Giordano Bruno was burned by the Roman Inquisition in 1600 for his 'heretical' scientific ideas and has been held for ages to have been a martyr for science destroyed by religion. Yet isn't the truth better said that Bruno was a victim of politics?
The Medici and other Italian families had used the papacy for political purposes before. The Catholic Church of the era was one actor in a vast political drama of contention for power. Hundreds of thousands died in religious purges (and science lost very few people and should have been regarded as sacred cows one might guess that some believe).
Bruno was himself a Dominican friar as well as a scientist. That fact alone makes the issue seem like a sectarian striving for power and direction within the church more so than an alienated and remote Bruno working in a scientific ivory tower at some remove on a shining city on a hill persecuted by pitchfork wielding peasant that believed the world is flat.
It is quite disingenuous for scientists to offer the point that they are a peaceful, non-political form of humanity working soley for the advancement of humanity. Much science from the anatomical books of Joesph Mengele to the atomic bombs of a generation of theoretical physicists and all of today's high tech weapons were created for financial and political reasons by scientists.
Scientists have persecuted their own commonly as dissidents in environmental science to geology and in physics have advanced new ideas. Unique ideas created by brilliant individuals were sufficient reason for loss of tenure tracks and employment security. Scientists tend to be intolerant in their bureaucratic and ossified stage of establishment.
Religion in Europe was co-opted by politics and economic pragmatism long ago. By the time of Constantine's vision bringing conversion and the rise centuries of later of Pope Gregory to bring the church militant into being the politicization of religion became a fact. Christianity was still virtuous and had no doctrine in support of torture, execution, enslaving others or death when found in the hearts of believers and reading in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, yet the practical worldliness of human social organizations had move the Catholic Church into a political power position and tool role player amidst the great political dynasties of Europe. The Catholic Church was also directly challenged by a very politicized Moslem religion that directly attack Europe on three axes; the Dardanelles, Iberia and Sicily-Rome.
For modern supporters of science to attack Christianity for the persecution of a few scientists amidst the hundreds of thousands of political deaths in the era is a little wimpish, and it is incorrigibly misleading to suggest that Christian doctrine in the Bible can be in some be the rationale for the political extremes of European history that were a phenomena of human social character.
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