Reply #26: 1. I hope we completely agree regarding the immorality of burning people alive

[struggle4progress]

and more generally the immorality of silencing people by the threat of violence. Frankly, I cannot imagine how you purport to read any view contrary to that in anything I have ever posted anywhere at DU

2. Nevertheless, historical examination suggests Bruno was not exactly matryr of science he is sometimes alleged to be, insofar as Bruno seems not to have been a scientist but a speculative philosopher -- engaging in no experiments or modeling whatsoever

3. The question, of exactly what happened to Bruno, is possibly of interest to anyone, who might from time to time pay the price of confronting authority -- and, unfortunately, it cannot be known with certainty.

But there is something very odd about the case of Bruno: he could have escaped the Roman Inquisition by continuing in the portions of Europe not under Catholic control, but instead returned voluntarily and was subjected to a very long trial, during which he seems to have been accused of heresy and denied the charge, essentially at the end throwing his hands to say something like Well, I tried, which suggests the entire episode looked quite different to Bruno than to his accusers.

There are (as I am sure you are aware) certain insecure and vindicative authority figures who are much more concerned about perceived threats to their own authority than they are about the exact details of whatever they have chosen to interpret as challenging them. The psychology of such interactions is bizarre: once the authority figure interprets anything as defiance, absolutely no possibility for rational dialog remains but what the authority figure seeks is evidence of submission; these petty tyrants do not appear only in religious contexts but are scattered throughout power structures of every sort. Without the full record, of course, there can be no proof that Bruno's trial should be described this way, but it is consistent psychologically with the facts of the previous paragraph.

4. It is interesting to me that some people who want Bruno as a martyr of free-thought may not regard St. Stephen or Perpetua or the Anabaptist martyrs in the same light -- though in all cases the people in question fearlessly and honestly spoke their minds in the face of mortal danger