People know since about 5000 years but ...

[jwocky]

Human history teaches us, the wish for freedom and some degree of guaranteed Civil Rights is impossible to suppress over longer terms. North Korea or the former Soviet Union have been quite good, but then, they had to spend every year some billions to do so. If you don't have billions - forget it!
Since Assurnasirpal and the Hyksos kings in Egypt, we know that ... and still, on every level, big for whole nations, small in every human organization, some people have to try it again. I wonder why? It definitively lets the term "Homo sapiens sapiens" appear sometimes a little doubtful, doesn't it?

[IAHM-COL]

I think domination and territorialism may have a big play
It makes me think, of, per example, tribal behaviors quite common even in early ancestral africa -- which are reproduced in baseball, football and soccer games fan base.

Baseball games remember me of our all powerful leader, Curt, in some ways

IH-COL

[SkyBoat]

Going back only about 500 years, Thomas Watson (1513-1584) the English humanist, scholar and bishop, stated:

Whosoever is afraid of submitting any question, civil or religious, to the test of free discussion, is more in love with his own opinion than the truth.

Considering he was a contemporary of Elizabeth I (1533-1603), who was not known for her great tolerance of free discussion, either religious or civil, Biship Watson made a truly bold statment.

Nevertheless, a mere 40 years after Watson's death, the fledgling Plymouth Colony would be sowing the first seeds for freedom in the New World, even though they themselves would only in part begin the process that would take another century and a half before it would grow to fruition in the American Revolution.

But the World itself changed, which also took place in this same time period of Watson's life, with the Copernican Revolution. the Polish astronomer,Nicholas Copernus', "On the Revolutions of the Spheres" was published in 1543, carefully detailing the proofs that the earth revolved around the sun, not the sun around the earth as had been proclamed by Ptolemy centuries before. And by the death of Elizabeth I in 1603, a Dutch lens maker had patented a pair of lenses that were placed at opposite ends of a tube, allowing the viewer to see at great distance.

In 1610, the device had found its way across Europe into the hands of an Italian mathemetician and astronomer, Galileo Galilei, who had the stroke of genius to turn the device into the night sky. And in a moment, the intellectual connection between the Copernican Heliocentric theory and visual proof of it came together, though the freedom of expression would cost Galileo dearly, even his suffering the Roman Church's judgment of heresy (finally reversed in 1964!) and being held under house arrest for the remainder of his life.

The facts, however, were, essentially correct. Copernicus did correctly state the earth revolves around the sun. Galileo was correct in stating that Copernicus was correct, and that by carefully studying the phases of Venus and the four largest moons of Jupiter (still by tradition called the "Gallileans), the Solar System was much larger place than was previously believed.

What neither man imagined, nor could imagine, was how wrong they were about the scale of the universe. That discovery would come some three hundred years later atop Mt Wilson Observatory outside of Pasadena, California, where, Edmund Hubble and his many assistants, during a period of years ending in 1929, discovered the Universe was a very, very, large place, indeed.

In 2009 I had the privilege of being part of a tour of Mt Wilson. Below is a photo of me standing beside the 100" Hooker Telescope that Hubble used to make his discovery that the Milky Way is only one of billions of galaxies.



The point of all this, is that throughout human history the search for truth as we can objectively define it has been incremental and always will be. Only in philosophy and theology is there the search for ontological, transcendant and eternal truths.

But. The free and unfettered search for all kinds of truth can only take place in an atmosphere of civility and constituionality where the right to expression and dissent are both guaranteed without fear of retribution. It is the breakdown of that guarantee that persuaded us to create Free Flight Free Speech.

It is also our great responsibility to live up to our own ideals and mission when we are challenged by those we have angered. And we must assume at some point, one or more such individuals will challenge us in a most unpleasant and pernicious fashion, to test us, to be able to say that we are a failure. We must watch for that trap and be prepared for it. It can come at any time.

But knowing it is a trap, we are already half-way prepared for it.