A Free Spirit

[Douglas Mercer]

[Douglas Mercer]

[Douglas Mercer]

[Douglas Mercer]

[Douglas Mercer]

[Douglas Mercer]

[Douglas Mercer]

[Douglas Mercer]

[Will Williams]

Douglas Mercer
August 7 2024

In all the long years of blistering Christian ignorance little was more ignorant than when on February 17 1600 the Catholic Church burned Giordano Bruno at the stake for holding opinions that ran counter to church doctrine. This was a prime example of a fossil religion persecuting the future, the future of free thought...

More about Bruno, here, by Robert Green Ingersoll in a Selection from Great Infidels (1881) https://nationalvanguard.org/2015/07/ju ... ano-bruno/

...The first star that enriched the horizon of this universal gloom was Giordano Bruno. He was the herald of the dawn.

Giordano Bruno

He was born in 1550, was educated for a priest, became a Dominican friar. At last his reason revolted against the doctrine of transubstantiation. He could not believe that the entire Trinity was in a wafer, or in a swallow of wine. He could not believe that a man could devour the Creator of the universe by eating a piece of bread. This led him to investigate other dogmas of the Catholic Church, and in every direction he found the same contradictions and impossibilities supported, not by reason, but by faith.

Those who loved their enemies threatened his life. He was obliged to flee from his native land, and he became a vagabond in nearly every nation of Europe. He declared that he fought, not what priests believed, but what they pretended to believe. He was driven from his native country because of his astronomical opinions. He had lost confidence in the Bible as a scientific work. He was in danger because he had discovered a truth.

He fled to England. He gave some lectures at Oxford. He found that institution controlled by priests. He found that they were teaching nothing of importance — only the impossible and the hurtful. He called Oxford “the widow of true learning.” There were in England, at that time, two men who knew more than the rest of the world. Shakespeare was then alive.

Bruno was driven from England. He was regarded as a dangerous man — he had opinions, he inquired after reasons, he expressed confidence in facts. He fled to France. He was not allowed to remain in that country. He discussed things — that was enough. The church said, “move on.” He went to Germany. He was not a believer — he was an investigator. The Germans wanted believers; they regarded the whole Christian system as settled; they wanted witnesses; they wanted men who would assert. So he was driven from Germany.

He returned at last to his native land. He found himself without friends, because he had been true, not only to himself, but to the human race. But the world was false to him because he refused to crucify the Christ of his own soul between the two thieves of hypocrisy and bigotry. He was arrested for teaching that there are other worlds than this; that many of the stars are suns, around which other worlds revolve; that Nature did not exhaust all her energies on this grain of sand called the earth. He believed in a plurality of worlds, in the rotation of this, in the heliocentric theory.

bruno_2
Bronze statue of Bruno in Campo dei Fiori in Rome, erected in 1887 on the site where the philosopher died at the stake in 1600, after being condemned to death by the Inquisition. In the 1920s Mussolini refused to remove the statue, despite intense lobbying from the Vatican.
For these crimes, and for these alone, he was imprisoned for six years. He was kept in solitary confinement. He was allowed no books, no friends, no visitors. He was denied pen and paper. In the darkness, in the loneliness, he had time to examine the great questions of origin, of existence, of destiny. He put to the test what is called the goodness of God. He found that he could neither depend upon man nor upon any deity. At last the Inquisition demanded him. He was tried, condemned, excommunicated and sentenced to be burned.

[Douglas Mercer]

Will Williams: thank you for that very insightful article which shows that Bruno was very much a Cosmotheist before his time.

This man, greater than any naturalist of his day; grander than the martyr of any religion, died willingly in defense of what he believed to be the sacred truth. He was great enough to know that real religion will not destroy the joy of life on earth; great enough to know that investigation is not a crime — that the really useful is not hidden in the mysteries of faith. He knew that the Jewish records were below the level of the Greek and Roman myths; that there is no such thing as special providence; that prayer is useless; that liberty and necessity are the same, and that good and evil are but relative.

According to Professor Draper, he believed that this world is animated by an intelligent soul — the cause of forms, but not of matter; that it lives in all things, even in such as seem not to live; that everything is ready to become organized; that matter is the mother of forms, and then their grave; that matter and the soul of things, together, constitute God.