From desert cliff and mountaintop we trace the wide design, Strike-slip fault and overthrust and syn and anticline... We gaze upon creation where erosion makes it known, And count the countless aeons in the banding of the stone. Odd, long-vanished creatures and their tracks & shells are found; Where truth has left its sketches on the slate below the ground. The patient stone can speak, if we but listen when it talks. Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the rocks.
There are those who name the stars, who watch the sky by night, Seeking out the darkest place, to better see the light. Long ago, when torture broke the remnant of his will, Galileo recanted, but the Earth is moving still. High above the mountaintops, where only distance bars, The truth has left its footprints in the dust between the stars. We may watch and study or may shudder and deny, Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the sky.
By stem and root and branch we trace, by feather, fang and fur, How the living things that are descend from things that were. The moss, the kelp, the zebrafish, the very mice and flies, These tiny, humble, wordless things—how shall they tell us lies? We are kin to beasts; no other answer can we bring. The truth has left its fingerprints on every living thing. Remember, should you have to choose between them in the strife, Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote life.
And we who listen to the stars, or walk the dusty grade, Or break the very atoms down to see how they are made, Or study cells, or living things, seek truth with open hand. The profoundest act of worship is to try to understand. Deep in flower and in flesh, in star and soil and seed, The truth has left its living word for anyone to read. So turn and look where best you think the story is unfurled. Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.
So far as I know, he wasn’t, just placed under house arrest. It jumped out at me too; you really have to get these poems exactly right on a factual level or it takes a lot away.
The modern conception of Galileo as someone harshly prosecuted for his beliefs seems rather exaggarated: in reality, he was even explicitly encouraged to write a book on the subject by the church. It was only when he offended the Pope in his book that he got sent to house arrest.
In the end, Cardinal Bellarmine, acting on directives from the Inquisition, delivered him an order not to “hold or defend” the idea that the Earth moves and the Sun stands still at the centre. The decree did not prevent Galileo from discussing heliocentrism hypothesis (thus maintaining a facade of separation between science and that church). For the next several years Galileo stayed well away from the controversy. He revived his project of writing a book on the subject, encouraged by the election of Cardinal Maffeo Barberini as Pope Urban VIII in 1623. Barberini was a friend and admirer of Galileo, and had opposed the condemnation of Galileo in 1616. The book, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, was published in 1632, with formal authorization from the Inquisition and papal permission. [...]
Earlier, Pope Urban VIII had personally asked Galileo to give arguments for and against heliocentrism in the book, and to be careful not to advocate heliocentrism. He made another request, that his own views on the matter be included in Galileo’s book. Only the latter of those requests was fulfilled by Galileo. Whether unknowingly or deliberately, Simplicio, the defender of the Aristotelian Geocentric view in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, was often caught in his own errors and sometimes came across as a fool. Indeed, although Galileo states in the preface of his book that the character is named after a famous Aristotelian philosopher (Simplicius in Latin, Simplicio in Italian), the name “Simplicio” in Italian also has the connotation of “simpleton.”[48] This portrayal of Simplicio made Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems appear as an advocacy book: an attack on Aristotelian geocentrism and defence of the Copernican theory. Unfortunately for his relationship with the Pope, Galileo put the words of Urban VIII into the mouth of Simplicio. Most historians agree Galileo did not act out of malice and felt blindsided by the reaction to his book.[49] However, the Pope did not take the suspected public ridicule lightly, nor the Copernican advocacy. Galileo had alienated one of his biggest and most powerful supporters, the Pope, and was called to Rome to defend his writings.
So far as I know, he wasn’t, just placed under house arrest.
According to Owen Gingerich’s The Great Copernicus Chase, the 1633 decree calling Galileo to be interrogated* read, in part, as follows:
Galileo Galilei … is to be interrogated concerning the accusation, even threatened with torture, and if he sustains it, proceeding to an abjuration of the vehement [suspicion of heresy] before the full Congregation of the Holy Office, sentenced to imprisonment....
(Emphasis added.) Gingerich goes on to say:
On the next page the results of the interrogation are recorded. In Italian are Galileo’s words: ‘I do not hold and have not held this opinion of Copernicus since the command was intimated to me that I must abandon it.’ Then he was again told to speak the truth under the threat of torture. He responded: ‘I am here to submit, and I have not held this opinion since the decision was pronounced, as I have stated.’ Finally, there is a notation that nothing further could be done, and this time the document is properly signed in Galileo’s hand. Galileo was sent back to his house at Arcetri, outside Florence, where he remained under house arrest until his death in 1642.
