Lecture me
Lectures begin, and I am a dismally antiquated, disgruntled engine spluttering back into academic life.
It amazes me; I suffered an epiphany today in the middle of a most intriguing lecture on the foundations of Enlightened thought. I have known since age 6 or 7 about Galileo's heliocentric theory of the universe, various gravitational experiments, and Newton's universal laws, but I have never quite grasped the significance of these watershed moments in their entirety. To have centuries of ecclesiastical supremacy shaken as they were by a mere dropping of an apple, or a fleeting thought in the mind of one who was prepared to prove it...indeed the very idea of empirical experimentation itself initiating an embryonic epicenter of faltering faith, the concentric ripples of which, over time, put into motion the creation of an increasingly secular civilization...the sheer magnitude of the paradigmatic shift required to incite and install critical inquiry in the minds of a people conditioned by historical waves of traditional acquiescence...
(Quite) a few years ago, men like Galileo and Newton proved the Church wrong. Today, atheism, agnosticism, spiritual indecision, "don't really care" or even "somewhat Christian but not really, I go to Mass once in a while", dominate the modern populace.
And people say history is irrelevant.