Thanks for the honestly anti-Catholic rant on Slashdot. Do you have any nice remarks for Jews and Muslims as well?
Bruno wasn't killed by jews or muslims, so ranting about their religions would be off-topic.
You realize of course, that the Church has abided any number of zealous critics who have been announcing it's imminent destruction. Then another couple of hundred years pass and the critic has long turned to dust, but the Church remains, as eternal as ever.
So what? Old nonsense is still nonsense. I don't doubt that there will be enough superstitious people to keep religion going forever. But that doesn't make it a good thing.
Bruno truly is one of the great figures of history. Robert G. Ingersoll put it very eloquently in his The Great Infidels:
On the sixteenth day of February, in the year of grace 1600, by "the triumphant beast," the Church of Rome, this philosopher, this great and splendid man, was burned. He was offered his liberty if he would recant. There was no God to be offended by his recantation, and yet, as an apostle of what he believed to be the truth, he refused this offer. To those who passed the sentence upon him he said: "It is with greater fear that ye pass this sentence upon me than I receive it." This man, greater than any naturalist of his day; grander than the martyr of any religion, died willingly in defence of what he believed to be the sacred truth.
...
He was the first of all the world who died for truth without expectation of reward. He did not anticipate a crown of glory. His imagination had not peopled the heavens with angels waiting for his soul. He had not been promised an eternity of joy if he stood firm, nor had he been threatened with the fires of hell if he wavered and recanted. He expected as his reward an eternal nothing! Death was to him an everlasting end -- nothing beyond but a sleep without a dream, a night without a star, without a dawn -- nothing but extinction, blank, utter, and eternal. No crown, no palm, no "well done, good and faithful servant," no shout of welcome, no song of praise, no smile of God, no kiss of Christ, no mansion in the fair skies -- not even a grave within the earth -- nothing but ashes, wind-blown and priest-scattered, mixed with earth and trampled beneath the feet of men and beasts.
The murder of this man will never be completely and perfectly avenged until from Rome shall be swept every vestige of priest and pope, until over the shapeless ruin of St. Peter's, the crumbled Vatican and the fallen cross, shall rise a monument to Bruno, -- the thinker, philosopher, philanthropist, atheist, martyr.
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Bruno truly is one of the great figures of history. Robert G. Ingersoll put it very eloquently in his The Great Infidels: