I had commenced a philosophical discussion involving David Palm and Robert Sungenis. Per a mail adressed to the two of them.
The latter got a few more involved. I did not object.
One of these few more is however Christopher Ferrara. I leave to my readers whether his opening words of an "endless war" mean he took our rather peaceful discussion - at least on my own and David Palm's part - as an "endless war". However, what is abundantly clear is that he:
- 1) proposes a "truce", and proposes it be binding on all involved by their voluntary gentlemen's agreement;
- 2) then asks the participants in a discussion I started and involving me to keep this secret.
I find such a gesture totally worthy of the creeps who run the Modern World to its ruins. That it comes from one purported opponent of them, and not from an abortionist or evolutionist, if anything makes it worse.
Here are the two letters:
- I
- Christopher Ferrara to Robert Sungenis et al. including me
- 12/03/15 à 03h41
- Re: On "Sungenis Looses What He Has Bound on Joshua 10"
- I suggest that you end this seemingly endless war with a truce containing the following terms:
1. To hold to the heliocentric is not heresy per se.
2. Yet, the Copernican principle and modern cosmology in general are clearly, expressly and avowedly motivated by a philosophical aim, stated as such, by leading physicists such as Wolfson, whom I am reading now. That aim is to prove that that the Earth is nothing special, which is an indirect proof of the nonexistence of God. We inhabitants of Earth are just the incredibly fortuitous outcome of a long series of mutations occurring on a planet in a random location at the edge of a humdrum galaxy. They cannot abide a central earth for that reason, and they say so. You may say that God’s majesty does not depend on the location or the uniqueness of Earth, but the propagandists for the Copernican narrative know the public mind and know what works in terms demystifying the Universe and thus eliminating the need for God. It is naive simply to assert that their propaganda is of no consequence.
3. Thus, modern cosmology—part science, part philosophy driving the science (as it does evolutionary theory)—threatens to erode the Faith, as does evolutionism, even if it cannot be called formal heresy.
4. Catholics are free to argue for some version of the geocentric model precisely in order to counter the pretensions of modern cosmology, whose “dark matter,” “dark energy,” string theory, multiverse, balloon-like expanding Cosmos (the only way to avoid a center of the Universe with all of the problems that entails for the Copernican narrative) and other gimmicks are no more or less contrivances than the ether that even the modern cosmologist is, at this very moment, trying to sneak in the back door under a different name.
5. Geocentrism is not per se a crackpot theory. Even atheist cosmologists such as Krauss admit that the CMB data suggest either that Earth is indeed at the center of the universe or that the Copernican model has to be rethought completely. You may say Krauss is wrong, but’s an argument, not a per se demonstration that geocentrism is crackpot stuff. If he (and others) can see the problems for the Copernican narrative, Catholics should admit them and also admit that geocentrism is still arguable on the basis of empirical evidence that suggests Earth is centrally located. Krauss calls this “crazy” only on the basis of his a priori assumption that it can’t possibly be true, because, as Wolfson puts it: "Do you really want to return to parochial, pre-Copernican ideas? Do you really think you and your planet are so special that, in all the rich vastness of the Universe, you alone can claim to be “at rest”? On purely philosophical grounds, we should reject the notion that Earth alone could be at rest relative to the ether.” Wolfson, Richard (2003-11-17). Simply Einstein: Relativity Demystified (Kindle Locations 1009-1010). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition. ” Wolfson, Richard (2003-11-17). Simply Einstein: Relativity Demystified (Kindle Locations 1005-1009). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
Further, if serious problems remain for the geocentrist theory, they are no more serious than those confronting the opposing cosmology, whose continuous ad hoc additions border on the ridiculous. A universe whose constituent matter and energy are 95% undetectable? Really? Any Catholic geocentrist is entitled to reject that claim on the same philosophical plane as their opponents reject geocentrism. What is gratuitously asserted may be gratuitously denied. And even if some semblance of an evidential argument can be concocted for the missing 95%, that argument hardly renders geocentism per see untenable.