(Emphasis added.) These quotes can be seen using Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature. This link worked for me. These passages are also excerpted in this pdf.
So, Galileo was explicitly threatened with torture, though he was not actually tortured and may not even have been “shown the instruments of torture” (which is the strongest claim made in reputable sources). As I argue in this thread, I believe that this justifies saying that the Church used torture (as an institutionalized practice) to force Galileo to recant.
* An earlier version of this comment referred here to “the 1633 sentence entered against Galileo” because I misread Gingerich’s use of the word “sentence” to refer to a sentence of punishment, but he just meant a grammatical sentence ><.
I got burned during a debate because I trusted the history from my physics textbook. After having read several books on the history of science (rather than summaries inside larger works) I am convinced that the Dark Arts on on full display even in natural science coursework.
I was analogizing “torture” with “gun”, not “crime” or “shooting”. Torture was a tool that the church had on hand and was prepared to use, and Galileo’s knowledge of their threat to use torture was what led him to recant. (It was the forcing of his recanting that was the “crime” in my analogy.)
It might be more precise to say that what the church had on hand was an institutionalized practice of torture, but using “torture” to refer to the practice (rather than a particular act) seems within the bounds of accuracy in poetry.
That’s a bit contrived—imagine if a presidential candidate mentions how his will was broken by torture in Vietnam, and afterward it’s revealed that all that happened was that he was told he might be tortured, so he spilled the beans immediately. I wouldn’t expect his poll numbers to go up.
imagine if a presidential candidate mentions how his will was broken by torture in Vietnam, and afterward it’s revealed that all that happened was that he was told he might be tortured, so he spilled the beans immediately. I wouldn’t expect his poll numbers to go up.
I would still say that torture was used to break his will. To say this would be accurate, if not precise (because I’m not specifying whether I mean a particular act or an institutionalized practice). Whether his will proved too easy to break to satisfy the electorate is another matter.
This song was inspired when a friend of mine complained to me about a run-in with some Creationists, and asked “what can you say to such people?” The first words that popped out of my mouth were “humans wrote the bible. God wrote the rocks.”
Cat Faber is the offspring of a sasquatch and a space alien, which gave her a unique perspective on things like sports and religion (if those can be said to be separate subjects). Her taste in music is likewise unusual, combining a love for the folksong style with an interest in subjects like science and magic. This made her such a natural for filk that it is astonishing she didn’t discover it until she was nearly full grown. She sang from babyhood, though her sasquatch parent maintains she was tone-deaf until about the sixth grade. In 1996 she hooked up with Arlene Hills to form the filk duo Echo’s Children.
This comment being upvoted +21 doesn’t fit my model of LessWrong voting, because it personifies the natural world with a God-concept, even if it is advocating for science and evolution. Am I missing something?
So should every every metaphor be voted down? Or just personifying metaphors? Or just metaphors mentioning deities?
I figure this particular one strikes some as a bit iffy since the metaphor is so close to the salient metaphor the actual creationists are using and treating as a non-metaphor. Metaphors, like “God wrote life”, closely associated with unsympathetic real-world groups tend to carry a bit extra baggage. The matter is of course confused further by the original context where this was written as a response to creationists.
Well, there is some dispute whether he was “shown the instruments”. A historian named Gingerich apparently argues that the showing never took place. But, in any case, threat of torture is not torture—or at least it is not what comes to mind when the myth of torture is repeated. The myth is a falsehood, which, if repeated by someone who knows better, is usually referred to as a “lie”.
If you take the Christian Bible and put it out in the wind and the rain, soon the paper on which the words are printed will disintegrate and the words will be gone. Our bible IS the wind and the rain.
-- Something Wiccans like to say. Google gives conflicting advice on the original source.
While we’re playing that game, I’d like to point out that the heat death of the universe will beat up not only holy books, but also the wind and the rain, and any other forces of nature you care to name. Victory is mine!
I find this quote a bit ironic in light of the stories attributed to various saints in which they supposedly achieved conversion of pagans by demonstrating the supernatural resilience of the bible against exposure to water and fire.
