Free The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster by Bobby Henderson Page A

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The Da Vinci Code.
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Giordano Bruno:
Deserved What He Got
    Originally born with the name Filippo in 1548, Giordano Bruno took his new name in 1565 when he became a Dominican friar at the Monastery of Saint Domenico near Naples. Eventually he was ordained a priest, which is slightly ironic considering what the Church eventually did to him. But more on that later.
    Disliked by all who encountered him, Bruno became an avid reader of books. He read Plato, Copernicus, Thomas Aquinas, Averroës, Duns Scotus, Marsilio Ficino, Nicholas of Cusa, Nick Hornby, and Isaac Asimov. It is a well-known fact that those who read books often develop some funny ideas, and history has shown this to be especially true of people from the olden days. Bruno became particularly influenced by his reading of Copernicus and Plato—so much so that he couldn’t stop talking about them. In 1576 the Inquisition put Bruno on their Ten Most Wanted list.
    He escaped to Geneva, but this wasn’t the last time the Inquisition would come calling. For a short period, Bruno joined the Calvinists, but he was unwilling to abide by their strict “no smiling” policy. In 1579 he traveled to Toulouse, France, where, for a while, he enjoyed theprotection of powerful French patrons. It was during this period that he completed the majority of his writing, including
De l’infinito universo e mondi
, in which he argued that the stars were the same as our sun, that the universe was infinite, and that all universes were inhabited by intelligent beings, establishing Bruno as the first ever sci-fi geek.
    While still in France, Bruno gained fame for his prodigious memory. Although his ability to retain information might have been a direct result of his intensive reading habits, he really should have put down the books at this point and slipped into dispassionate ennui like the rest of the French. Instead, Bruno decided to go to England.
    In 1583 he sought a position at Oxford, but the people there judged him to be a know-it-all and Bruno was turned away. After petitioning to teach at a few other English schools, he came to learn the harsh reality of the saying “You only have one chance to make a good first impression.” For the next couple of years, it is believed that Bruno spied against Catholics in England. Posing as a Catholic priest, he purportedly took confessions from Catholics, then reported those confessions to English spymasters who saw to it that the Catholics were put to death under the persecutory laws of the time. Even if Bruno wasn’t a heretic, he most surely had proved himself to be a major asshole by this point—and well-deserving of a good burning.
    In 1585 Bruno returned to Paris. Within a year he had pissed off the Parisians, and so he moved to Germany, where his reputation hadn’t preceded him. By 1588 he was on his way to Prague, and it was growing clear that Bruno was running out of countries.
    Faced with the option of fleeing to Siberia 8 or going back to Italy, Bruno stupidly accepted a brief teaching position at Padua in 1591. Unfortunately for him, 9 the professorship he sought there went to Galileo Galilei. So he journeyed to Venice, where he pissed off one last person, who then denounced him to the Inquisition.
    Bruno was arrested on May 22, 1592. It took six years before he stood trial in Rome, and when the inquisitor, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, asked him if he still stood by his beliefs, Bruno is believed to have replied: “Does the pope wear a funny hat?”
    And so, on February 17, 1600, a nail was driven through his tongue, Bruno was tied to a stake, and he was burned as a heretic.
    If only he’d kept his mouth shut.
    A tough lesson, for sure.
Charles Darwin:
Evolution’s “Creepy Little Cook”
    In June 1837, more than twenty years before Charles Darwin published his famous, if highly flawed, treatise on Natural Selection entitled
On the Origin of Species,
the young biologist self-published a lesser-known work, one