Perchance you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it.Bruno was receiving, here, the sentence of death...and a terrible one at that. And how did he reply? He saw his accusors' fear. They killed him because they were afraid of him. They were afraid of his life and his ideas, and they were afraid others would think like him and be like him.
--Giordano Bruno, quoted by Gaspar Schopp of Breslau in a letter to Conrad Rittershausen, written on the day of Bruno's burning at the stake for (among other things) the crime of being an "atheist," quoted from Dorothea Waley Singer, Giordano Bruno: His Life and Thought (1950), p. 179
Whatever happened to, "...perfect love casts out all fear,"?
It appears here, and in the other accounts (and remember, these were written by and for the very people who killed him) that Bruno was unafraid to die. Maybe he had a dose of something that his accusors lacked.
Thinking freely, and rejecting a majority message solely on the grounds of "Appeal to Authority/Majority", that does indeed require some courage. People who fear are just like sheep who fear. They move in herds, where there is security and comfort in numbers.
Bruno once remarked on this himself:
It is proof of a base and low mind for one to wish to think with the masses or majority, merely because the majority is the majority. Truth does not change because it is, or is not, believed by a majority of the people.In light of our current politic climate, I thought the following quotes were germane--on war:
-- Giordano Bruno, Heroic Furies, quoted in Mason, Great and Mind Liberating Thoughts, quoted from George Seldes, ed., The Great Thoughts (1985)
Before August, 1914, it was the correct thing to proclaim Christ as the Prince of Peace and Christianity as the religion of love and the brotherhood of man. We had a Peace Sunday each year when lip-service was paid to Peace from thousands of pulpits. After August, 1914, these sames pulpits resounded with prases of the Lord as a man of war (Exodus, xv. 3) and declarations that the great European War was a Christian war, sent directly by Almighty God himself. The earlier attitude, disassociating Christanity from war, was both dishonest and, to say the least of it, ungrateful; for Christianity has been nursed, nourished, and spread abroad by war and by what we now call frightfulness.Need I explain this one? I think it clear that Bush linked the War in Iraq to religion in more ways than one. Need I quote him? He used the religious predisposition of America to ignite passions against "the axis of evil" (the only one of the three mentioned in the axis which posed no threat to us), and he unequivocally stated that he was doing the will of God Himself in ousting Hussein.
--Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner, "Slavery" chapter of Christianity & Conduct; Or, The Influence of Religious Beliefs on Morals (1919), quoted from Gaylor, Women Without Superstition, p. 311
[PS: Hypatia was a woman scientist murdered in 415 by being hacked to death by an angry mob of Christian monks due to her "heresy"]
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction"
--Pascal, Pensees (1670)
The revelation comes after Mr Bush launched an impassioned attack yesterday in Washington on Islamic militants, likening their ideology to that of Communism, and accusing them of seeking to "enslave whole nations" and set up a radical Islamic empire "that spans from Spain to Indonesia". In the programmeElusive Peace: Israel and the Arabs, which starts on Monday, the former Palestinian foreign minister Nabil Shaath says Mr Bush told him and Mahmoud Abbas, former prime minister and now Palestinian President: "I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, 'George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.' And I did, and then God would tell me, 'George go and end the tyranny in Iraq,' and I did."Why is it that so few people feel unease at reading these words? Why is it that so few people realize the danger of an elected official openly claiming to be doing the "will of God", regardless of what it is, and when that leader is making a decision to go to war???
And "now again", Mr Bush is quoted as telling the two, "I feel God's words coming to me: 'Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East.' And by God, I'm gonna do it."
Mr Abbas remembers how the US President told him he had a "moral and religious obligation" to act. The White House has refused to comment on what it terms a private conversation. But the BBC account is anything but implausible, given how throughout his presidency Mr Bush, a born-again Christian, has never hidden the importance of his faith.
From the outset he has couched the "global war on terror" in quasi-religious terms, as a struggle between good and evil. Al-Qa'ida terrorists are routinely described as evil-doers. For Mr Bush, the invasion of Iraq has always been part of the struggle against terrorism, and he appears to see himself as the executor of the divine will. He told Bob Woodward - whose 2004 book, Plan of Attack, is the definitive account of the administration's road to war in Iraq - that after giving the order to invade in March 2003, he walked in the White House garden, praying "that our troops be safe, be protected by the Almighty". As he went into this critical period, he told Mr Woodward, "I was praying for strength to do the Lord's will.
"I'm surely not going to justify war based upon God. Understand that. Nevertheless, in my case, I pray that I will be as good a messenger of His will as possible. And then of course, I pray for forgiveness."
Another telling sign of Mr Bush's religion was his answer to Mr Woodward's question on whether he had asked his father - the former president who refused to launch a full-scale invasion of Iraq after driving Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991 - for advice on what to do.
The current President replied that his earthly father was "the wrong father to appeal to for advice ... there is a higher father that I appeal to".
How would we feel, for example, if Mr. Bush had said, "I consulted with the Wiccan Priests on this decision..." Or, "I laid a fleece out in the grass and asked God to repeat Gideon's experiment for me..." Or if our leader consulted an Oiuja (sp?) board...? We wouldn't feel very well about it at all, if we had a brain to think about it at all.
I also found this satirical comment on religion quite amusing:
Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice.It's almost that time again...
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Religion, Fear, Church-state
