Nice post Michael. I think the sentence to highlight from your quote is:
"the Roman Catholic Church did not condemn the heliocentric theory because it endangered belief in God the Creator but because it contradicted the word of God in scripture."
To Joe, I would add that if you want a better understanding of the origins of morality you would do well to read Nietzsche's "Genealogy of Morality." In it he debunks the hypothesis that
evolution is the source of our values. Through etymology, Nietzsche is able to demonstrate that in fact our values come from people naming characteristics of
themselves the "Good." This began with the ancient Greek aristocracy who's jubilant noble values focussed on honour, power, truthfulness, joy. The bad were simply those who were unlike them. Meanwhile their slaves hated their tyrranical masters and because it was unbearable to suffer and not know reason for it they named the masters evil, themselves victims of evil and
their own characteristics the good! Therefore their morality was based around HUMILITY, SELF SACRIFICE, PACIFISM, PIETY. That is the judaeo/christian (SLAVE) morality, which overthrew the master morality when the Jews nailed their own leader to the cross and in doing so created the most powerful symbol the world has ever seen under which the oppressed united. Jesus was the "saviour" because it was through him that the slave morality won power.
So it was that an
inversion of values occurred. The oppressed became the oppressors in the form of the church and they damned characteristics such as pride, strength and honour. As Michael refers to in his post, during the reformation the church lost power and importantly it was around this time that we stopped defining people in terms of the society they live in. The INDIVIDUAL was created and the teleological way of viewing people that made the moral structure of the time congruent and objective was lost. However fragments of the judaeo/christian values remained and are still taught to children today.
