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Copernicus Reburied As Hero
CasualFriday writes "Mikolaj Kopernik, a.k.a. Nicolaus Copernicus, the 16th-century astronomer whose findings were condemned by the Roman Catholic Church as heretical, was reburied by Polish priests as a hero on Saturday, nearly 500 years after he was laid to rest in an unmarked grave. On Saturday, his remains were blessed with holy water by some of Poland's highest-ranking clerics before an honor guard ceremoniously carried his coffin through the imposing red brick cathedral and lowered it back into the same spot where part of his skull and other bones were found in 2005."
Jacek Jezierski, a local bishop who encouraged the search for Copernicus, said that he considers Copernicus' burial as part of the church's broader embrace of science as being compatible with Biblical belief.
In the end it's just one big format war...
We should start a new Slashdot and return control to the geeks. It actually wouldn't be that hard to get some users to
Say what you will about it being too little, too late, but I'm glad that they're going back and recognizing past mistakes and trying to do what little they can to right them. Especially so that others can see how they've changed in the meantime. Ideally it'll change the behavior of those still alive today...
I'm glad the church recognizes the value of bleeding-edge Renaissance science. Maybe next year they will find out the importance of electricity, birth control, or logic.
Sometimes, i just dont understand people's motivation for this sort of thing. Copernicus was a great man, why on earth do we need to dig up his corpse and rebury him to honor his achievements? The mere fact that we discuss him and his work 500 years later is the greatest honor. There are times were circus and spectacle are needed, this is not one of them.
Good-bye
Copernicus' burial in an anonymous grave in the 16th century was not linked to suspicions of heresy. When he died, his ideas were just starting to be discussed by a small group of European astronomers, astrologers and mathematicians, and the church was not yet forcefully condemning the heliocentric world view as heresy, according to Jack Repcheck, author of "Copernicus' Secret: How the Scientific Revolution Began."
"Why was he just buried along with everyone else, like every other canon in Frombork? Because at the time of his death he was just any other canon in Frombork. He was not the iconic hero that he has become."
Does this mean he gets to go to heaven now? or just that his body got violated by a bunch of priests.
I'm sure he feels just about the same being buried in the new grave as he did about being buried in the old one. He doesn't care at all.
Qxe4
No. Wait. He's dead. He doesn't care at all what you do to his bones.
They're doing this as a PR stunt to distract people from the mistakes they're making today.
Copernicus is known in almost every science class today. Who cares what The Church does with whatever-is-left-of-his-body now? 500 years later?
Until then, they'll continue to bury their bones in inappropriate places.
Have gnu, will travel.
Church Admits Touching Children and Covering it Up Not Such a Good Idea.
Pope John Paul George Ringo the Third officially stated via the openly gay pontiff's Jupiter-hosted website [www.catholic.popestuff2], "We've had a little time to think about it and we finally understand that whole uproar or whatever. Hey like the third testament says in Bieber 10:15 'Whatever you want shawty I'll give it to ya'."
He went on to say, "Here's some water! Hope that makes up for it."
Editor's Note: Catholicism was a dominant religion centuries ago in which old men in funny hats told others what to do.
Editor's Editor's Note: Religion was a wide-held belief that ideas found in stories millenniums old should be used to rule our lives. Not kidding.
(article translated from Chinese via Skybot Vacuum Cleaner with Babel Attachment)
That doctrine is actually much more modern than most people would guess, having been issued in 1870.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Mikolaj Kopernik, AKA Nicolaus Copernicus, the 16th-century astronomer whose findings were condemned by the Roman Catholic Church as heretical,
Do we have a cite for this?
This is the catholic church we're talking about, they've much more progressive than the American sects that oppose science (hence the acceptance of evolution in Europe, there are no debates about what should be taught in schools here).
I'm aware that the catholic church is extremely conservative but compared to the madness of the American fundamentalists that make the news they're moderates.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
How long until Richard Dawkins will be sainted? 2510?
thegodmovie.com - watch it
There are lots of Catholic schools in America (Catholics too, obviously) and they all teach that the Church has accepted the notion that man came about by the process of evolution, albeit a process conceived of and initiated by God. Also, I would guess that the vast majority of Christian schools in the country are Catholic, even though Catholics only make up 30 percent of US Christians.
