, clusters of galaxies were discovered, followed by still larger structures in the vastness of the Universe.
Still, the Christian Church insists on the dogma of the Creator needing a biological "son", tortured and killed by man to appease Himself.
The Creator of the Universe behaving like the aggressive life-form living on a planet in an average star system among millions of stars in one galaxy among thousands of millions of others? Are we not over-estimating our role within creation in a preposterous way?
Regardless of the truth found by modern science that man can hardly be the centre of Creation, the Church maintains its hopelessly antiquated views.
The history of the Catholic Church and its dogmas reeks of a machoistic criminal attitude, maintained for reasons of sheer power and based on the false concept of man being the centre of creation. There seems to be only one goal, namely the suppression at all cost, of anything not conforming with their dogmatic views. Views that have cost the lives of millions of innocent fellow humans.
Innocent, because there are no such beings as heretics, heathen or witches. The catholic murderers, with the cross in one hand, a sword in the other and looted gold in their pockets had no more title to the truth than the hapless indians they were so adamant to exterminate in the name of what they call god.
When will we finally realise the true vastness of creation and the unique unimportance of the human race? We may not even be the only intelligent beings!
If, after reading this, you tend to label me as an atheist, let me assure you that I do believe in a higher principle or principles. Call it God or gods, if you like. But my belief rests within a framework of convictions that, whatever created the Universe, is totally unlike us, so as to make even partial understanding of its nature highly improbable. The physical reality around us and its mathematical interpretation, however, is ours to probe into ever deeper.
Survival of most religions could well depend on a reform whose main objective must be to remove man from his central role in creation. Any anthropomorphic image of God is doomed to be proven false sooner or later.
(Obstacles to this reform, see: Why do We Need Religions?)
* The Anthropic Principle originates from observations that the world is just right for us to live in, and that even the slightest change of initial conditions would make life as we know it impossible. Is the Universe as we observe it, are the physical laws the way they are, because we are here?
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