So I just started this series. Partway through ep 3 and I'm getting the urge to rant. Bear with me.
Everything about it is so high quality, but I just can't help but be rubbed the wrong way by this attitude it has with the past, which you see EVERYWHERE.
For context, I'm not religious at all.

But this mindset that's so common is one of unearned smug superiority. Standing on the shoulders of giants, absorbing so much fact through osmosis, and having this better-than-they, smarter-than-they idea about the people of the past, with no consideration for historical or cultural realities......

It's hard to put into words exactly, but the premise of this anime is that the main character is in 15th century Europe and wants to prove heliocentrism in spite of persecution.
So from the very start we, with our modern osmosis-knowledge, start with the certainty that the protagonist and right and the accepted opinion of his world is wrong.

I for one couldn't prove heliocentrism in that era. Neither could >99% of the population. Of course with modern technology, modern scientific consensus, etc we know it to be true, and now even poor idiots wouldn't doubt it. Not because they know WHY they shouldn't doubt it, but just because it's the common view of the day.

I just feel like it's so presumptuous to write a story where, not only is the whole world wrong, but we as outside observers KNOW it's wrong and are meant to feel smug about that knowledge. "Oh those STEWPID 1400s churchmen and their campaign against the obvious truth!"

Besides which, it's just historically inaccurate. I get the feeling that it's maybe supposed to be Not!Europe, and either way it's not a biography or anything, but in the early 15th century nobody was burned for promoting heliocentrism. Copernicus lived a long life promoting it. It didn't catch on, since it went against established thought, but it wasn't generally considered heresy.

And we need to consider WHERE and WHEN that established thought came from. Back in the Greco-Roman period, the early age of philosophers, many leading thinkers didn't limit their theories to specific fields, like most scientists do today. So many wrote on diverse subjects. Thinkers like Aristotle and Ptolemy were incredibly influential and deserved much of the praise heaped on them. They weren't right about everything, but what they were right on was incredible, and what they were wrong on still usually had a solid theoretical basis and deserves respect. The issue is when people began assuming that, being right on one thing meant they must be right on other things, that a thousand years of momentum carried that forward.

The geocentric model isn't some clearly-nonsense idea. There was a lot of thinking done by very smart men to back it up. But with our hindsight, it LOOKS as silly as flat-Eartherism.

Going forward in time to the era of Galileo, greater levels of church persecution of natural science theories began, but just saying "The church persecuted Galileo for his heliocentrism" ignores a lot of circumstance.
For one, Galileo was rather caustic in promoting his ideas. For two, he had a lot of enemies, and those enemies used whatever they could to try fucking him over. Honestly, the story of Galileo is one of church corruption being used to settle personal feuds much more than one of religious stifling of science.
For two, this was all in the era of the Reformation, which while in many ways was justified, also lead to wars (such as the 30 Years War) on a greater scale than Europe had ever seen before.
I'm not some inquisition apologist or anything, and in many cases I'm appalled by the ways various "heresies" were stamped out. The Albigensian Crusade, for instance. Horrible shit happened there.
But it's not hard to imagine a timeline where this "heresy" here or that "heresy" there (I use quotes since I'm not actually religious and don't really believe in the idea of heresy) could have lead to conflicts like the 30 Years War much earlier in time.

And while it might be tempting to suggest that all of that violence just proves that religion is evil or something like that, all it takes is a look at the horrible violence committed in the name of Communism, a supposedly "secular" ideology to see that it isn't religion so much, as it is human nature.
"Religion" is natural. That is, strongly-held beliefs which override all else. Even today I see it. Can you really look at the modern gender cult and see anything but religious patterns? No dissent from dogma, demonization of infidels, etc.

Religion is completely natural and has the potential to lead to great good, but just as with everything natural to humanity, there's the potential for great evil too. How many have died in the name of someone else's love? Is love evil?

Anything just rambling here at this point. I figure kissu welcomes this sort of post..................