Eisen-Suppressed-Inventions-and-other-Discoveries-True-Stories-of ...

184 Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries
obscurantist monks and popes who burned Giordano Bruno, silenced
Galileo, taught the unlettered that the Earth was flat, and so on.
While not disputing the validity of these charges, it it very clear that the
things which Hawking, or Star Trek, or Nova, or The Shape of the World,
or Asimov, or Sagan (Carl, not Francoise), or Hofstader, or hosts of others
really don't like about the Medieval Church, is the presence of a strong
and well-organized competition. This myopic view of history also fails to
understand that the kind of world that Science has created for us, and the
kind of spiritual desert it wishes all of us to live in, is driving hundreds of
thousands, millions of the "ignorant" into the arms of these simplistic,
foolish, backward yet in so many ways more spiritually enriching faiths,
such as Creationism, which people like Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould
waste their time in hating and fearing.
As long as there is a well-entrenched, powerful intellectual Establishment
trying to teach all of us that the pointless and sterile accumulations
of silly facts has more spiritual merit than the compassion of a
Mother Teresa or the courage of a Mahatma Ghandi, the legions of the
"ignorant" and, presumably, the "damned," are going to swell.
XI. That anything but the latest theory ("the paradigm") is ignorant,
superstitious or crazy and should be ridiculed or even persecuted.
(I am indebted for this example to Dr. Andreas Ehrenfeucht, at the
University of Colorado.) We know that the father of the theory of Drifting
Continents, Hans Wegner, was ridiculed and ignored throughout most of
his scientific career for his belief in this theory.
Imagine today, however, that there is a geologist who for lots of good
reasons believes that this theory is false.
He would probably be given much the same treatment that Galileo
received, less brutal in its methods, perhaps, but with exactly the same
results: a black-listing and a silencing.
XII. That social involvement interferes with pure thought.
Why should the priesthood, the social elite who are carried on the backs
of the society like Hindu Brahmans of old in the hoodhahs of elephants,
worry themselves about the cow dung that the elephants have to step in
Go to half a dozen science conferences and you will see that the academic
scientific world lives in a kind of permanent merry-go-round from lectures
to banquets to receptions to luxury hotels to jetliners to grants to
awards to citations to publishing contracts to . ..
XIII. That Science is pure thought.
Few words in our vocabulary are quite so impure as the word "pure."
The Burmese Buddhist tradition maintains that any person who is so
advanced as to have no more than one sexually unclean thought each