6. To eliminate endless bickering over various conspiracy theories unrelated to geocentrism, the geocentrist proponents of such theories should simply admit that they are mere speculation, are unproven, are not worth pursuing to the detriment of more important issues, and should be definitively abandoned.
7. All parties should devote themselves to defending the Church against truly massive threats to the integrity of her liturgy and her doctrine, above all the astounding ongoing general eruption of neo-Modernism lamented by leading Churchmen, including Msgr. Pozzo, Archbishop Lenga, and Bishop Schneider during the run-up to the next session of the preposterous “Synod on the Family.”
In short, enough already. And, frankly, the notion that geocentrism threatens the Faith of anyone in the Magisterium is hard to take seriously in the midst of a situation in which leading Churchmen everywhere appear to be abandoning fundamental dogmas of the Faith while the Pope presides over a Synod whose controllers are clearly attempting to overthrow the teaching of John Paul II only 33 years ago—an effort which, were it to succeed, would destroy confidence in the entire Magisterium overnight.
In view of the above, can’t we all just get along?
Chris
- II
- Christopher Ferrara to Robert Sungenis et al. including me
- 12/03/15 à 04h22
- Re: On "Sungenis Looses What He Has Bound on Joshua 10"
- This should go without saying, but out of an abundance of caution: I do not give anyone permission to quote me from any email in any forum. These are private remarks, and I ask that you respect my wishes in this regard.
Now, I feel that the two letters fulfill very exactly the criteria for my resuming them as above, again:
- 1) [He] proposes a "truce", and proposes it be binding on all involved by their voluntary gentlemen's agreement;
- 2) then asks the participants in a discussion I started and involving me to keep this secret.
And I will later, if not stopped by bad intrigues, from pseudo-rightists like Ferrara or from open leftists like Mayor of Paris, perhaps even today disclose the full correspondence.
But now, I will also give the exchange this caused between me and Ferrara:
- Me to Christopher Ferrara and Robert Sungenis et al.
- 12/03/15 à 12h48
- Re: On "Sungenis Looses What He Has Bound on Joshua 10"
- "This should go without saying, but out of an abundance of caution: I do not give anyone permission to quote me from any email in any forum. These are private remarks, and I ask that you respect my wishes in this regard."
No, your caution was NOT abundant.
Now, as to permission, that is a moral quandary.
Remarks as far going as yours and asking for agreements, are such that I consider the public held in the dark if it cannot have them.
In other words, Ferrara, I consider your social method to be that of Freemasons or of Jews from the Synagogue, and totally unworthy of a Catholic.
Do I make myself clear on this?
Hans Georg Lundahl
- Christopher Ferrara to me, cc to Sungenis et al.
- 12/03/15 à 12h59
- Re: On "Sungenis Looses What He Has Bound on Joshua 10"
- The “public” has no right to know of private conversations between Catholics. If you cannot respect that principle, then this is the last email I will send.
[Note how he put "public" in quotation marks - as if the concept did not exist for him.]
- Me to Christopher Ferrara, cc. Robert Sungenis et al.
- 12/03/15 à 13h20
- Re: On "Sungenis Looses What He Has Bound on Joshua 10"
- Christopher A Ferrara!
I did not consider this email exchange totally private in the first place.
I did not myself invite you. If you did not note, I was the one who took the initiative to this discussion.
If you wish to absent yourself, do so.
However, a private conversation is private insofar as it touches private matters, not insofar as private persons agree on what reaches the public. Or especially that it do not reach the public. Chesterton and Belloc would not have liked your idea one bit, and I consider them better Catholics than you.
Hans Georg Lundahl
In case someone thinks the other team of US Catholics are playing open, like Chesterton and Belloc would have liked, how about checking on Mark Shea's blog, where a few days ago there was an article about Karl Keating's The New Geocentrics, under which article I posted links to answers? See if it was just temporary - unless you prefer suspecting my sloppiness - or if it is still down.
