Dispatches from the Culture War
The Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program, aka the Senate CIA Torture Report, is a legalistic summary of the Torture committed in our name during the post-9/11 War on Terror, matter-of-fact descriptions of acts that, whatever enhanced euphemism we use to mask the truth, are acts of Torture.
In 1633, the Holy Roman Inquisition sentenced Galileo Galilei1The father of modern science, if my public school education is to be trusted. to a lifetime of house arrest for having the audacity to agree with Copernicus regarding the Earth’s motion around the Sun. Despite the fact that heliocentrism is one of the greatest scientific discoveries in history, the Church declared Galileo to be “vehemently suspect of heresy” and ordered him to recant under pain of punishment and excommunication. The myth holds that Galileo refused, pointing to the celestial bodies and declaring “Eppur si muove”, Italian for “and yet it still moves”. This could be one of those momentous events that never happened but should have – varying accounts have Galileo saying this upon release, upon transfer to a more benign/malign jailer, stamping his foot as he said it, or maybe not saying it at all. Either way, the phrase has come to symbolize the refusal of science to knuckle under to theological pressures to privilege theology over scientific evidence and observation.
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