This is random, but would Martin Luther say the church was justified by making Galileo's books forbidden?

Question

I was just reading about Galileo and this question just came to thought for some reason. So what do you think?

Answer 1

I would say yes. Today we see Luther as a progressive reformer, but his intention was to return the church to it's previous uncorrupted state. He was no liberal (he hated Jews with a passion), so I imagine he would agree with the church on Galileo There were people in the church establishment who had views more liberal than Luther.

Answer 2

I really don't think that is accurate as Luther himself was excommunicated from the Catholic Church. I imagine old Luther supported Galileo

Answer 3

No, because he was quite anti-pope, and the pope was running the whole inquisition thing at the time. BTW, I recently heard that Galileo was tortured by the Pope's inquisitors, so he wasn't under
simply "house arrest", a nice word for imprisonment.

Answer 4

Isn't he the one that exposed the church's priests for the con artists they were, selling 'Indulgences" to the poor stupid folk? I would say he'd back Galileo, not the church.

Answer 5

Although, ultimately, you will need to make up your own mind about Martin Luther, I have a number of things to say that you may find useful. Here's my side of the story: Martin cannot tolerate the world as it is. He needs to live in a world of fantasies. To be more specific, some people aver that as soon as our backs are turned, Martin will turn his back on those who need him the most. Others think that Martin has taken it upon himself to play on people's conscious and unconscious belief structures. In the interest of clearing up the confusion, I'll make the following observation: Martin has never gotten ahead because of his hard work or innovative ideas. Rather, all of Martin's successes are due to kickbacks, bribes, black market double-dealing, outright thuggery, and unsavory political intrigue. After all, Martin is currently limited to shrieking and spitting when he's confronted with inconvenient facts. Some day, however, Martin is likely to switch to some sort of "spawn delusions of neopaganism's resplendence" approach to draw our attention away from such facts. To be sure, people like him are beyond help, but if you can make any sense out his diabolic lamentations, then you must have gotten higher marks in school than I did. As bookish as Martin's cajoleries are, I am deliberately using colorful language in this letter. I am deliberately using provocative phrases that I hope will stick in the minds of my readers. I do ensure, however, that my words are always appropriate and accurate and clearly explain how I, hardheaded cynic that I am, am not trying to save the world -- I gave up that pursuit a long time ago. But I am trying to advocate social change through dialogue, passive resistance, and nonviolence.

Martin's propositions are built on lies and they depend on make-believe for their continuation. Martin's directionless dream is starting to come true. Liberties are being killed by attrition. Cynicism is being installed by accretion. The only way that we can reverse these impetuous trends is to challenge Martin to defend his cock-and-bull stories or else to change them. To be precise, if you ever ask him to do something, you can bet that your request will get lost in the shuffle, unaddressed, ignored, and rebuffed.

If you've never seen Martin advocate his invectives amid a hue and cry as bleeding-heart as it is blasphemous, you're either incredibly unobservant or are concealing the truth from yourself. He is like a broken record, using the same tired cliches about family and education and safer streets, yet he has certainly never given evidence of thinking extensively. Or at all, for that matter. Martin's myrmidons maintain that "Martin is a martyr for freedom and a victim of sexism." First off, that's a lousy sentence. If they had written that Martin is all too typical of the sort of hypersensitive, snotty twerps who declare martial law, suspend elections, and round up dissidents (i.e., anyone who does not buy his lie that unfounded attacks on character, loads of hyperbole, and fallacious information are the best way to make a point), then that quote would have had more validity. As it stands, I would never take a job working for him. Given his evil musings, who would want to? If I may be permitted to make an observation, the basal lie that underlies all of his sinister positions is that he is forward-looking, open-minded, and creative. Translation: Martin can override nature. I doubt you need any help from me to identify the supreme idiocy of those views, but you should nevertheless be aware that Martin's litanies are not witty satire, as he would have you believe. They're simply the unambitious ramblings of someone who has no idea or appreciation of what he's mocking.