So, if you are curious what this exchange started about, it was an essay by David Palm. But this is a longer correspondence, and it will also involve my answer to the 7 proposals of Christopher Ferrara.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
Pope St Gregory I
12-III-2015
PS And now, Mark Shea has even blocked me again.
I tried to post this reply:
| "had little trouble pointing to the Crusades and the Inquisition as evidence of why Catholics where not Christian but popish followers of a predatory manmade cult irreconcilable with True Americanism"
Actually, 19th C. Protestants might typically have been more upset about Inquisition and less or not at all about Crusades. I mean the kind of Protestants who had "crusaded against Popery" under Cromwell or Gustavus Adolphus. |
Under this post:
Catholic and Enjoying it : News Flash!: Americans Fought in the Crusades and Conducted Inquisition
February 20, 2015 by Mark Shea
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/markshea/2015/02/news-flash-americans-fought-in-the-crusades-and-conducted-inquisition.html
And I found out I was again blocked. Meanwhile, I had under another post of his, concerning Willy Herteleer, expressed:
- What he positively said was correct;
- but his inculpation of Pewsitters may just concern one "news clipper";
- and wondered whether the ground where Willy was buried was not reserved for bishops. To this latter I got a satisfactory answer, it was not. Both bishops and princes, i e both bishops and laymen are buried there, and Willy being a layman is not in any way an obstacle to his getting buried there. I wanted to thank for the answer, but couldn't since I was - blocked.
Which probably goes some way to explaining why the post under which I had posted a link to a reply to Karl Keating was gone from the blog too./HGL
I am not understanding why the desire of keeping an Email confidential is a mark of sinister motives. By it's very nature, I don't think private correspondence is entitled to be public, and any publicizing should at the very least be kept anonymous. I'm not a moral theologian, but such a violation of a person's trust/confidence could fall under the umbrella of Detraction.
ReplyDeleteNick, has it STILL eluded you that the matter at hand in the private email was:
ReplyDelete1) public future behaviour
2) of public and publically both known and recognised debaters, like Ferrara himself, like Sungenis, like Palm, etc?
I think these criteria mean the proposal concerns precisely the public.
It is not as if we were talking of a private person's future marriage or past crimes or secret sins.
As to anonymity, I use the rule, a public person known by me as such, is published with name. A private person or one first presumed as such, I give initials to distinguish from other persons in debate, but not full name. With Tom Trinko, I first published his remarks under acronym TT, but when he told me he was writing for public newspapers, I corerected that to the full publically known name.
As to detraction, it concerns:
a) someone's real faults (if made up it is calumny rather than detraction);
b) and revealing them unnecessarily.
In case this latter was the case, for one thing, he had not suffered what people usually suffer from detraction, but rather gotten support, and for another thing, in the correspondence, I notified him and offered him to make some kind of honourable amends for setting me before fait accompli.
It seems he may in his secrecy and privacy made a detraction about me, unless his desire for me to get correction from the likes of you can be deemed a necessity. I think not.
Btw, you asked about "sinister motives". I never attributed such to him.
ReplyDeleteI said something about his gesture being sinister, but I did not judge his motives.
Btw, here is the correspondence with the guys starting:
ReplyDeleteWith David Palm and Sungenis
It is part 4 of this series, and it continues to part 7. This part one is an extract of the part 6. Or rather contains two such. Parts 2 and 3 concern my debates with John Médaille and Tom Trinko.
I am admittedly out of the loop on this matter. I just get really antsy when I see private matters made public, especially because it's happened to me before where people have broadcasted private correspondence, and even though it was nothing scandalous it was a serious violation of confidence.
ReplyDeleteI have tried to avoid the geocentrism issue like the plague, since I feel it falls into one of those categories where it's blown way out of proportion to the bigger issues we have at hand, especially promoting strong Catholic families.
But the question again is: was the matter private just because Ferrara declared it such?
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure what you mean. If I said something to you and said "please keep this private," that would naturally entail it shouldn't be broadcasted. It's not only common courtesy, it's somewhat a natural right.
