The Murder of Giordano Bruno

On this day (February 17) in 1600, Giordano Bruno, a mathematician, philosopher, astronomer, and Dominican friar, having been found guilty of heresy by the Inquisition, was stripped naked and driven through the streets of Rome, then tied to a stake in the Campo de’ Fiori and burned to death.  What was his horrible crime? He put forth the conjecture that other stars were suns like our own, and that they could each have planets like our own, and that those planets (gasp) have life. Such is life in a world without separation of Church and State.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

For more information about this fascinating individual, see the following:

• "Giordano Bruno: The Forgotten Philosopher" by John J. Kessler, Ph.D., Ch.E.
• "Giordano Bruno (1548-1600)" - The Galileo Project
• "Giordano Bruno (1548-1600)" - The Great Freethinkers

Executing someone for heresy is and always has been an act of murder, pure and simple. There is no legitimate justification for it.

When I first started writing this post, it at this point transformed into a diatribe against modern threats to separation of Church and State, and those such as Gov. Rick Perry, Rep. Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, and faux-historian David Barton who keep endeavoring to return us to the bad-old-days of theocracy, culminating with the surreal spectacle of House hearings this week on the topic of birth control in which no women were included among the witnesses, a disgraceful display of the reproductive rights of women being trampled by religious orthodoxy. However, the more I wrote, the more angry I grew. I suppose that, for now, I should just leave it at that....