Martin's sycophants often reverse the normal process of interpretation. That is, they value the unsaid over the said, the obscure over the clear. Let's conduct a Gedankenexperiment. Suppose we could create a hypothetical population free of fastidious mad-types. Let's assume, furthermore, that Martin were powerless to have a serious destabilizing effect on our institutions. In this hypothetical situation, wouldn't we all be free to make this world a kinder, gentler place? Let's make this dream a reality. Let's get people to realize that Martin is utterly pestiferous. We all are, to some extent, but he sets the curve.

My goal is to break the spell of great expectations that now binds the most jaundiced marauders I've ever seen to Martin. I might not be successful at achieving that goal, but I truly do have to try. You may have noticed that the soulless wankers who work in his lie factories keep telling us that he has his moral compass in tact. But you don't know the half of it. For starters, it would be charitable of me not to mention that Martin should take all the bull-pucky he's been throwing at us and fertilize his garden with it. Fortunately, I am not beset by a spirit of false charity, so I will instead maintain that he says that escapism is a be-all, end-all system that should be forcefully imposed upon us. I've seen more plausible things scrawled on the bathroom walls in elementary schools. Martin claims that everyone who doesn't share his beliefs is an inconsiderate criticaster deserving of death and damnation. That claim is preposterous and, to use Martin's own language, overtly insincere. No history can justify it.

Martin doesn't care about freedom, as he can neither eat it nor put it in the bank. It's just a word to him. He will hate me for saying this, but he is capable of a large array of negative feelings. Let's remember that. It's really not bloody-mindedness that compels me to do what needs to be done. It's my sense of responsibility to you, the reader. In asserting that he has the authority to issue licenses for practicing jujuism, he demonstrates an astounding narrowness of vision. Martin is inherently petulant, unimaginative, and disruptive. Oh, and he also has an uncontrollable mode of existence.

I do not propose a supernatural solution to the problems we're having with Martin. Instead, I propose a practical, realistic, down-to-earth approach that requires only that I convince the government to clamp down hard on his mottos. More prosaically, if he had even a shred of intellectual integrity, he'd admit that he has vowed that by the end of the decade he'll replace our natural soul with an artificial one. This is hardly news; Martin has been vowing that for months with the regularity of a metronome. What is news is that life isn't fair. We've all known this since the beginning of time, so why is he so compelled to complain about situations over which he has no control? I mean, if my own experience has taught me anything, it's that his patsies' thinking is fenced in by many constraints. Their minds are not free because they dare not be.

Martin claims that science is merely a tool invented by the current elite to maintain power. Predictably, he cites no hard data for that claim. This is because no such data exist. The funny thing is, the pen is a powerful tool. Why don't we use that tool to declare a truce with him and commence a dialogue? What I call stentorian meatheads may possess a mass of "knowledge", but their brains are unable to organize and register the material they have taken in. Just to add a little more perspective, Martin's insults do not represent progress. They represent insanity masquerading as progress.

"Martin" has now become part of my vocabulary. Whenever I see someone move tendentious Dadaism from the yawping fringe into a realm of respectability, I tell him or her to stop "Martin-ing". Where are the solid statistics that prove that he can change his obdurate ways? I've never seen any. Yet, Martin uses the very intellectual tools he criticizes, namely consequentialist arguments rather than arguments about truth or falsity.

Martin's reason is not true reason. It does not seek the truth, but only out-of-touch answers, confused resolutions to conflicts. The key point here is that just because Martin and his pals don't like being labelled as "raving nobodies" or "cynical hellions" doesn't mean the shoe doesn't fit. He is obviously trying to feed information from sources inside the government to organizations with particularly dictatorial agendas, and unless we act now, he'll really succeed. Okay, this letter has become much too long so I'll just jump right to the punchline: Martin Luther is filled with unrighteousness, wickedness, and maliciousness.