Son of Galileo

Are you intentionally misrepresenting things or are you just not paying attention to what’s been discussed and written? It’s hard to take you seriously when you create these strawmen. 1. Catechumens absolutely have a spiritual guide and confessor. Sometimes the priest is both the catechist and the confessor, sometimes they just guide them spiritually and confess them before baptism and have someone else conduct catechism. Catechumens participate the life of the Church in every way except participation in the Mysteries, which presupposes, of course, initiation. (Surely you agree that the non-orthodox are not participating in the Mysteries, right?) 2. Ben does not have a “ministry“. He is not a “teacher“. He is not purporting to be a “teacher of the orthodox faith.” He is conducting interviews, sharing news and takes on non-Orthodox events and ideas. That does not make him a “teacher“ of the Church. Moreover, he was doing this before he became a catechumen, he already had a channel and he’s continuing with the blessing of his spiritual guide. What do you see as problematic here? Is that not up to the spiritual guide to decide if he should continue in *this* or not?

Here is a story about a group of students who fundraised and worked for an entire year to bring Neil de Grasse Tyson to speak at an event: "We were a small college club with around 10 members and on a whim one of our members emailed tyson's agent to see if we could book him. We found out it would cost 40k (it raised to 50k in December of that year where I think it still might be) for his speaking fee plus expenses to have him come to our college for 1 day where he'd host a small lecture, a press meeting, dinner with up to 6 people, and the main lecture and a book signing time permitting. We decided to go for it, and spent a year where our club exclusively worked on bringing him in. When he arrived, myself and others introduced ourselves and our fields of study. He went after first of us in humanities or soft sciences pretty much relentlessly from the get go. We're all used to the philosophy major working at McDonald's joke, but he wasn't trying to be funny, and spent the ride from the airport making repeated comments about the uselessness of our majors. Additionally he spent about 5 minutes trying to show that logic was stupid but he was citing logical rules and Occam's razor. The small lecture was him bragging about how famous he was, and how easy it is to pull yourself out of poverty or etc. The dinner was for leaders of other clubs so helped us raise money. He took the piss out of how one student held her fork, and was impossibly smug when giving advice to physics students. The main event was a terribly boring lecture consisting of fart jokes and fan service; teasing the upcoming TV series he was in and not much else. He spent a quarter of the time reading Sagan's blue dot, which is nice but shouldn't have cost us because it wasn't his material. He left at about 2am, and we were all exhausted because we had spent the day busy setting up and tearing down. The whole affair cost nearly 85k. The additional money being for locations, personnel, air fare, Tyson's hotel, catering, etc. We all decided he was an ass hole. I'd never want to spend 16 hours with a celebrity again." From another member of the same group: "Neil deGrasse Tyson, who came to our university, gave a crappy speech rife with lame fart jokes, was rude and disrespectful with the people who organized the event (there were a couple campus clubs working on it for about a year). He equated one of the group's member's philosophy major as a degree in mental masturbation. We were so pumped to hear a talk about the universe, astrophysics, black holes and dark matter, and instead he gave a speech on debunking lame pop media science misconceptions such as the "supermoon" because the organizing club is known as a skeptic/secular humanist society. He then basically said he did us a favor and that we "owed him one" for that. He delivered a private lecture to our group and members of the campus physics club in which he realized he had said something witty, whipped out hsi iphone, and spent the next fifteen minutes trying to come up with the perfect wording for it to post it to his twitter. In the middle of a lecture we spent a year's work and $55k total to organize."

We need you guys to help. This our family, our friends, my husband’s godson, Matthew aka George. Please pass this around to everyone that you can. This will get spammed a lot here until it’s fulfilled. Link in comments

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