Suppression of Scientific Thoughts
(With malice towards one & all)
At the center of the Dark Ages stood the Christian Bible. All scientific thought which contradicted the Bible was suppressed. The Christian Bible states very clearly that the sun revolves around the earth. The result was that for centuries the important astronomical discovery that the sun was the center of the universe was deliberately suppressed by the church, with proponents of the non-Christian theory being persecuted for their endeavors.
Another famous suppression was with regards to the earth being round. The Bible talks very clearly of the four corners of the earth, therefore, the church argued, it must be square. This dogmatic belief was quietly dropped only when the voyages of discovery finally proved beyond doubt that the earth was round: despite this fact having been known by the non-Christian Classical Greeks since the time of Alexander.
Galileo who lived in the 16^th century was an Italian scientist & astronomer, proclaimed that the earth was round, and the earth orbits around the sun. He also said that there were millions of stars, because there was also a number given to the amount of stars in the heavens.
As soon as the Pope came to know about this, Galileo was summoned by the Pope for his blasphemous statements and was imprisoned, and was warned that if he did not withdraw his statement he would be executed. Galileo was a wise man, he told the jury that I am unable to prove the first two facts, but with regards to the third you can send your representatives to my house and they can observe through my telescope the number of stars in the night sky. The representatives were sent to his house but were too scared to look into the telescope, because to report the truth might also mean their own persecution.
By withdrawing his first two statements Galileo knew that the truth cannot be hidden, sooner or later the facts will be in the open for every body to see.