While I don’t particularly mind this being downvoted and would normally have expected it to be, I am slightly confused why this pantheistic anti-Bible quote is being downvoted while the pantheistic anti-Bible quote I posted it in reply to is being upvoted so much.
Besides those differences already mentioned by others: The parent quote talks about the continuous discovery of knowledge, yours talks about the obliteration of knowledge (“the words will be gone”), as if the fact that a text can be deleted proves it wrong.
However, I think your quote is an unfair comparison. Christianity is not identically equal to physical bibles. Wiccans put a mythic overlay on the wind and the rain.
Well, there is the idea that if you’d wipe out all memory of Christianity, it’d never come back, but if you’d wipe out all memory of direct natural phenomena like wind and rain, people would rediscover them pretty quickly.
There seems to be an interesting factual question lurking here: how much of the mythic overlay would people reinvent in a similar form, even if they forgot all their language and culture? A quick search turned up the amazing Wikipedia page List of thunder gods. Of course, the major monotheistic religions are also very similar to each other (I’d say about as close as C# was to Java when it first appeared), but they didn’t arise in ignorance of each other, as pagan mythologies did.
I was thinking the same. My understanding is that neopaganism is more about the general process with which people come up with mythic significance for natural phenomena than any specific pagan myth. There certainly seems to be a case for humans doing that spontaneously in a state of nature, though it’s hard to tell exactly how wide the variation would be.
The closest the human universals list has are “belief in supernatural/religion” and “weather control (attempts to)”. So everyone ends up trying to magic up nature into doing stuff, but they’re not necessarily reverent about it like the neopagans would like?
Christianity would not come back. Not with that name and not with those details.
Science would not come back either, not with that name and not with those details. It would actually be fascinating to see how we built up our understanding a second time around. Much of how we carve reality into human sized pieces is an artifact of how it was discovered as well as mere chance. Rediscovering the mechanisms behind natural phenomena may well produce systems of knowledge that take considerable effort to understand.
I think that human sized pieces will always be human sized pieces. Important discoveries may be made in a different order, but if we turned back the clock I’m pretty sure we’d rediscover fire, positional numeral systems (though not necessarily base 10), metallurgy, and electromagnetism, assuming humanity doesn’t go extinct too fast.
On the other hand, achievements like space travel and the nuclear bomb depended heavily on the geopolitics of the time, and I wouldn’t expect them to be replicated.
Your post appears to be a dominance game. Your bible will obliterate their bible.
While beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I would guess that the initial quote probably strikes many here as elegant poetry that is well worth sharing (and upvotes effectively equal sharing).
Your post isn’t particularly interesting so I would guess that it wouldn’t attract any upovotes and point 1 means that it is nearly certain to attract at least two or three downvotes.
It ties into several pagan themes; this-worldliness, nature-worship, immanence, pantheism, anti-dogmatism and the continuity and durability of these ideas.
Okay. Well people here tend to like this-worldliness and anti-dogmatism but tend to dislike nature-worship, ‘immanence’ and pantheism. So that pretty much explains the downvotes.
Compare to the first one which is a poem about how science is way cooler than religion. It’s like rationalist catnip. I wouldn’t take it personally.
From desert cliff and mountaintop we trace the wide design,
Strike-slip fault and overthrust and syn and anticline...
We gaze upon creation where erosion makes it known,
And count the countless aeons in the banding of the stone.
Odd, long-vanished creatures and their tracks & shells are found;
Where truth has left its sketches on the slate below the ground.
The patient stone can speak, if we but listen when it talks.
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the rocks.
There are those who name the stars, who watch the sky by night,
Seeking out the darkest place, to better see the light.
Long ago, when torture broke the remnant of his will,
Galileo recanted, but the Earth is moving still.
High above the mountaintops, where only distance bars,
The truth has left its footprints in the dust between the stars.
We may watch and study or may shudder and deny,
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the sky.
By stem and root and branch we trace, by feather, fang and fur,
How the living things that are descend from things that were.
The moss, the kelp, the zebrafish, the very mice and flies,
These tiny, humble, wordless things—how shall they tell us lies?
We are kin to beasts; no other answer can we bring.
The truth has left its fingerprints on every living thing.
Remember, should you have to choose between them in the strife,
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote life.
And we who listen to the stars, or walk the dusty grade,
Or break the very atoms down to see how they are made,
Or study cells, or living things, seek truth with open hand.
The profoundest act of worship is to try to understand.
