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      It captures my imagination to think about the implications of the discovery that the universe does not revolve around the world of humans. It’s far out to think that we’re smaller than we think we are, and that our whole system of order is not really how God sees things. It was all a construct of our minds. This leads to questions of morality. In religion, people think that it is good to suffer and that they need to have some authority above them to tell them what to do. They feel they literally need this, or they will go astray. They feel that it is what God intended. But maybe not, in Galileo’s universe.

There were some stirring quotations by Galileo that fly in the face of our sense of security in knowledge, like when he was talking about the sailors who didn’t have “the advantages of a classical education but are not afraid to use their eyes. I tell you that our dockyards are stirring with that same high curiosity which was the true glory of ancient Greece.” (Brecht 69) It may be hard to see our world as this way now, but Galileo’s world shows how stuffy and unthinking people allow themselves to be. The old monk on page 73 is literally is collapsing under the weight of his religious beliefs that define him. And it’s also true when it comes to academia. In the play, they swore by the words of Aristotle, for example, just as they would the Bible; he was an Authority Figure. A classical education, in which you read books in order merely to gather knowledge, seems to me to be superficial. It’s kind of troubling to think that you think you are learning all this knowledge, but it is really just things other people have said; you are gathering ideas, but if you are separated from the textbook, you get disoriented and totally lost, because you can’t think for yourself, and you can’t apply it in everyday life; you have actually become conditioned not to think for yourself, and feel that you can’t. Whereas, if you use your senses like the sailors, you can learn things others with all their conditioned education will miss.