Reply #64: No, I was responding to GM's claim in the post immediately prior: [View All]

[struggle4progress]

And everyone knows that science-based atheists are burning woo-woos at the stake. Oh, wait, no they aren't. See that is the big difference.

The subtext here is: cruel arbitrary religion versus humane and tolerant science.

But the purported anti-parallelism is false for a number of reasons.

First, because it attempts to contrast a cruel event in 1600, perpetrated by the Vatican of that time, against the supposed non-cruelties of scientists today. No such comparison, across a span of four centuries could possibly be meaningful.

Second, because it attempts to portray the cruelty of the event as an essential feature of the Catholic religion, which it is not.

The burning of Bruno occurs at the end of the Roman Inquisition, and to my knowledge nobody burned in Rome after Bruno. The fact that the Vatican "lost" the record of the trial suggests to me some considerable official embarrassment about the actual details of the event. The official Vatican position today stands heavily against the death penalty and heavily against any use of violence in propagating the faith.

Moreover, such authoritarian cruelty was common at that time, which (while not excusing church acceptance or encouragement of such acts of cruelty) shows again that the authoritarian cruelty was not peculiarly religious, as you may see by contemplating the record of Henry VIII. In realities, such brutality throughout is unfortunately a common reaction of authorities when their authority is challenged. One sees it equally in the Nazi execution of Sophie Sholl and in the Salvadoran death squad execution of Archbishop Romero, and of course such phenomena continue today.

Third, because it attempts to portray scientists in contrast as beacons of humane behavior, when in fact the same authoritarian character disorders that lead certain churchmen to burn Bruno recur in all contexts.

You assert that modern scientists don't attack "woo-woos." Against this, I should rather rather that almost all humans (scientists or otherwise) are individuals of good will, who do not use their authority to injure others while claiming they are motivated by "the good of mankind" -- but that in essentially every situation where some individuals wield authority over others, there can be found persons who are happy to justify torturing or killing others who they regard as inferior, even if "woo-woo" is not the particular derogatory term applied.

You claim with certainty that the Nazi doctors never experimented on patients because they were "woo-woos." Real scholarship on that grisly topic would be both difficult and depressing, so let us content ourselves with a few indications. Political opposition in Nazi Germany was a potentially capital offense, and the concentration camps contained all manner of "offenders," including communists, priests, gays, and persons guilty of violating "racial purity laws" (among others). Any such person who died in a Nazi medical experiment, died because the state and the doctor had concluded the person was in some sense a "woo-woo" whose suffering or death would be justified by some "greater good." If you want to insist nobody fell into that category, you should provide some real evidence making your claim plausible because I see no reason to believe it.

But I actually had in mind other examples, equally cruel to my mind, which were justified by some mythical "good" and involved a complete disregard for the humanity of the patients.

The Tuskegee syphilis experiment is a prime example: in this case doctors pretended to treat but deliberately failed to treat and merely studied infected people, who, of course, they did not call "woo-woos" but probably did call some other offensive name. Walter Freeman's innumerable ice-pick lobotomies, too often performed against the patients' wishes, provide another example, and in this case one may be fairly sure that a term such as "woo-woo" does describe how the saintly doctor regarded his patients. The origins of this surgery have been traced:

In 1890, Dr. Gottlieb Burckhardt, the superintendent of a psychiatric hospital in Switzerland, drills holes in the heads of six severely agitated patients and extracts sections of the frontal lobes, altering their behavior with varying degrees of success. Two of the patients die. http://www.lobotomy.info/adventures.html

It is not at all difficult to multiply such examples. What they seem to me to have in common is a certain sociopathic tendency, that in its fullest form leads to serial murder:

... <The> Shipman Inquiry, which found that this sole-practising General Practitioner near Manchester had murdered at least 215 of his patients between 1975 and 1998 .... Shipman .. got into Medical School because he was very bright, and won a scholarship .... <His> personal style was particularly arrogant, tyrannical, and very few people found they could cope with him, and he almost invariably fell out with everybody that he worked with. The only psychiatrist who’s examined him called him the ultimate control freak. He had to have everything done the way he wanted it ... <There> seemed to be this characteristic that he was absolutely in control, and everybody around him had to do what he told them ... http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/helthrpt/stories/s636389.htm

While I agree we can learn something from Bruno's case, what I would take away is apparently unacceptable to those who want to conceptualize case as illustrating some eternal struggle between religion and a freethinker, a conceptualization I regard as mythologizing. As indicated by my posts in this thread, I prefer to understand the episode as shedding some light on the ways in which power structures may seek to protect their own authority in times of crisis, and the ways in which authoritarian personalities use abstract ideological considerations to justify violence in the name of some "greater good."