The window for tolerating thought is closing even as we breathe. Compared to the Middle Ages our tech age can seem more intolerant and less enlightened.
How long did it take for a papal intolerance to come back to bite? The answer is, as long as the Enlightenment lasted. On June 22, 1633 Pope Urban VIII’s inquisitor, a Father Maculani da Firenzuola, tried Galileo for heresy. At the time the ‘settled science’ held that the sun moved around the Earth. Galileo posited the opposite. The order that the Vatican handed down creepily reverts to our own guardians of thought and the penalties unleashed on the unbeliever.
We pronounce and declare that you, Galileo, have rendered yourself vehemently suspected by this Holy Office of heresy, of having believed and held the doctrine (which is false and contrary to the Holy and Divine Scriptures) that the sun is the center of the world We order that the book of Dialogues of Galileo Galilei be prohibited. We condemn thee to the prison of this Holy Office during Our will and pleasure.
In fact the astronomer spent a life sentence locked down at home. Are the holy cow wisdoms of today an improvement on the edicts of the Pope in Rome?
The parallel is too close for comfort. The Church powers are Experts, and the way they defend their science makes you think of it as settled as Newton’s law of universal gravitation. A deacon of poetry, Alexander Pope, made quite another Adam of him.
Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:
God said, “Let Newton be!” and all was light.
Were our Covid Tsars, our doomsday spinners and tech wizzkids more like Newton and less like fakes, our sick world would not be on the mend from a purposeless devastation. Were our ‘elites’more like Newton they would not be panicked by views which fit the facts better than their settled science. Our elites would not be drawn to flag heresies, to fact check , to ban repeated dissenters, to rubbish outcomes that put their science to the sword as misinformation or anti-science or conspiracy theory or the raving of anti-vaxxers.
I read a pithy joke that drops in too close for comfort.
If you still need a booster after being FULLY vaccinated , and still need to get tested after being FULLY vaccinated, and still need to wear a mask after being FULLY vaccinated, and still get hospitalised after being FULLY vaccinated, It is probably time you admitted that you have been FULLY conned.
Despots are never secure people. The terror driving the little squeaky woman with weird teeth who runs New Zealand is her overthrow. The nightmare of baby Trudeau throwing tantrums in his Ottawa bunker is being disobeyed. Biden’s vile slur that America has a pandemic of the unvaxxed comes from his being confronted with higher Covid fatalities during the year of vaccines than the year without vaccines.
“The motivation of the Cathedral now is to protect their power against what they view as an unruly, prideful, and disobedient rabble.” Their fear is well founded. The people are indeed fed up with the elite panic agenda. They have, as the Monmouth poll indicated this week, moved on — they believe “it’s time we accept that Covid is here to stay and we just need to get on with our lives”.