[BipolarBob]

I read your words. They are one sided. The angelic church and the hot headed ignorant Galileo. Hmmmm. The facts are Galileo was right. The church was wrong. Those are the facts and no matter how you/church wish to manipulate them, they remain. It is/was immoral what the church did to that man. The pope did not show the mercy, love or patience of Christ. He showed what he truly was and that was a prideful spiteful man.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

In what way was Galileo "right"? There is no coherent Galilean model of planetary motion. Read Kostler's The Sleepwalkers, great read. Galileo was a strident and hamfisted advocate of a theory he could not explain, did not understand and that is actually less useful for predicting observations than the one it proposed to replace. He was absolutely, demonstrably wrong about tides. If he had not provoked an unnecessary and pointless fight with the Vatican, he would have been a minor footnote in history.

BTW, Martin Luther was adamantly opposed to heliocentricism (he had read some early papers by Copernicus, prior to the release of De Revolutionibus) and condemned it as heresy. Copernicus was a Roman Catholic Cannon, about equal in rank to a Monsiegnor. The Roman Church was indifferent to heliocentricism, until Galileo made a fuss about it and had De Revolutionibus added to the Index. Again, like Akin on abortion, Galileo's hamfisted proclamations gave the geocentricists power they never would have had otherwise.