Lost and Found by Phil Callaway
One dear old duffer on our course has given up on golf altogether. Oh, he doesn't mind hitting a ball now and then, but if you're standing near the tee box when he swings, you'll notice that he purposely aims for the creek. And when the ball goes where he intended, he feigns disappointment.
"You go on ahead," he smiles, "I'll catch up later."
As he says this, he slides his ball retriever from his bag and slips over the edge of the bank where the shanked balls hide. Every other club in his bag has failed him, but not this one.
It is a sad thing to watch the hunter become a gatherer.
Monday, August 30, 2010
Monday, August 2, 2010
Catholicism and Galileo
The following article is transcribed from the January 7, 2001 edition of Our Sunday Visitor.
On Galileo, “conventional wisdom” is bunk
Church authorities erred in judging the 16th-century astronomer’s views. Now, if only today’ Catholic-bashers would deal with the facts of the case
It was one of the most dramatic moments in the history of science. It was 1633. And there was Galileo, bent and broken by the tortures of the Inquisition, retracting that which he knew to be true – that the earth orbits the sun and moves on its own axis. Blind religion had conquered science.
Yet, as he leaves the court for life imprisonment in the dungeons of the Inquisition, he musters on last moment of courage. The he promised never to teach again that the earth is anything but a motionless orb in space, he defiantly mutters aloud, “Eppur si muove!” (“And yet it does move!”) It would take 360 years – not until the 1990s – for the Church to apologize and admit that the astronomer had a point.
That’s the conventional wisdom on the trial of Galileo. And it is all bunk.
Galileo was never tortured and never spent a day locked in a prison cell. The famous quote attributed to him was invented by a writer 125 years later. And within 100 years of Galileo’s death on Jan. 8, 1642, well before science was capable of proving his theories, his published works received an imprimatur from the Church.
On Galileo, “conventional wisdom” is bunk
Church authorities erred in judging the 16th-century astronomer’s views. Now, if only today’ Catholic-bashers would deal with the facts of the case
**********
By Robert P. Lockwood
**********
It was one of the most dramatic moments in the history of science. It was 1633. And there was Galileo, bent and broken by the tortures of the Inquisition, retracting that which he knew to be true – that the earth orbits the sun and moves on its own axis. Blind religion had conquered science.
Yet, as he leaves the court for life imprisonment in the dungeons of the Inquisition, he musters on last moment of courage. The he promised never to teach again that the earth is anything but a motionless orb in space, he defiantly mutters aloud, “Eppur si muove!” (“And yet it does move!”) It would take 360 years – not until the 1990s – for the Church to apologize and admit that the astronomer had a point.
That’s the conventional wisdom on the trial of Galileo. And it is all bunk.
Galileo was never tortured and never spent a day locked in a prison cell. The famous quote attributed to him was invented by a writer 125 years later. And within 100 years of Galileo’s death on Jan. 8, 1642, well before science was capable of proving his theories, his published works received an imprimatur from the Church.
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