Galileo's Folly: Dissing the Big

No one should be surprised that there are things that are learned in school that aren't true.  We all learned as children that George Washington chopped down his father's cherry tree but fessed up to it because he was so honest that he 'could not tell a lie.'  Not true.  A certain Mason Weems concocted that tale to make his biography of Washington more interesting.  We all saw that Disney movie about lemmings where we learned that for some inexplicable reason the poor things felt it necessary to commit mass suicide by throwing themselves off a cliff, but this also isn't true; James Simon imported a bunch of lemmings to Alberta, Canada (not even their native habitat) and herded them off a cliff to make his movie more interesting.  Mass murder for grade-school entertainment under the guise of education.  We were taught in third-grade science class that diamonds are made up of compressed coal over millions of years, but in reality the carbon they're composed of comes from melted rocks in the upper mantle of the Earth.  Humans only use ten percent of our brains?  No dice.  That little factoid comes from an experiment where (apparently pretty creepy) scientists taught rats to run through a maze, then cut out a little bit of their brains after each run.  The rats continued to solve the maze until they only had about ten percent of their brain left, and somehow that led to the conclusion that we humans only use that much of our brain at any given time and the rest is empty, redundant space.  Whatever.  The list of these instances go on and on.

All of things piss me off, some more than others.  I hate being lied to, and I hate when lies have become so institutionalized that they are taught as truths without our teachers even knowing that they are lying to us. 

One such lie has been coming up a lot lately.  I have 'liked' a whole slew of Facebook pages involving atheism, and just as I figured, a lot of them are run by a bunch of angry people that carry on one-sided arguments against religions and the religious .  This kind of thing kinda turns me off, as I am not an angry or argumentative type of person.  I just don't believe in god, and I don't want to argue about it. I believe in the truth, and when people talk about how the Catholic Church persecuted and tortured Galileo because he taught that the Earth revolves around the Sun, I try to set the story straight.  That doesn't make a lot of people happy.  They like the idea and enjoy using it as a tool to get across their anger at the Church, and they get really pissy when someone tries to take away that tool.  I get it, the way we all learned it, it was a great story. Nice old white-haired guy, just trying to spread some science and enlightenment, gets arrested and tortured and thrown in jail for the rest of his life... Kind of a Jesus story, really.

But it's the truth; Galileo was never tortured by the Inquisition, nor did he ever spend one day in any prison.  He was threatened with torture and imprisonment, but he quickly recanted his story, which satisfied the Pope at the time (Pope Urban VIII, I think).  And it is true that he spent the last couple years of his life under house arrest, but this was both a kindness and a way of saving face for the Pope, as by then Galileo was blind from staring at the sun through a telescope, broke, and completely friendless as he had been such an asshole for most of his career.  Nor is it true that the Church was even particularly bothered with the whole heliocentric theory that Galileo was a proponent of. The Pope at the time was a pretty progressive guy and was interested in these "wondrous" new ideas and had asked Galileo to come to Rome and explain it all. Asked twice, I think.

So many of the things we learned in school about the guy are just plain wrong.  He didn't invent the telescope, sailors had been using them for years.  He was the first to call it a telescope, and might have been the first one to point it upwards to the sky instead of horizontally at the skyline, but no one really knows that for certain.  He didn't invent the microscope either, or the thermometer or the pendulum or pendular clock.  He didn't even throw down balls from the Tower of Pisa!  Goddamit!  It just pisses me off to think of all the crap I learned in school that simply isn't true.

The source of Galileo's problems weren't that he was teaching dangerous, new ideas that contradicted the Church.  His problem was that he wasn't the kindly, nice old brilliant guy like I learned in school.  He was, in fact, a big asshole.

Galileo rose to prominence as a scholar in his twenties, not based on his brilliance or his ideas.  He got famous as a debater, for his particular style of debate.  Regardless of the subject or how much or little he knew on the subject of debate, he won a lot of 'em because of his method; he didn't argue the merits of his knowledge or observations, he won by making his opponent look stupid.  He'd be right at home today, and as a matter of fact it's my opinion that if he were around now, he'd have a show on Fox News.  He was the original O'Reilly or Hannity or Limbaugh, who could sarcastically out-insult whoever disagreed with him so well that he could win any debate.  Facts didn't matter. Whenever and wherever he was on the bill, the gallery would be packed with people there to watch him destroy his opponents.  And not just academics, but farmers and farriers and merchants, guys from the Olde Swillhouse down the road, whatever. Whoever that had the opportunity to watch it.  It was the 1600's, and this was great entertainment, I suppose.

Naturally, he didn't make many friends this way, and a lot of people who might have supported him during his later troubles refrained from doing so because he had insulted them and their works at some point, maybe kicked their ass in a debate.  He'd made so many colleagues look like such asses so many times that a lot of people weren't so bothered by the idea of Galileo's body in a torture chamber or his head on a stake.  Add to that, the fact that whenever someone made any discoveries at all about the nature of 'the heavens and the stars', Galileo would claim credit, saying he'd already made those discoveries but just hadn't published them yet.  In a letter he wrote, "You cannot help it, Mr. Sarsi, that it was granted to me alone to discover all the new phenomena in the sky and nothing to anybody else.  This is the truth which neither malice nor envy can suppress." What a dick!

As I mentioned before, the Pope at the time had invited him to come to Rome and enlighten him about all these new ideas.  Arthur Koestler, who supplied me with the story in his book 'The Sleepwalkers' described Galileo's reply as obsequious, the first time I'd ever encountered that word, thanks for that one! He wrote back, saying that he was far too unimportant for such distinguished company and he wouldn't want to waste His Holiness' time with such foolish trivialities that won't ever amount to much, but in a letter to a friend he made a comment that he didn't want to waste his time or energy explaining such lofty and complicated ideas to the ignorant louts of the Church who wouldn't understand them anyway.  Not a smart move, for such a smart guy.  That little bit got around, and the Pope eventually heard about it.

To top it off, in one of his final publications, he made the Pope look stupid.  They didn't have professional peer-reviewed trade journals or magazines back then, when someone wanted to put out their ideas and theories and results of experiments, they (kind of weirdly) wrote them in the form of a dialogue.  There typically would be two characters talking, one being the voice of the author and would put out the author's ideas and the other character would be the voice of the status quo, of what was commonly accepted, and the two would debate through dialogue, and you always know who won in the end.  In 'Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems', Galileo had three characters, two scientists and an idiot named Simplicio, a guy who spouted out inanities and absurdities and couldn't follow the basic arguments of the other two guys.  This character was a conglomeration of two of Galileo's professional enemies and the Pope.  THE POPE.  The guy who had an army of Inquisitors and torturers at his command, not to mention the armies of actual soldiers.  Again, not a bright move.

Galileo was told to knock it off.  He didn't.  He was told he would be tortured and imprisoned if he didn't.  So he did.  He recanted, kissed a lot of asses, said he wouldn't teach anyone anything anymore.  He went back to his laboratory and stared through his telescopes until he was blind (such a genius, and couldn't figure out that maybe it would be a bad idea to stare at the sun through a series of magnifying glasses).  Like I mentioned before, he eventually was put under house arrest for the rest of his life, but was 'imprisoned' in the Tuscan ambassador's quarters overlooking the Vatican grounds, with a full staff of servants to wait on his blind ass until he died.  Not exactly a punishing or brutal way to go.

I read the story of Galileo in Arthur Koestler's 'The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe.'  Koestler might have himself been a creep, but he knew how to write a good book, and it has some fairly shocking lines considering it was written in 1959.  Like this one, on a certain Joachim Rheticus who was a disciple of Coperincus:

     "He was twenty-five when he arrived in Frauenburg "at the extreme outskirts of the Earth", with a determined purpose to get the Copernican Revolution going which Copernicus tried to suppress; an enfant terrible and inspired fool, a condittiere of science, an adoring disciple and, fortunately, either homo- or bi-sexual, after the fashion of the time.  I say "fortunately" because the so afflicted have always proved to be the most devoted teachers and disciples, from Socrates to this day, and History owes them a debt."  Pretty gutsy, coming from the Eisenhower era!

The moral of the story... I'll leave that up to others to decide.  It's not a crime to be an asshole, at least not anymore, and it's perfectly normal for people to go around making other people look like assholes just to make themselves appear to be on the right side of a topic.  We do, however, still torture, imprison and kill people who disagree with us.  Especially if they're Muslims.  The Inquisition continues, they just don't wear such flashy costumes anymore.  The search for Truth goes on, and so does the struggle to Deny.

