While I certainly don’t agree with them (the church), it’s not quite as evil as I had previously thought. First, he was kept in a palace, and he was permitted

While I certainly don’t agree with them (the church), it’s not quite as evil as I had previously thought. First, he was kept in a palace, and he was permitted to continue publishing until his death. Second, according to the article he had made a lot of enemies in ways that other scientists of the day, who also held heliocentric beliefs, hadn’t done. Lastly, he was pushing science that there wasn’t evidence for and that required new assumptions to make up for the current assumptions they were trying to prove. Like I said, I don’t agree with them but I also have the luxury of hindsight. One way to look at it from the church’s pov may have been that he was making up a bunch of stuff that wasn't supported by evidence and also contradicted directly their institution, so they might have perceived him as just creating political trouble and instability. People in the past would make up all sorts of lies back then that would later be used as justification for war, especially when these things had some sort theological underpinnings to properly motivate one side against another. It’s definitely not good but I now see, as how the history was laid out, that Galileo hadn’t really discovered anything himself, wasn’t even correct, didn’t have evidence for things he was putting fourth, and other scientists didn’t even agree with him. It was in fact Kepler who was much closer to a correct model, but he wasn’t a polemical of a writer so he didn’t have as much influence and legend as Galileo.