Just about every school child knows that Galileo was condemned by religious fanatics because he proposed that the earth revolved around the sun instead of vice versa. That’s the line we were fed, what we were taught, what we believed. In 1633 the Catholic Church hauled in Galileo (Galileo Galilei), an Italian astronomer, for his heresy, and after he apologized he was sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life.

The editors at history.com (website) say that on June 22, 1633, the Church handed down the following order: “We pronounce, judge, and declare, that you, the said Galileo … have rendered yourself vehemently suspected by this Holy Office of heresy, that is, of having believed and held the doctrine (which is false and contrary to the Holy and Divine Scriptures) that the sun is the center of the world, and that it does not move from east to west, and that the earth does move, and is not the center of the world.”

Thanks to our teachers, we swallowed, hook, line and sinker, that religion hated science, stood in the way of science.

Francesco Maddalena, Msc. Nanoscience / PhD Physics, at Quora (quora.com), says that the idea of heliocentrism (earth and planets revolving around the sun) was around long before Galileo. Maddalena says that what got Galileo into trouble was that he made several attacks on church doctrine. He said that when the Pope and some high-ranking clerics asked Mr. Galileo “to write a book to examine both sides of the arguments”, he “wrote a book…basically calling stupid anyone who disagreed with him, while he was wrong (even if his conclusions were correct).”

In the article, “THE CATHOLIC CHURCH: NURSEMAID TO SCIENCE”, (catholicscience.com), the author, a physicist, notes another story that unfairly put the church in a bad light.

“The trial of Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) has been used as another example that the Church is opposed to science. Bruno proposed a cosmology that was surprisingly modern: an infinite universe, stars very far away and a non-geocentric cosmology. However, the cosmology was founded on a mystical basis, not on science. In 1600 Bruno was burned at the stake for heresy. As argued in the Catholic Encyclopedia on Bruno, his proposed cosmology did not enter into the charges:

“‘Bruno was not condemned for his defence [sic] of the Copernican system of astronomy, nor for his doctrine of the plurality of inhabited worlds, but for his theological errors, among which were the following: that Christ was not God but merely an unusually skillful magician, that the Holy Ghost is the soul of the world, that the Devil will be saved, etc.’”

The author of that article argues that the development of physics and cosmology began and grew “in Medieval Christendom…not in the ancient Hellenistic worlds or other civilizations.” (I’m not sure he is all correct there, claiming everything for Medieval Christendom, but let’s pass on that, for now.) The author said that priests were big in the science world because “they had time to do scholarly work (as do academics today) and did not have to worry about earning a living from non-scholarly pursuits”, and because “those in the Church were highly motivated to learn—to relate the world around them to that which Revelation and Faith had given them to believe. The term ‘scholastic’ for these Medieval priests was apt indeed.”

Okay, all that because I want to ensure we do a double take before putting tar on Samuel Haynes for his decision during the 1919 uprising in Belize City. You all know the story, but for refresher we go to an essay by Ms. Regina Gordon, “Marcus Garvey and the UNIA in British Honduras”, which she wrote to celebrate UBAD’s 25th anniversary in 1994.

Regina wrote, “In July 1919 a number of ex-Servicemen from Belize who had served in the First World War under the British returned to Belize totally disgusted with the racist treatment they had suffered abroad at the hands of the British Forces. When they were treated shabbily on their return and their pay was delayed, some of them started a riot in Belize Town, and they were soon joined by over 3,000 Belize Town residents, including many women. The looting was stopped by other members of the returned troops led by Samuel Haynes, but the whites did not feel safe until a British warship arrived the following day, followed by a U.S. gunboat a few days later.”

I’ve been ferreting around to find a quote from Haynes in which he explained, while in the USA, working for the UNIA, that it was no spur of the moment decision to calm things. Haynes is supposed to have said that he gave the matter careful thought and arrived at the decision that it was best for the Ex-Servicemen to cool off.

So, Haynes turned protector. He was a leader of the men and so we have to believe he could have excited things further, to the point where the representatives of the King in Belize, the Governor and all his men, could have been stripped of their belongings and put in jail. He could have burned Belize Town.

It is likely that if Haynes was unconscious of the world around him he would have gone completely riotous, but the fact is that Haynes was an educated man who most likely had already established connections with the great leader, Marcus Mosiah Garvey, who had begun planting seeds (for the giant movement he would launch in the US) in Central America about ten years previously.

A year or so after Haynes went “soft” on the British in British Honduras, Marcus was accused of going “soft” on the big American banana rulers in Central America. Marcus lobbied for workers in the banana plantations in Central America, especially the many West Indians, but in 1920/21 he advised them against striking. His detractors in the USA accused him of letting down the workers, but Marcus was looking at a greater prize.

It was the banana workers of Central America who were the first to bankroll the UNIA. In Belize, we had our branch of the UNIA (United Negro Improvement League) and the mighty Black Cross Nurses.

It would be easy to throw things at Marcus and Samuel, for what happened in 1919 (Samuel Haynes) and 1920 (Marcus Garvey), for their roles in keeping the peace when they could have done severe damage to the white ruling class. They could have had a moment’s satisfaction. Make no mistake about the vision of those men; both Haynes and Garvey knew how the white world had conspired to destroy the Haitian Revolution.

To be more specific to our Samuel Haynes, there were other deep issues in our part of the world that he couldn’t ignore. He had his reasons to stick with the British whom he and his colleagues had just gone to the war zone to fight for. Intrigue, Guatemala trouble, was the order of the day; well, it was as much the order of the day then, as now. Dr. Peter Ashdown contributed to this story about happenings in British Honduras, found at ww1latinamerica.weebly.com:

July 16 –first German invasion scare — Oppression in Guatemala stoked a number of armed opposition groups that used Belizean territory to infiltrate their homeland…Guatemalan revolutionaries and Mexico’s Carranza government had a common enemy—Guatemalan dictator Manuel Estrada Cabrera. To the Germans and Guatemalans, British Honduras was a tempting target with very light defense.

In July 1916, a prominent German in Mexico City reportedly offered 5,000 Germans to Guatemalan revolutionary leaders, hoping that Guatemala exiles would join them in an attack on Belize and the British Colony. The numbers were wildly exaggerated, but the intent was not… Belize rightly feared a German invasion: an army of Mexican and Guatemalan volunteers commanded by German officers and advisors.

May 1917 – Colonel Cowie’s Belizean Defense Mission — A military preparedness cadre from the British West Indian Regiment under Lieutenant Colonel E.L. Cowie arrived to bolster Belizean defense. They expanded the