And still, today and more than likely tomorrow and days after that, teachers will teach kids shit that just ain't right.

A silly answer to a silly question

So I was working at the bar last night, a painfully slow Tuesday night.  I hadn't had any customers for over an hour when finally three people, two men and a woman, walked in and sat down.  They were in the middle of a discussion, at first I couldn't tell what about, but it soon became clear they were discussing the moral state of America.  And not in glowing terms.  The woman was obsessing about teenagers going or gone wild, one of the guys kept trying to steer the discussion towards rotten politicians and the other guy just wanted to talk about Jesus.  'If Jesus were here today, what do you think He'd do first?'

No one asked me my opinion, of course.  Chances are I wouldn't have honestly answered.  I am after all a bartender (read: tip-whore), and if I told them my honest thoughts, they probably would have gotten up and left.  Without a tip.  So I just kept polishing glasses, thinking my thoughts and grinning an idiot's grin.

What I would have said, had they asked me;  "Well, I imagine the first thing Jesus would do if he were here today?  He'd hit the first all-you-can-eat buffet.  You ever read the Bible?  I'm surprised He managed to get any kind of message out at all, seeing as how often He was stuffing food into His mouth.  Good thing He walked a lot, otherwise the Romans would have had a hard time getting His ass up on that cross, and then the world would've had one less martyr.  So He probably would've bellied up at the nearest Golden Corral or Asian King and around mouthfuls I expect He would alternate between boosting the spirits of His fellow diners and haranguing them for being sinners and making them like mortal crap.  Then, when someone would probably say, 'Well, who the fuck are you to judge me?' He'd probably say something like, 'Well I'm Jesus.  Not just the Son of God, but God Himself!'  Then the cops would show up, pepper-spray Him and haul Him off to one of those wards typically situated on the East side of the hospital."

But no one ever wants to know what the bartender thinks.  Thank Heaven!  Kidding.  Godboy kept on talking about how Jesus would clean this place up, his buddy kept saying how Bachmann is going to clean this place up (in Jesus' name), and the lady kept talking about how somebody better figure out a way to get these goddam kids to stop fucking.  I just kept on making the glasses not so dusty, and after one stinking drink they grabbed their coats, threw some money down and walked out.

Their bill was fourteen bucks, they left me fifteen.  I thought to myself, Jesus Fucking Christ......