Deep in flower and in flesh, in star and soil and seed,
The truth has left its living word for anyone to read.
So turn and look where best you think the story is unfurled.
Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.
~Catherine Faber, The Word of God
What evidence is there that Galileo was tortured?
So far as I know, he wasn’t, just placed under house arrest. It jumped out at me too; you really have to get these poems exactly right on a factual level or it takes a lot away.
The modern conception of Galileo as someone harshly prosecuted for his beliefs seems rather exaggarated: in reality, he was even explicitly encouraged to write a book on the subject by the church. It was only when he offended the Pope in his book that he got sent to house arrest.
According to Owen Gingerich’s The Great Copernicus Chase, the 1633 decree calling Galileo to be interrogated* read, in part, as follows:
(Emphasis added.) Gingerich goes on to say:
(Emphasis added.) These quotes can be seen using Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature. This link worked for me. These passages are also excerpted in this pdf.
So, Galileo was explicitly threatened with torture, though he was not actually tortured and may not even have been “shown the instruments of torture” (which is the strongest claim made in reputable sources). As I argue in this thread, I believe that this justifies saying that the Church used torture (as an institutionalized practice) to force Galileo to recant.
* An earlier version of this comment referred here to “the 1633 sentence entered against Galileo” because I misread Gingerich’s use of the word “sentence” to refer to a sentence of punishment, but he just meant a grammatical sentence ><.
I got burned during a debate because I trusted the history from my physics textbook. After having read several books on the history of science (rather than summaries inside larger works) I am convinced that the Dark Arts on on full display even in natural science coursework.
A gun can be used to commit a crime even if it isn’t fired.
“Torture” here is analogous to “shooting”, not “crime”.
I was analogizing “torture” with “gun”, not “crime” or “shooting”. Torture was a tool that the church had on hand and was prepared to use, and Galileo’s knowledge of their threat to use torture was what led him to recant. (It was the forcing of his recanting that was the “crime” in my analogy.)
It might be more precise to say that what the church had on hand was an institutionalized practice of torture, but using “torture” to refer to the practice (rather than a particular act) seems within the bounds of accuracy in poetry.
That’s a bit contrived—imagine if a presidential candidate mentions how his will was broken by torture in Vietnam, and afterward it’s revealed that all that happened was that he was told he might be tortured, so he spilled the beans immediately. I wouldn’t expect his poll numbers to go up.
I would still say that torture was used to break his will. To say this would be accurate, if not precise (because I’m not specifying whether I mean a particular act or an institutionalized practice). Whether his will proved too easy to break to satisfy the electorate is another matter.
What about a shooting? Can a gun be used to commit a shooting even if it isn’t fired?
This was especially exciting due to my newfound knowledge that ballad meter can be sung to the tune of the Gilligan’s Island theme.
Who is Catherine Faber? Has she made anything public about herself other than this wonderful poem? Google and Wikipedia were not immediately helpful.
From her website:
From her bio:
I want to upvote this twice.
This comment being upvoted +21 doesn’t fit my model of LessWrong voting, because it personifies the natural world with a God-concept, even if it is advocating for science and evolution. Am I missing something?
So should every every metaphor be voted down? Or just personifying metaphors? Or just metaphors mentioning deities?
I downvoted it because it perpetuated the myth that Galileo was tortured. Plus, God knows, the poetry was pretty awful.
I figure this particular one strikes some as a bit iffy since the metaphor is so close to the salient metaphor the actual creationists are using and treating as a non-metaphor. Metaphors, like “God wrote life”, closely associated with unsympathetic real-world groups tend to carry a bit extra baggage. The matter is of course confused further by the original context where this was written as a response to creationists.
What details have you got about Galileo? I’d heard that he was shown the instruments of torture, and recanted at that point.
Well, there is some dispute whether he was “shown the instruments”. A historian named Gingerich apparently argues that the showing never took place. But, in any case, threat of torture is not torture—or at least it is not what comes to mind when the myth of torture is repeated. The myth is a falsehood, which, if repeated by someone who knows better, is usually referred to as a “lie”.
Sounds like mock executions—they’re not actually being executed...
“Plus, God knows, the poetry was pretty awful.”
I could agree with you more. But I won’t.
It beautifully promotes Joy in the Merely Real, and strongly encourages the pursuit of knowledge.
It’s good art advocating for science.
