Fun story indeed, but it has a minor problem: Galileo wasn’t excommunicated. He had to refrain from teaching his “heresy” and was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life.
Also, excommunication is explicitly intended to be revokable - it should be absolved when the offender repents. That’s even true for automatic excommunication, like performing or getting abortions. It’s even in the discretion of the judge to reinstate the excommunicated if he interprets something as a sign of repenting.
Oh, fun fact: Giving an excommunicated person an ecclesial burial is an offense worthy of excommunication. I wonder if the Medici family had enough money to bribe someone to take that risk.
hmm - crap, I must have him confused with someone else that they only got around to removing the decree in the 1970s or something. Or I am victim of one of those fun fact things in the 80s that wasn’t fact after all.
I did know that the hubub wasn’t over his scientific work, but his views on how it should apply to doctrine.
Possibly thinking of Giordano Bruno, who was burnt at the stake in 1600? (But not for Heliocentrism.) There were probably other people around then who got a rawer deal (or well done in Bruno’s case) than Galileo.
I’m sure someone mentioned Bruno in passing when politely asking Galileo to recant.
Sure. But then it would still be easier to retroactively have his excommunication revoked by providing witnesses that he gave signs of repenting in his last days. If that hadn’t be possible because no one would have believed that, then giving him an unauthorized Christian burial would be a grave danger to any priest who dares so.
Were it not for the established plans for the Bible museum, I might have thought this was the root for some sort of idiotic viral marketing campaign.
I envision headlines along the lines of, “Suburban Mom Discovers Wall Clock Is Actually 4,000 Year Old Tablet”, accompanied by a story along the lines of “I just got this at Hobby Lobby! They had no idea that valuable artifacts were just sitting on their shelves! I will be shopping there more often!”
That sounds vaguely familiar. But of course, any government documents are actually public domain. As long as historians and scholars can go to the National archives and library of congress, we should be able to tell the stories we need to tell. As far as I know, the Archives have copies of all the founding documents (maybe I’m wrong, I’m not a colonialist/early republic historian).
I could buy that as an explanation, actually. Given how politically charged history has become in general, I can see someone doing this specifically to create a specific historical narrative. But I do think that there are probably enough artifacts that they can’t get which still are accessible to scholars.
Yes, but as @DukeTrout notes and @Wanderfound reiterates , it’s not a museum aimed at educating the public (private museums can still be great museums, of course), but aimed at “theocratic pseudohistory” instead. It’s not a very useful kind of museum that’s misleading the public for political and economic gain.
Well, like I said, I am more worried about preservation. I don’t know how good or bad the museum would have been. @nungesser 's post didn’t make it sound Creationist Museum Crazy, but whether I’d consider it “good” I’d have to see (with legit artifacts.)
Still, even though I would never visit the creationism museum (I almost would for the dinosaurs, but I just… I don’t think I could get through the whole thing before pulling a Jesus and start flipping over tables.) I don’t mind the fact they have skeletons on display. As long as artifacts are properly cared for, I think it is a win overall, even if the setting is less than desirable.
I’d rather it in the Hobby Lobby Museum than destroyed, in a super villains lair, or being improperly kept. Still ideally they never would have been looted in the first place.
This as well, absolutely. Poking around their site a bit, it looks like the Bible quotes they’re using here and there are all from the English Standard Version, a fairly recent literal translation.
I visited a guy’s McMansion once, just outside Washington DC, that had furniture made of ancient Assyrian artifacts. The coffee table was a carved stone sacrificial altar with a thick slab of glass on top, and there were winged bulls with human heads on either side of the owner’s recliner chair, and columns and bas reliefs all over the place.
The guy’s parents were US diplomats in the Middle East, and he inherited the loot.