Zeno's Heaven/Hell

    I'm an atheist.  I don't believe in God or the Devil, I don't put any credence in the Bible, the Torah, the Koran or any other piece of literature.  I don't believe in the authority of the Pope or Jesus or any other religious authority in this land or anywhere else on the planet.  I don't get angry or upset about other people's beliefs, I just don't want them imposed upon me.  I think that pretty much describes a lot of people, religious or otherwise.
    I'm not religious in any sense of the word.  But I do, however, believe in heaven and hell.
    To explain, I have to drop an old name, Zeno of Elea.  He was an grumpy, old curmudgeounly fuck that lived 490-430 B.C. whose favorite thing in the world was to poke holes in other people's thinking and logic.  Geometry being the thing of the day, he invented a series of paradoxes involving mathematics, apparently just to make other mathematicians look like dicks.  His most famous paradox is called Zeno's Race.
    Say you have a guy running the 100 yard dash.  The gun goes off, and the runner goes 50 yards.  He has crossed the halfway point, and now has 50 yards to go.  He keeps going, runs another 25 yards.  He has traveled, again, half the distance left to run, and now has 25 yards to go.  He perseveres and keeps running, reaching another halfway point of the remaining distance at 12.5 yards.  You don't need to be a mathemagician to know both that he has 12.5 yards to go and where I am going with this.  According to Zeno, the guy never actually crosses the finish line, he merely keeps getting infinitely closer to it, cutting the remaining distance in half.
    Pretty clever, eh?  On paper, this is a great argument, but in reality this is clearly not the case.  The runner goes the distance, breaks the tape, grabs a bottle of Gatorade and waves to the crowd.  Unless you're a fat old chain-smoking fuck like me, who can't go 100 yards walking without passing out or puking.
    When I first read about Zeno's paradox, I was a bit younger and still struggling with the rejection of the idea of God.  Even as a kid I was a non-believer, but I didn't like to talk about it and certainly never wanted to debate anyone on the subject.  I took the usual cop out and claimed 'agnostic' status.  It's pretty safe to say that.  'I can neither prove or disprove it, so I'm not gonna argue about it.'   I was kind of an angry kid also, with an authority problem, and anytime I heard some preacher or minister railing about Heaven and Hell I thought, 'Fuck you, you repressed control-freak.'  It's always seemed ludicrous to me to tell people, especially people who live in a country as wonderful as America who have every opportunity to live a perfectly fantastic life, and say 'When this miserable life is over, if you're good you'll be rewarded and go to Heaven.'  What balls!  Who could fall for that crap?  The Here and Now is fantastic!  The idea of Heaven and Hell is bullshit, invented by assholes to hold humanity hostage.
    Every one has heard accounts of near-death experiences, with the tunnels and the lights and the celestial music and the souls floating overhead and the departed loved ones beckoning from beyond, and almost everyone has an explanation for these experiences.  Either you believe them or you don't- again, it's one of those things you can neither prove nor disprove, just like God. 
    I was of the non-believer persuasion as far as this kind of thing goes, until my Mom almost died.  In 1990 or so, my Mom had a heart attack in the kitchen at home and almost died.  What a lousy son I am, I can't even remember when my Mom had a heart attack.  At any rate, she described to me very vividly the experience, being somewhere up above and looking down at herself lying on the floor while EMTs worked on reviving her and bringing her 'back to life.'  My Mom is a very pragmatic, sensible and reasonable person and when she tells me something, I believe it.  So some rethinking on the subject was neccesary.
    Here's my theory:  When a person is dying, when their life-force or soul or whatever you want to call it, is dwindling, it's a bit like the runner who is about to break that tape and finish their race, their life has got this much left, then half of that, then half of that, then half of that, and so on and so on.  To a doctor or loved one standing by observing, it seems that one second the dying person is alive and then the next moment, they're 'gone.'  But to the person actually experiencing death, the whole thing must seem like eternity!  Time is of course subjective, relative to the experience, anyone who's ever been in a car crash or similar experience can tell you that, and actually dying is a obviously a pretty momentous occasion. 
    At some point, the conciousness dwindles to the point that no further information from the outside world is coming in.  You no longer have access to your senses, you can't hear your parent or spouse or child crying in sorrow, can't feel the hand holding yours or see the place where you are spending your last moments.  Your brain has received all the information it's ever going to get, and that's what you're stuck with.  For this entire personal eternal moment, you are absolutely stuck with nothing more than the memories of the life that you have lived.  If you've lived a good life and your brain is full of positive memories, I imagine that would be a lot like Heaven.  If you've been a shitty person and lived a shitty life, this eternal-seeming moment of death is going be really---not so pleasant. 
    That's all!  That's Heaven and Hell in nutshell.  Something that to an outside observer is over in no time at all is going to seem like forever to you. 
    So at the end of the day, ultimately we are all runners on Zeno's seemingly endless track, and whether we experience heaven or hell when we reach the finish line depends on how we run our race and how we relate to and interract with all of the other racers.  No God, no Jesus, no Pope or priest or minister or rabbi or imam or boddhisatva can change that.
    I don't know any of the for certain, of course.  But what do I know?  I am merely a humble bartender with a G.E.D., and I know very little for certain.  Outside of the fact that the sun rises in the east, the Kinks were better than the Rolling Stones and the Beatles put together, and that I am unbearably charming when drinking whiskey.  But it seems pretty reasonable to me.
    I really hope that the guy who cheered and applauded during a recent Republican debate at the suggestion that fellow Americans who can't afford health care should just be allowed to die at some point atones for his shitty attitude.  I hope that politicians who vote to take away the freedoms of the people who elected them into their position somehow make restitution.  I hope that anyone who does violence and harm to their fellow human beings somehow find a way to make up for it.  I hope that those who feel the need to repress other people's sexuality just because it's different than their own and therefore are threatened by it in SOME way wake up to this fact and act accordingly.  I hope that guys in uniforms who beat the shit out of and pepperspray non-violent citizens can realize realize that they've done wrong and find a way to do right.  I hope that shitty people somehow find a way to change.  Not because God or anybody else wants or commands it, but simply because they're going to die someday and I want everyone to have a good death, following a good life.
    When I encounter shitty people doing shitty things, I don't say 'How can you live with yourself?'  I ask them, 'How are you going to die with yourself?'


Chad Kittrell
12/06/2011