Ada Palmer: belief

Transcript context

…And even he had these ideas of reincarnation or... I think probably the number executed for atheism would be about 100. There are 12 total trials of scientists about science. Galileo is one. Giordano Bruno is one. Giordano Bruno is the only one executed. Of those 12 trials, only three were convicted. Hundreds of thousands of trials for Judaizing, which is theoretically contaminating Christianity with Jewish thought, and all of these other minutiae of oppression and segregation of populations, executions for paganism, meaning practicing your indigenous religion in a colonized space… Hundreds of thousands of executions for that, one for science. I recently got interested in the story of Kepler just because the way he discovers the laws of planetary motion is so whimsical with the theory of Platonic objects. While he’s going through Brahe’s data and coming up with the laws of planetary motion, he is the imperial mathematician for the Habsburg emperor, which basically means that he’s doing astrology for a general. Will we win the battle or whatever. Then he gets excommunicated, not for the laws of planetary motion, but because he’s a Lutheran. In fact, his mother is tried for witchcraft. Again, has nothing to do with science, it’s just because she’s also a Lutheran.…

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