That's a genuine wish for whoever is going to mark the holy days in one form or another . . .

. . . and thanks for the back-up, Mary Anne (and Tony and LJ).

But -- Jacob's feeble attempt to rouse my ire with a fumbling play of "the Nazi card" fell flatter than the proverbial Kansas pancake. This comes as no great surprise, considering the source is one who seems not to have read any history of cosmology, or enough about The Galileo Matter* to understand the underlying issue:

Until Galileo looked at the night sky with his telescope, especially the Jovian satellite system -- and why else do you think they're called "the Galilean moons", Jake? -- the nature of the universe was an ever-increasing pile of rationalizations based on the only observation available at the time: the sky appears to turn around the Earth. The faithful took this to mean that the Earth was the Center of the Universe. To Christians, who retained the Jewish creation story, that meant God placed it there, and placed Man as the best thing created for that center.

In other words, until Galileo's observations and conclusions, cosmology was inextricable from mythology. Galileo made it a science.

Yes, it's possible to make an extremely superficial reading of the matter, relying solely on the politics of power. What you've missed understanding is that the threat to power represented by the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (full text here) went to that power's very base: Faith that Earth and Man were the Center of Creation.

Undermine the base, and the tower falls. Obviously, the people who live at the top would rather that not happen.

As things turned out, it didn't happen. It took the Church 600 years to admit they were wrong in assuming Galileo's science would destroy Faith, but admit it they did.

[* -- try Galileo's Daughter, by Dava Sobel]