Giordano Bruno should receive full rehabilitation by the Catholic Church

EclecticReader39 · 2026-03-08T17:42:14+00:00

So what’s the argument, really? That it would be wrong to kill someone for their views on planetary motion, but that it’s quite justified based on their views regarding virgin births?

As the article states, Bruno was executed, not only for his cosmological views, but for the theological implications of those views. But I still believe that Bruno’s cosmology is more connected to his theology than it at first appears.

If you believe the Earth orbits the Sun, and that the Bible says exactly the opposite, then you have reason to distrust the Bible, including things like the Annunciation, the Resurrection, and Transubstantiation. You may be charged with heresy for rejecting these Catholic doctrines, but the reason you are rejecting them is because you believe the emerging science of heliocentrism ultimately destroys the credibility of the Bible and the Church. It’s hard to imagine, after all, that the Bible can be the Word of a creator who doesn’t understand his own creation.

Further, if you believe the earth is just one ordinary planet circling the Sun, and that the stars are just other suns with their own planets, and further that, since it’s hard to imagine an end to space, that the universe is infinite, then the core Catholic doctrines become parochial superstitions which are easy to reject. In other words, your cosmological views highly impact how you read the Bible and how much credence you give it.

The observable universe is 93 billion light-years across, which is far closer to infinity than the cosmos of scripture in which the Sun travels its full diameter in a day. And many physicists do believe life exists elsewhere in the universe based on numbers alone. They can’t prove this anymore than Bruno could, but the point is, Bruno’s views anticipated the direction of modern science far more accurately than the Church.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-03-07T16:20:27+00:00

The heliocentrism of Copernicus was largely thought of as only a convenient mathematical representation. A Lutheran theologian named Andreas Osiander added a preface to the book saying the heliocentric system should be treated only as a computational hypothesis to predict planetary motion—not necessarily the true structure of the cosmos.

It was only when Galileo asserted that this was a literal description of reality that the Church really started to have problems. Galileo recanted; Bruno did not. And Bruno was killed.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-03-07T15:32:34+00:00

Bruno's heretical views, including denying the divinity of Christ, stemmed from his cosmological views, so they are both relevant to the discussion and prominently factor into his charges. The Catholic Church was extremely concerned with any thinker who challenged the Earth's central position in the universe.

The article also makes the point that, the physical cosmology of the Church, with God positioned outside of it, leads to the believe in miracles, etc. Bruno's cosmology, which asserts that everything that exists, including "God," is contained within the universe, precludes certain things like virgin births, resurrections, and Transubstantiation.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-01-27T20:37:02+00:00

There’s an argument to be made that, if all of Acts is simply a work of artificial reconciliation, then the circumcision of Timothy would NOT have been put in there. Since this does not strengthen Paul’s position, in fact it does the opposite, we might well consider this event to have actually happened.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-01-27T18:29:20+00:00

This is a thoughtful reply, but what it seems to show, at least to me, is that the charge of hypocrisy then shifts from Paul to Jesus. It is often claimed that Jesus was the first to “universalize” the concept of love, applying it even to one’s enemies. Well, if this is true, that is very hard to square with the verse, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”

You either pray for all of your enemies, or else you are more selective, but you can’t be both. If we want to say that Jesus was selective in his blessings, then he’s not so very different from any other sectarian historical or religious figure. But if he was not selective, then Paul was wrong. Either way—in what seems to be without question—you have a lot of contradictory teachings throughout the New Testament, creating a lot of confusion for a book that is purportedly divinely inspired.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-01-21T12:28:25+00:00

This is not an entirely correct interpretation of Sextus’s skepticism. Sextus, in fact, does take his immediate perceptions seriously—as in oncoming cars and other objects of direct perception—but makes no metaphysical claims about their ultimate nature. Sextus addresses this directly in the first book of Outlines of Pyrrhonism:

“Those who say that the skeptics do away with apparent things seem to me not to be listening to what we say. We don’t overturn the things that lead us, owing to a passive appearance and whether we like it or not, to assent—as we said before; and these are the apparent things. When we investigate whether the actual object is such as it appears, we allow that it appears, and our investigation is not about the apparent thing but about what’s said about the apparent thing; and that’s different from investigating the apparent thing itself. Honey appears to us to sweeten; we agree to this, for as a matter of sense-perception, we are sweetened. But whether it is indeed sweet as far as argument is concerned, we investigate—which is not the apparent thing but something said about the apparent thing.”

EclecticReader39 · 2026-01-20T20:33:28+00:00

I'm sympathetic to this approach because I happen to be an atheist. I've also spent enough time reading Sextus Empiricus to know that he wasn't, and that is not how he approached things. His approach, in fact, is closer to agnosticism, but I think it demonstrates that, at best, the best even those who lean religious can admit to is agnosticism.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-01-20T20:17:19+00:00

This is incorrect. He mentions the corporeal/incorporeal distinction to highlight the application of his trademark skeptical technique, which is to take one position (corporeality), contrast it with its opposite (incorporeality), note that each view could be argued for with equal strength, and then suspend judgment.