ReplyDeleteUsually what I see in these situations is when Person A says something to Person B in private, and then Person A proceeds to speak publicly in a hypocritical manner from what he said to Person B in private, then often times Person B will say "That's not what Person A said to me in email," which is where the can of worms is usually opened. But if Person A is not being hypocritical, then I see no reason for Person B to even bring up the private email.
The problem is that in context - see other parts of debate, where the context comes in full - Christopher Ferrara was hypocritical in two ways:
ReplyDelete1) when starting to call our debate "this seemingly endless war" and pretending we needed his wisdom to make a truce;
2) by secrecy he would have made us hypocrites if we had all abided by the truce in front of all our readers and not told them how he had proposed it.
That was what I wanted to avoid, especially as he specifically asked one other debater (see all debate in context) to precisely keep a debater on other side in the dark on what he had said.
But there is more:
If I said something to you and said "please keep this private," that would naturally entail it shouldn't be broadcasted.
Key word usually.
But here we are dealing with:
* public topic (construction of universe is hardly the private affair of someone believing it is constructed a certain way)
* public people (Ferrara himself, Sungenis, Rick DeLano, Robert Bennett (with two teas!), and in some respect even me
* a proposal involving the public behaviour of these people
* and at same time a proposal to keep this private.
This is, as far as I can see, abusing, contrary to the natural law.
We are not dealing with:
* someone otherwise unknown
* in an as yet private aspect of life or private business
* and a proposal of merely private behaviour
* and me yet divulging all such private matters in public.
I fully understand my behaviour was not good "business manners", but I consider his behaviour was not good "writers' manners" or "men of letters manners", as in writers or men of letters, correspondences are often made privately merely to enjoy the calm, while all are aware that it will be published at an opportune moment.
If I had agreed with Ferrara, if I had even not objected, I would have made this subsequent publicisation of the correspondence (they are also free to publish their versions of it, if they like and the versions would differ, which I doubt insofar as they are honest), an act of betrayal against the trust I would then have invited him into.
So, in a way his words were also a little trap for me.
Because, the debate was per se not about Ferrara, not about secrecy, but about different takes on Geocentrism. Which you can verify, if you care to look at the rest of the messages in this series.
Here is next part of this series:
ReplyDeleteDebate with John Médaille on Geocentrism
And here is first part of the part concerning Sungenis and a few more, including Ferrara:
With David Palm and Sungenis
Here is an example of the kind of people who really DO have reason to value secrecy about anything where secrecy is asked:
ReplyDeleteHello Dear.
I am Mr.[anonnymised], a regional managing director (Matro bank int'l) London England, Are you a trustworthy individual or company? may I trust you? can you handle A multimillion's top secret deal? If your answers to the above questions are yes,
contact me for immediate transfer of GBP17.7 millions to your account hence you bear the same name with a deceased client in my bank who died in a plane last year without any next of kin.
I will be delighted to offer you 35% of the total funds immediately, Contact me in my Private E mail Address ([anonymised]) for more details.
Kind Regards,
[anonymised]
One reason I anonymise is that the spammer who sent me this may have in fact neither used his own name nor invented one, but stolen one. For revenge or for lack of ingenuity.
But one reason the spammer needs complete discretion is so that the one agreeing with the deal (I deleted mail) may be safely plundered without having alerted anyone.
Meanwhile, Christopher Ferrara has published the decision he made in secret back then, God bless him for that!
ReplyDeleteGeocentrism - Crackpot Theory?
TheFatimaCenter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=554TOFX3FW8
However, so far I cannot link to this under the video, since comments are disactivated for it.
By the way, it seems also the video was from "Ajoutée le 6 févr. 2014", meaning that referring to Chris Ferrara's decision as sth secret, to be kept from such and such a person, was basically baiting me, like testing how well or ill informed I was about him through internet.
ReplyDeleteNow, I do like people to get to know me on internet before getting in touch with me, but I would not pretend something I had already expressed were a secret, just to bait someone else.
That said, I have NOT yet had occasion to watch the video, so I cannot tell if it was a real change of mind.