I suspect it may be something similar to what NihilCredo said; rationalist quotes from theist sources are just so much fun.
That’s actually pretty good, aesthetically. Thanks!
-- Something Wiccans like to say. Google gives conflicting advice on the original source.
It seems LW has now sunk to the level of “my holy book can beat up your holy book”.
While we’re playing that game, I’d like to point out that the heat death of the universe will beat up not only holy books, but also the wind and the rain, and any other forces of nature you care to name. Victory is mine!
(Or is it?)
I find this quote a bit ironic in light of the stories attributed to various saints in which they supposedly achieved conversion of pagans by demonstrating the supernatural resilience of the bible against exposure to water and fire.
While I don’t particularly mind this being downvoted and would normally have expected it to be, I am slightly confused why this pantheistic anti-Bible quote is being downvoted while the pantheistic anti-Bible quote I posted it in reply to is being upvoted so much.
Besides those differences already mentioned by others: The parent quote talks about the continuous discovery of knowledge, yours talks about the obliteration of knowledge (“the words will be gone”), as if the fact that a text can be deleted proves it wrong.
-2 isn’t a whole lot.
However, I think your quote is an unfair comparison. Christianity is not identically equal to physical bibles. Wiccans put a mythic overlay on the wind and the rain.
Well, there is the idea that if you’d wipe out all memory of Christianity, it’d never come back, but if you’d wipe out all memory of direct natural phenomena like wind and rain, people would rediscover them pretty quickly.
But they wouldn’t rediscover the mythic overlay, which is what makes the original quote a lie and an attempt to steal credit.
There seems to be an interesting factual question lurking here: how much of the mythic overlay would people reinvent in a similar form, even if they forgot all their language and culture? A quick search turned up the amazing Wikipedia page List of thunder gods. Of course, the major monotheistic religions are also very similar to each other (I’d say about as close as C# was to Java when it first appeared), but they didn’t arise in ignorance of each other, as pagan mythologies did.
The various LISPs may also be a good analogy.
I was thinking the same. My understanding is that neopaganism is more about the general process with which people come up with mythic significance for natural phenomena than any specific pagan myth. There certainly seems to be a case for humans doing that spontaneously in a state of nature, though it’s hard to tell exactly how wide the variation would be.
The closest the human universals list has are “belief in supernatural/religion” and “weather control (attempts to)”. So everyone ends up trying to magic up nature into doing stuff, but they’re not necessarily reverent about it like the neopagans would like?
Christianity would not come back. Not with that name and not with those details.
Science would not come back either, not with that name and not with those details. It would actually be fascinating to see how we built up our understanding a second time around. Much of how we carve reality into human sized pieces is an artifact of how it was discovered as well as mere chance. Rediscovering the mechanisms behind natural phenomena may well produce systems of knowledge that take considerable effort to understand.
I think that human sized pieces will always be human sized pieces. Important discoveries may be made in a different order, but if we turned back the clock I’m pretty sure we’d rediscover fire, positional numeral systems (though not necessarily base 10), metallurgy, and electromagnetism, assuming humanity doesn’t go extinct too fast. On the other hand, achievements like space travel and the nuclear bomb depended heavily on the geopolitics of the time, and I wouldn’t expect them to be replicated.
I’m just wondering if we would end up breaking the pieces up in different ways, ways that are unintuitive to us.
I can think of several reasons
Your post appears to be a dominance game. Your bible will obliterate their bible.
While beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I would guess that the initial quote probably strikes many here as elegant poetry that is well worth sharing (and upvotes effectively equal sharing).
Your post isn’t particularly interesting so I would guess that it wouldn’t attract any upovotes and point 1 means that it is nearly certain to attract at least two or three downvotes.
NMDV, but I have no idea what your quote is supposed to mean.
It ties into several pagan themes; this-worldliness, nature-worship, immanence, pantheism, anti-dogmatism and the continuity and durability of these ideas.
Okay. Well people here tend to like this-worldliness and anti-dogmatism but tend to dislike nature-worship, ‘immanence’ and pantheism. So that pretty much explains the downvotes.
Compare to the first one which is a poem about how science is way cooler than religion. It’s like rationalist catnip. I wouldn’t take it personally.
Dunno either. I liked yours.
Maybe people are associating the Wiccan connection with New Agey woo and the straight-up anti-rationalism it sometimes turns into.