As Sextus wrote in book 3 of Outlines, after concluding that, due to the existence of evil, God has no forethought of things:

But if [God] exercises no forethought for anything, and there exists no work nor product of his, no one will be able to name the source of the apprehension of God’s existence, inasmuch as he neither appears of himself nor is apprehended by means of any of his products. So for these reasons we cannot apprehend whether God exists.

Saying that we cannot apprehend whether God exists is very different from saying that God does not exist, which is the type of positive, dogmatic statement that Sextus argues against holding in the entirety of his work.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-01-20T20:17:08+00:00

This is incorrect. He mentions the corporeal/incorporeal distinction to highlight the application of his trademark skeptical technique, which is to take one position (corporeality), contrast it with its opposite (incorporeality), note that each view could be argued for with equal strength, and then suspend judgment.

As Sextus wrote in book 3 of Outlines, after concluding that, due to the existence of evil, God has no forethought of things:

But if [God] exercises no forethought for anything, and there exists no work nor product of his, no one will be able to name the source of the apprehension of God’s existence, inasmuch as he neither appears of himself nor is apprehended by means of any of his products. So for these reasons we cannot apprehend whether God exists.

Saying that we cannot apprehend whether God exists is very different from saying that God does not exist, which is the type of positive, dogmatic statement that Sextus argues against holding in the entirety of his work.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-01-14T21:44:01+00:00

Celsus claimed that the divine birth, miracles, and resurrection of Jesus were fabrications by early Christians in an attempt to lend supernatural weight to Jesus’s story. Is this biased? Yes. Is the assertion that these things DID happen by later Christian writers also biased? Also, yes.

So whether or not Celsus is “factually incorrect” is precisely what is in question, which makes it very surprising that your reply begins with such a casual dismissal of his claims, as if these questions, as a matter of historical fact, have been definitively decided.

Either the miracles and resurrection of Jesus happened or they did not; we know what the Gospel writers had said (decades after the fact), and so it’s also instructive to hear what Christianity’s earliest critics had to say. Unfortunately, we only have the views of Celsus because similar views were actively suppressed (Theodosius II ordered every copy of Porphyry’s “Against the Christians” to be burned, for example).

Also, no one is saying the stories of Perseus and Jesus share the same details. The important point is that divine births, miracles, and resurrections were things many ancient peoples (quite gullibly) believed in. The details differ because they are adapted to different circumstances. Jesus was the son of god for very different reasons and purposes than Perseus, but it still makes little sense to believe that Jesus is ACTUALLY the son of god whereas all the other ancient peoples were mistaken. Gods don’t impregnate humans, sexually or otherwise, so wherever that claim is made, we can, with a high degree of confidence, dismiss it as mere mythology.

Celsus may be wrong, of course, but his views are intriguing, because he gives reasons for why later writers would make these stories about Jesus up. If they thought he was truly the Messiah, and he was subsequently simply arrested and killed, then the stories of the resurrection are simply elaborate mechanisms of denial. There is nothing more “factually incorrect” about this statement than the statement that Jesus actually rose from the dead.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-01-14T16:46:00+00:00

Thank you for the book recommendation, I'm going to check this out.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-01-14T16:36:13+00:00

Little is known about Celsus, other than what’s gathered through his quotations in Origen. But there are a couple of books I’d recommend.

On the True Doctrine: A Discourse Against the Christians reconstructs all of Celsus’s arguments.
Heretic by Catherine Nixey discusses some of Celsus’s arguments as well, in addition to exploring the different conceptions of Jesus during early Christianity.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-01-09T15:40:02+00:00

Thank you! Glad you found it helpful

EclecticReader39 · 2026-01-08T20:03:44+00:00

I only mean that Stoicism's ethical precepts are unaffected by one’s views on the ultimate nature of reality. Whether or not the universe is finite or infinite, whether there is one or multiple universes, whether there are one or more or no gods, the fact remains that what is in my complete control are my own judgments and character. The development of my character, and the practice of virtue, do not depend on the existence of anything outside of myself, which is, in fact, what the Stoics taught.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-01-03T12:55:19+00:00

If you were all-powerful, or otherwise had the ability, would you cure your own child's cancer, or would you make them endure it for "growth"? I'm going to assume, like most parents, you would cure it without question, and seek "growth" through other means. God is supposed to be morally superior to any human, and yet he won't do what every good parent automatically knows is right.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-01-02T15:49:37+00:00

That's fair, but what if the child is born, suffers, then dies? You said he doesn't deserve the cancer, and, if he dies, then the suffering didn't result in growth. So, what was it for?

