re: So Cosmos is more atheistic rant than actual cosmos?

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My question is why spend so much time, almost half the show, using Bruno to make that point if not to paint the Church and Christians in a bad light

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I agree that they spent too much time on it. It was a lame story. Still, it is totally fair to paint the Church and Christians in a bad light. They were total dickheads.

I think that one of the main goals of this cosmos series is to get young people excited about science and interested in becoming scientists. That is why Tyson talked about Carl Sagan and how he was one of the biggest inspirations to him and many others to become an astrophysicist.

The Bruno story makes sense from that perspective, because it goes to show how lucky we are to be alive today, in a time when we can pursue scientific research without persecution. Most of our scientific advancement has occurred only in the past couple hundred years.

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Alahunter

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Using the King James Bible doesn't help your argument.

He revised the Bible at a much later date than the Roman Catholic Bible. Also, he changed a good bit.

But, the world was proven to be round well before the New Testament came to be.

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well. the Church did set back free thinking and innovation by about 1400 years.

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Tru dat

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well. the Church did set back free thinking and innovation by about 1400 years.

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So you're saying the church encouraged free thinkers and welcomed new ideas?

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Nope.

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Now, this is but one single piece of machinery that shows the knowledge in the time B.C.. Imagine what could have been lost in territorial wars between civilizations in the thousands of years before that. Imagine the knowledge lost when the Ancient Library of Alexandria was destroyed. Much, much more could have set back civilization, for much longer times, than religion or Christianity.

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The loss of the House of Wisdom was even more sickening. They had files that were older than 2500 BC. When the Mongols came to Baghdad, they destroyed the library and threw so many books in the river that the Euphrates river ran black. It was intense to say the least.

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Some were Christian but they were tolerant of all.. The khan dynasty was made up of Turks, Chinese and middle eastern peoples also.

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Tell that to the Persians. I would not say that the Mongols were tolerant whatsoever. They were efficient and it made more sense to not kill every man, woman, and child that surrendered to them. The Persians refused under any circumstance, which led to the most brutal siege in the past thousand years. No one since Attila had come close.

I just watched the entire first episode and saw nothing whatsoever that would lead me to believe that this show has a tilt against religion. If anything, the vision Bruno had is IMO a great example of a vision from God. If I was a Catholic, I would be demanding he be sainted.

Maybe the second episode is different. As a Christian it really does bother me when people take shots at religion (and I really mean Christianity because no one outside of Bill Maher and South Park dare go near Islam, and it is cool to be Jewish or Buddhist). It isn't edgy or cool. It is actually pretty commonplace at this point. It pisses me off almost as much as when an Atheist tries to tell me how I'm supposed to act as a Christian.

Just a side note, I have always been more than happy to accept anything related to science. But as a historian, I also know the history of science is a history of thinking that something is known and then realizing maybe they were basing that off of incorrect observations. I think it is awfully arrogant of anyone to say decisively this is the way things are and that's just it. Because over the centuries, that's never how things work out. Carl Sagan spent his last years as a staunch global warming alarmist, and well...anyway.

I really liked NdGT as a host. You could tell he was really getting emotional at the end when speaking about Sagan and that day together. That anecdote really wrapped the show up nicely.

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well. the Church did set back free thinking and innovation by about 1400 years.



Tru dat

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What the frick are you two tards even talking about? This kind of BS is exactly what I'm talking about pissing me off. It's so cool to hate Christianity isn't it? I'll bet you two go to little groups and bitch about the "religious right" and pass around a garbage can to shite out of your mouths into.