I believe relic worship isn't practiced in any protestant belief, that's a catholic thing. Protestants don't have saints and don't pray to relics, a big part of the reformation was ditching all the "extended universe" canon stuff and going back to what's in the original book.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
You win!
I, for one, am looking forward to the inevitable
There are a lot of misconceptions about what Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and all the other important figures during this time period were doing. For example, a lot of people don't realize that the system constructed by Copernicus still had epicycles. It was more aesthetically pleasing and slightly simpler mathematically than the Ptolemaic system but it wasn't actually more accurate. It wasn't until Kepler came around that a system that was genuinely superior in both simplicity and accurate. Also, people seem to forget that a major reason for Copernicus' work was that the Church wanted a more accurate astronomical system because they needed it to calculate the dates for Easter and other issues. And the Roman Catholic Church didn't even take a negative stance to heliocentrism until many years after Copernicus. Martin Luther and some of the other early Protestants reacted negatively far years before the Church did. The actual history is much more complicated than the standard narratives make it out to be. There are two excellent books on this topic. The first is Thomas Kuhn's "The Copernican Revolution" which presents the history pretty well although it gets filtered slightly through Kuhn's philosophy. The second is Alan Hirschfield's "Parallax" which takes a broader outlook over a much longer time period but with less detail on the period directly after Copernicus. Both books are very good reads.
Professor: "I'm sorry, Fry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all."
Fry: "Oh. What's it called now?"
Professor: "Urectum. Here, let me locate it for you."
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
The man is a national hero. You're not Polish and so you don't understand but try to get this - for almost 200 years Poland did not exist and Polish language, culture and identity were suppressed and systematically eliminated by Russia, Prussia, Austo-Hungary, then Germany and then the Soviet Union. We therefore value people like Chopin, Marie Curie-Sklodowska and Copernicus as national heroes to help preserve our identity. Hence the man is being honoured.
The Catholic Church isn't nearly as monolithic as you appear to believe. It is a world-spanning organisation, with a lot of internal dissension. Even among the Cardinals, there is a lot of disagreement, and there have been several issues over the last decade that have brought it very close to schism, particularly along continental boundaries.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
In case anyone is interested, I just looked to see what was actually done about Copernicus. No action was taken during his lifetime. During the Galileo affair, motion around the sun was declared to be erroneous and heretical. Thus Copernicus' major work was taken out of circulation for 4 years, until it could be "corrected." 9 or 10 corrections were made, which appear to have been simply inserting the word "hypothetically" or equivalent, on the grounds that it was a hypothesis that hadn't been proven.
Note that I am not defending the actions of the Catholic Church. I just thought people might want to know what they were. The uncorrected version was put on the Index.The "corrected" version was not, so it continued to circulate. The source I looked at (http://hsci.ou.edu/exhibits/exhibit.php?exbgrp=1&exbid=14&exbpg=4) says that there was no official finding that Copernicus was heretical, although it appears that there was a general condemnation of heliocentrism (at least this is how I read a couple of seemingly contradictory statements).
Great Scientist's Remains Further Desecrated in Black Magic Ritual Effort to Distract Citizenry.
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.
I'm glad the church recognizes the value of bleeding-edge Renaissance science. Maybe next year they will find out the importance of electricity, birth control, or logic.
How about the Theory of the Big Bang? It was a Belgian priest who first formalized that.
1. You have to put it into perspective though. All of the verses that posited an immovable Earth at the centre of everything are Old Testament, and by all accepted chronologies most were already 2000 years old or more at the time Copernicus got his ideas. (Though Earth being flat does get a nod in Matthew 4:8, which is late 1'st century AD. So even that would be very nearly 1500 years old in the time of Copernicus.)
I'd say that's pretty good covering their asses if it took that long before it was even possible to call them on it.
Stuff that was easier testable, well, they seem to have usually written the prophecy after the event.