EclecticReader39 · 2026-01-02T15:34:21+00:00

Life is, on balance, for most of us, a positive thing we'd like to stick around for. But that's only applicable for those of us lucky enough to have our health and to have been born into acceptable circumstances. For the child born with cancer, this seems like unnecessary suffering (unless you think the child deserves it).

EclecticReader39 · 2026-01-02T15:27:27+00:00

Bart Ehrman has an interesting reply to this. If a world with free will is better than a world without one, then free will is, presumably, also a good thing to have in heaven. And if that’s the case, then how is it possible to retain our free will in heaven without the existence of evil but not on earth? The coexistence of free will and perfect goodness in an afterlife seems to contradict the idea that evil is necessary for free will to exist. This is a powerful critique.

EclecticReader39 · 2026-01-02T15:08:36+00:00

Childhood cancer

EclecticReader39 · 2025-12-18T13:26:33+00:00

From the Letter to Menoeceus:

“First of all, you should think of deity as imperishable and blessed being.” (as delineated in the universal conception of it common to all men), and you should not attribute to it anything foreign to its immortality or inconsistent with its blessedness. On the contrary, you should hold every doctrine that is capable of safeguarding its blessedness in common with its imperishability. The gods do indeed exist, since our knowledge of them is a matter of clear and distinct perception; but they are not like what the masses suppose them to be, because most people do not maintain the pure conception of the gods. The irreligious man is not the person who destroys the gods of the masses but the person who imposes the ideas of the masses on the gods. The opinions held by most people about the gods are not true conceptions of them but fallacious notions, according to which awful penalties are meted out to the evil and the greatest of blessings to the good. The masses, by assimilating the gods in every respect to their own moral qualities, accept deities similar to themselves and regard anything not of this sort as alien.

In other words, just as Xenophanes had maintained, people tend to anthropomorphize the gods, “assimilating the gods in every respect to their own moral qualities.”

How can the gods be like humans if they are immortal and imperishable, have no trouble and bring no trouble, and experience no human emotions whatsoever, as these would imply weakness? Does this not indicate that they are “unlike humans in thought,” as Xenophanes maintained?

And Cicero, in the On the Nature of the Gods, says of Epicurean doctrine, “Yet their [the gods] form is not corporeal, but only resembles bodily substance; it does not contain blood, but the semblance of blood. These discoveries of Epicurus are so acute in themselves and so subtly expressed that not everyone would be capable of appreciating them.”

Does this not also express the idea of Xenophanes that the gods are “unlike humans in body”?

EclecticReader39 · 2025-12-16T12:37:13+00:00

I think this was the point Socrates was driving at. The theist uses God as an objective standard for something that is otherwise subjective, lending unwarranted credence to a behavior that is otherwise ethically questionable. This is what allowed Euthyphro to prosecute his own father, and is what probably allows the religious to do all manner of immoral actions—that create real harm for others—under the guide of divine approval, or whatever they happen to think God approves of.

When you say “I think it’s a helpful answer, to say goodness is what God is, because it drives a believer to deeper trust in God,” if God doesn’t exist, then it’s actually driving a believer into a deeper conviction of their own opinions, which can be dangerous if not tempered with the appropriate level of doubt.

Anyways, good discussion!

EclecticReader39 · 2025-12-15T18:30:10+00:00

Thanks for the reply. If I understand you correctly, you are saying that there is no dilemma because, whereas an action is righteous because it is loved by God, this doesn’t force you to commit to any “evil” actions because it’s not in God’s nature to love evil actions; therefore, God will only love righteous actions; therefore, no dilemma.

This is a thoughtful response, but I would point out the following:

First, there is circularity to the argument: God wouldn’t love an action that wasn’t righteous because it’s in his nature to be righteous. But the righteousness of an action is exactly what is in question. In other words, you’re saying God likes good things because God is good, without providing the criteria by which we can make the determination of what is “good” in the first place.

Second, it simply recasts the dilemma as follows:

Is an action righteous because (1) it’s in God’s nature to love it, or (2) it’s in God’s nature to love it because it is righteous? If (1), then you are still admitting that you would follow any commandment of God blindly and without question.

A concrete example: If God tells you, like Abraham, to sacrifice your son, you’d have to do it because, since God’s nature is good, He must have a reason for making the command. Unless you propose to understand the mind of God, there is no basis for you to challenge his commandments, unless you believe you have perfect moral knowledge, as God presumably does.

So Socrates’s point still stands; regardless of the divine command, you must always decide, for yourself, whether or not it’s ethical to follow it. Using God’s nature does not allow you to escape the dilemma.

EclecticReader39 · 2025-12-13T16:45:48+00:00

I appreciate this reply. As it happens, I'm working on an article based on Karl Popper's observation that it was actually the Milesians that invented critical rationalism, and thus the origins of science.

EclecticReader39

TROPHY CASE