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Comment by fatneckbeard | Hacker News Reader

yes. I used to think the Church had a honest disagreement with Galileo about heliocentricity. When I grew up I realized the Church never cared about orbits at all, what they care about is maintenance of status quo.

And then when I got old, I realized, there is even a reason that some people want status quo... because they have usually been around long enough to see society fall apart into anarchy and mass murder, so in their mind, they are doing the right thing.

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"The Church" wasn't then and isn't now a monolith of opinion.

A modern characterisation of "The Galileo Affair" would be that he was SWAT'ed by someone he was really really mean online to.

    Thus the whole "Galileo affair" starts as a conflict initiated by a secular Aristotelian philosopher, who, unable to silence Galileo by philosophical arguments, uses religion to achieve his aim.  [1]

and

    While delle Colombe was almost alone in arguing publicly against Galileo, there was a group of scholars and churchmen who supported his Aristotelian views. After Galileo referred disparagingly to delle Colombe as 'pippione' ('pigeon'), his close friend the painter Lodovico Cigoli coined the nickname 'Lega del Pippione' ('The Pigeon League') for delle Colombe's group.[2]

Galileo literally refered to delle Colombe (and friends) as Simplicio (simple minded) and worse in his highly popular Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems [3] and within a year or so the Pigeon League got their revenge, using their influence to have religuous charges bought against Galileo.

The affair was complex since very early on Pope Urban VIII had been a patron to Galileo and had given him permission to publish on the Copernican theory .. this was very much a case of personal vendettas and internal politics rather than a straight up case of "The Church Versus Galileo".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_affair#cite_note-Spell...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lodovico_delle_Colombe

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialogue_Concerning_the_Two_Ch...

The church was not upset about heliocentrism. They were upset that Galileo was attempting to reinterpret the words of Bible in order to bolster his astronomical authority.

"[Therefore,] when God willed that at Joshua’s command the whole system of the world should rest and should remain for many hours in the same state, it sufficed to make the sun stand still. In this manner, by the stopping of the sun, the day could be lengthened on earth—which agrees exquisitely with the literal sense of the sacred text.”

- Galileo Galilei

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