Think for yourself

THE LITTLE MONK: But I would mention other reasons. Let me speak for a moment of myself. I grew up as a son of peasants in the Campagna. They were simple people. They knew all about olive-tress, but very little else. While observing the phases of Venus, I can see my parents, sitting by the hearth with my sister, eating their cheese[…] They are no rich but in their misfortune there lies concealed a certain invisible order of things[…] They call up the strength to sweat up the stony paths with their baskets, to bear children, yes, even to eat, from the feeling of continuity and necessity which is given them by the sight of die soil, of the trees springing with new green foliage every year, of the little church, and by listening every Sunday to the Bible texts[…] What would my people say if they learned from me that they were really on a little bit of rock that ceaselessly revolves in empty space round another star, one among very many, a comparatively unimportant one?[…] So do you understand that in that decree of the Holy Congregation I perceive true maternal compassion, great goodness of soul?

GALILEO: Goodness of soul! What you probably mean is there’s nothing there, the wine’s drunk up, their lips are parched, so let them kiss the cassock! And why is nothing there? Why is the orderliness in this country merely the order of an empty cupboard, and the necessity merely that of working oneself to death? Among bursting vineyards, beside the ripening cornfields! Your Campagna peasants are paying for the wars which the representative of gentle Jesus is waging in Spain and Germany. Why does he put the earth at the hub of the universe? So that the throne of Saint Peter can stand at the hub of the earth. That’s why! You are right: it’s nothing to do with the planets, it’s to do with the peasants in the Campagna.

I encourage anyone to read this marvellous play: Life of Galileo, by Bertolt Brecht. You can read a shortest version here: http://www.vidyaonline.org/arvindgupta/lifeofgalileo.pdf. I have recently come across Part 7, entitled: A Conversation (you can read a small section in this message). It’s worth reading. It addresses some of the questions that I have made myself more than once. And the conclusion of Galileo sounds about right to me: if you don’t care about the truth, others will. Thinking for yourself, tiring and dangerous as it might be, at least allows you to decide what kind of life you want to live, instead of living the life other people expect you to. Some people say: blindness is bliss, or faith is blind and ignorance is bliss. I suspect that all those who invent these sentences are not as blind and ignorant as they proclaim we all should be.