A reverse witch-trial: Jailed for NOT having supernatural powers
"Today, a court in the central Italian city of L'Aquila ... sentenced six scientists and a government bureaucrat to six years in jail on manslaughter charges for their failure to predict a 2009 earthquake that left more than 300 people dead."
"Rarely since a Catholic inquisition in Rome condemned Galileo Galilei to spend the remainder of his days under house arrest for the heresy of teaching that the Earth revolves around the sun, has an Italian court been so wrong about science."
That is completely backward.
Even a friend of mine who commented on this article in Facebook scoffed, "We know the world is flat because of the 2-D maps."
Again, the exact wrong reaction.
Though the court that tried these scientists was obviously hostile to the scientists themselves, there is not a hint of hostility to SCIENCE. In fact, the case would not have been tried without a judiciary and jury that was idiotically besotted with science, to the point of worshiping it and ascribing to it supernatural powers.
Since since the early 1990s, scientists started claiming that, out of a world filled with countless variables and massive influences, they had isolated a single class of molecule measured in parts per million as the single cause of a worldwide temperature upcycle (which turned out to last only 16 years). They were not only capable of explaining all history with the phrase "survival of the fittest," they now had powers to gaze into the earth and all its elements and discern its deepest workings.
And not only were these scientists unanimously certain that they'd found the culprit, but they were equally certain they had the key of seership to tell us what would happen in the next decade and century, with predictions so dire--and so inarguable--that conscience and duty compelled them to demand the sacrifice of any wealth and liberty by commoners, in faith to the oracle's doom.
And they've been getting that faith and those sacrifices. The western world has bowed to the heirs of priests and prophets who, in the late 19th century, banished God from history by proclaiming the completely non-predictive "science" of organic evolution. Not until Global Warming, though, had they claimed to do more than give us gadgets and free us from superstition; now they demanded faith and penance and fealty like hadn't been seen since the Dark Ages.
So, should we really be so surprised when a bunch of ignorant European acolytes and laymen break out the torches and pitchforks, after the self-proclaimed prophets and miracle-workers fail to predict even one day into the future of a planet they claim to know so perfectly?
Looks like some folks are falling into a pit they digged themselves.
