The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster - Bobby Henderson [29]
After that, Aristotle retired to his writings. It is said that Aristotle wrote over 150 treatises. Although that is an awful lot of treatises, they can be summarized as follows: Everything in our world is composed of potential (matter) and of reality (form). Like an uncarved block of marble, we have the potential to “sculpt” our lives and make them into whatever reality we wish. Today, this line of thought is referred to as “freaky New Age shit,” and contemporary scholars agree that, if Aristotle were alive today, he would definitely be a fixture on Oprah.
Aristotle has been a fan favorite of all the great thinkers throughout time. Not only was he a great philosopher, but he also developed a systematic classification of animals, which made him quite the Renaissance man, and it should be noted that his teachings experienced a real renaissance during the Renaissance. But there were dark clouds ahead for his Renaissance supporters … for although he talked a lot about God, he also declared that the universe was eternal, a belief that caused a lot of trouble about a thousand years after he died, when the Catholic Church finally started paying attention to all the Aristotle hype.
Leonardo Da Vinci:
Architect, Musician, Anatomist, #1 New York Times Bestselling Author, Inventor, Vegan, Engineer, Homosexual, Sculptor, Painter, and Minor-League Stickball Prodigy
Known as the original Renaissance Man, Leonardo Da Vinci came from humble origins. His father was a notary and his mother was a local peasant woman. Leonardo was raised on the hard streets of Florence where he grew up quickly—learning to draw, paint, sculpt, and invent before normal kids his age had ever even seen a gun. He was also a closeted homosexual.3
Da Vinci began keeping journals early in life. He wrote them in code, but his cowriter, Dan Brown, later translated much of what was inside. Through Da Vinci’s journals, as well as surviving records kept by Florence’s Officers of the Night, an antisodomy agency of the time,4 we have learned that Da Vinci enjoyed the company of adolescent boys and that he “liked ’em young.” He also became a vegan,5 having determined that milk-producing udders are homologous to a woman’s breasts, which of course he despised. But enough about his sexual preferences.
Throughout Da Vinci’s life, he managed to invent everything that’s ever been used in a war. These include the helicopter, the hang glider, the tank, the machine gun, the cluster bomb, the robot, and the submarine. Later he went on to invent the single-span bridge, the video game Halo, and the gate that swings both ways.
The Renaissance humanists saw no distinction between science and the arts, and so Da Vinci didn’t limit his brilliant imagination to just inventing things.6 He also painted such famous masterpieces as the Adoration of the Magi, the Mona Lisa, and The Last Supper. He studied anatomy, designed festivals, sculpted, and wrote music. He even arranged it so that his shit didn’t stink. In short, he was awesome.
(We will not cover Da Vinci’s problems with the Catholic Church, since everybody has already read The Da Vinci Code.)7
Giordano Bruno:
Deserved What He Got
Originally born with the name Filippo in 1548, Giordano Bruno took his new name in 1565 when he became a Dominican friar at the Monastery of Saint Domenico near Naples. Eventually he was ordained a priest, which is slightly ironic considering what the Church eventually did to him. But more on that later.
Disliked by all who encountered him, Bruno became an avid reader of books. He read Plato, Copernicus, Thomas Aquinas,