2. Well, at least the Catholics seem to have given up on the throwing a fit part since the counter-reformation or so. Now it's just a mystery, or the Lord is using metaphoric language, or those who wrote it down didn't get it quite right. So when Genesis says there were trees with seed (at the earliest that would be the late carboniferous era, and even that's stretching it) before there was a sun created at all, well, the Lord was _actually_ saying there must have been some single-celled algae before the cloud cover first broke and the sun was visible.
I'm not kidding. If you listen to some of them, some verses in Genesis even describe the Theia impact. Of course, you wouldn't recognize it without being told where and how to mis-read it.
It's a more perverse setup, where falsifying it is akin to nailing jello to the wall. No matter what's written there, and how you think you finally have proof that all possible interpretations are plain old wrong, there comes the "but we're not literalists" blanket excuse and that's the end of it. If it says "black" there and you've measured it as white, well,the Lord of course meant "white" and was just metaphoric about it. So, natch, you haven't falsified it.
Of course, I also never got a good answer to "so what good is a book which really doesn't tell you anything you didn't already know? Because apparently to find X in it, you already have to know about X so you can read something as meaning X."
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
If you count an embryo as a human being, then you should treat every sperm as sacred too. The simple truth is that it's not that clear cut. An embryo starts out as a clump of cells. This clump does not even meet the criteria for life, it does not think, does not feel pain, can't live outside a very alien environment (to us human beings), will not react to stimuli, essentially isn't human at all. At some point it does become human, of course. I'm not sure if anyone at this point can say when exactly that happens. But before it does, there's nothing human about it. It's an incomplete, tiny biological machine, no more human than a hair or nail.
That figures. Typically verbose.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
You can see how little scruple companies like the Catholic church have, when they dig up your remains to bury them again, just to make themselves look (not be, remember, Pope Kiddiefiddler) good...
READ THE FUCKING ARTICLE. The remains were lost in an unmarked grave for a long time. They were found in an archaeological search. That is what is done for the remains of anyone famous whose grave is not certainly known (as in Columbus, Crazy Horse or Genghis Khan.)
Once the remains were found, they were buried in a grave that clearly has his name, and with the honors he deserved. Seriously, how much dumber can /. posters get?
Many scientists are responsible for modern theories. The term 'big bang' was actually just bullshit made up by the religious to insult the concept.
Really, I always thought that Monsignor Georges Lemaître was a established scientist and mathematician, given that he was a not only a researcher but a professor of mathematics, astronomy and physics.
But I guess it's cool to be a bigot and ignore the man's credentials just because he was in the clergy.
Back then there weren't the same social issues with hanging or burning someone, at least not to the modern extent.
Back then when? What the hell are you talking about. We are talking about modern scientists and about how, according to you, the church puts modern scientists down.
The religious still put science down to the lowest possible level, even saying it has no logical backing because it is not based on the bible.
Which religious, which religion? Are you that dumb that the only religious movement you know is the fundamentalist, creationist one? The Vatican funds and supports observatories and research centers. I'm not saying it is a perfect organization (shit look at the scandal of pedophilia). But if you can't coherently build your arguments, you don't know what the hell you are talking about.
The religious still fight every scientific advancement that does not pertain to their interests.
Which religious groups? Which religions? See, change religious with say, "black", "jew", "homo", "socialist" or whatever aggregation, distinction or nationality, and what you get? A bigot statement. You are just spewing drivel without being able to back it up despite the hard evidence that not just the Catholic church, but many other religious organizations do promote science.
Get your head out of you ass. You seem to have a beef with the established creationist fundamentalists groups in the US (and so do I btw.). But you are as dumb as they are since you seem to be as bigot and willing to generalize.
On the one end of the stupidity spectrum we have the bible nuts calling all scientists the work of the devil.
On the other side, it is you calling all religious groups as anti-science. Congratulations, here is your bigot medal.
I really wonder if this has more to do with 'certifying' Copernicus as being of Polish ethnicity than rehabilitating him as a Catholic. There is a lot of dispute over whether he was a Pole or a German and this kind of stunt may just be the kind of salvo that modern nationalists might fire.