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Statue of Galileo Planned for Vatican
Reservoir Hill writes "Four hundred years after it put Galileo on trial for heresy the Vatican is to complete its rehabilitation of the scientist by erecting a statue of him inside Vatican walls. The planned statue is to stand in the Vatican gardens near the apartment in which Galileo was incarcerated. He was held there while awaiting trial in 1633 for advocating heliocentrism, the Copernican doctrine that the Earth revolves around the Sun. The move coincides with a series of celebrations in the run-up to next year's 400th anniversary of Galileo's development of the telescope. In January Pope Benedict XVI called off a visit to Sapienza University, Rome, after staff and students accused him of defending the Inquisition's condemnation of Galileo. The Vatican said that the Pope had been misquoted and since the episode, several of the professors have retracted their protest."
One of the many. Very few churches outside the USA have any issue with Darwin's work, or the facts of evolution.
They're happy enough to allow evolution to be true, but have God be the power that guides it, which makes perfect sense if you take God as being the personification of all that is beyond our understanding in the universe.
Religion and science don't have to be a dichotomy - in fact, it's usually only in the eyes of zealots (both pro- and anti-religion) that it is.
Excerpt from "LETTER TO A BRAZILIAN MASON UNEXPURGATED", by Marcelo Ramos Motta: "Several times, during the last fifteen hundred years, one or another group of those Initiates attempted to re-establish openly their cult. Whenever they did this, the Roman Church intervened with insane fury, slaughtering men, women and children, to the point that, as was the case with the Albigenses, even medieval captains, men made brutish by the violence of the savage battles of the times, became disturbed by the massacre and went to ask the Pope whether, maybe, they were not killing innocent people along with the guilty (the Albigenses died so virtuously, you understand). And it was on this occasion that the Bishop of Rome honored the "Christian" tradition of his church with these memorable words: "Kill them all; God will know his own." The slaughter, Dr. G., included even newborn babies... And it wasn't, Dr. G., as if the Bishop of Rome were victim of blind faith in the crass theology of his creed; it was not as if he truly believed in the existence of a "savior" called "Jesus", and believed that the Albigenses were "Satan's creatures". No, Dr. G., there was not even the explanation of fanaticism for the decision of the Bishop of Rome - for the Roman Popes know, have always known, that there never was any "Jesus Christ"! It is perhaps hard for you to believe this? Then remember the historic words, uttered in a moment of carelessness induced by overbearing vanity, one of the most cynical and most prosperous of the popes, Leo X: "Quantum nobis prodest haec fabula Christi!" That is: "How we are helped by this fable of the Christ!" You must remember that the original documents of what the Romans call "Christianity" are preserved in the Secret Library of the Vatican. It is the simplest thing for the extremely few prelates whom the Cur ia grant access to such documents to verify where facts stop and fiction begins. I think we have said enough about the past history of the Church of Rome. It must not be necessary that I remind you of Joan of Arc, or of Jules de Retz, against whom the most horrible accusations were made, no evidence of the charges was presented, and his judges and accusers were his heirs; or of Jacques de Molays and the rest of the Templars, of or Michel Servet, or of the Emperor Friedrich Hohenstaufen, or of Johann Huss, or of Henri IV (murdered by order of the Jesuits), or of the Cathars, or of the Albigenses, or of the Huguenots, or of the Jews and Arabs of Spain and Portugal, or of the French, Germans, Scottish and Irish Gnostics who were called "witches", and forced to confess absurdities under diabolical tortures, or of Galileo, or of Cagliostro, or of the immense quantity of Masons whose bones whiten the roads that take to Rome.... I think that, to a Mason, it cannot be necessary to speak further of the past of that infamous church." Read the whole document, if you so wish: http://user.cyberlink.ch/~koenig/dplanet/motta/moma2.htm
Um, Galileo has been vindicated many times over. It's the retards in the vatican with their fairy tales that are trying to rehabilitate themselves by associating themselves with a premier scientist. Now if they would stop fighting good science in public debates, maybe they could finish their own rehabilitation.
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