Spaced Out History

Yesterday's accidental lesson was that even someone who has been to college and pride themselves on their enlightenment and reason can get into much more of a lather about someone getting the director who directed a piece phonied up movie history wrong than they will be bothered by Hollywood pushing a phonied up, romanticized, pseudo history of a company that exploited child labor, hiring them with the intention of sending them into deadly working conditions on their own, with no real backup, advertising that they'd prefer to hire teenage orphans, presumably so there would be no survivors to pay or who might sue or just be inconveniently in grief.

By accident, over at what is apparently similar peoples' idea of an Athenæum, Salon magazine,  one of their resident neo-atheist hate commentators declared that

Link Baxter 17 hours ago
I guess the question we're all asking ourselves is this; why hasn't NASA ever sent a Christian astronaut to the moon? In fact why are there no Christian astronauts at all?

What came immediately to mind was the furious lather that old Maddy Murray O'Hair got into when the Apollo 8 crew read the beginning of Genesis, live, on TV from near the moon, filing one of her publicity lawsuits which got thrown out by the Supreme Court for lack of jurisdiction.  And, after that came to mind, I remembered Buzz Aldrin taking Presbyterian Communion on the moon, the first food ever eaten there.   As he described it:

In a little while after our scheduled meal period, Neil [Armstrong] would give the signal to step down the ladder onto the powdery surface of the moon. Now was the moment for communion.

So I unstowed the elements in their flight packets. I put them and the scripture reading on the little table in front of the abort guidance system computer.
Then I called back to Houston.

“Houston, this is Eagle. This is the LM Pilot speaking. I would like to request a few moments of silence. I would like to invite each person listening in, wherever and whomever he may be, to contemplate for a moment the events of the past few hours and to invite each person listening, wherever and whomever he may be, to contemplate for a moment the events of the past few hours and to give thanks in his own individual way.”
...
In the radio blackout I opened the little plastic packages which contained bread and wine.
I poured the wine into the chalice our church had given me. In the one-sixth gravity of the moon the wine curled slowly and gracefully up the side of the cup. It was interesting to think that the very first liquid ever poured on the moon, and the first food eaten there, were communion elements.

Whether or not he should have done it, the fact is that Aldrin did it.  There is some speculation that he kept it quiet because he knew NASA was still uptight from O'Hair's lawsuit.  More to my point, Aldrin was a member of Webster Presbyterian Church, called the “church of the astronauts” when John Glenn, Buzz Aldrin, Roger Chaffee, Jerry Carr and Charlie Bassett were all  members of that congregation.  I think Aldrin was an elder or deacon, though I'm not that familiar with Presbyterian organization.

Other astronauts were members of other denomination, I know a number were Catholics and would be surprised if the other major denominations weren't represented in the list of Astronauts.

By contrast, of course, someone might bring up the frequently reported quip attributed to the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, that he'd been in space and didn't see God.  Something I remember repeated a lot by the few atheists I knew back then.  It seemed like something you could imagine coming from a member of the Soviet military, someone promoted under the very anti-religious Khrushchev regime to the status of Cosmonaut.  But, now, apparently the word from people who knew him is that he never said it and that he was, even, perhaps a believer in   the Russian Orthodox Church.   His friend Colonel Valentin Vasilyevich Petrov said:

Yuri Alekseyevich, like all Russians, was baptized; and, as far as I can know, he was a believer. Our joint visit to the Trinity-Sergius Lavra in 1964, right on Gagarin’s thirtieth birthday, remains unforgettable to me. He, who was so lively by nature, once asked me directly if I had ever been to the Lavra. Having received an answer in the affirmative, he suggested going again. We set off at once, that evening, disguised in “civilian” clothes. We were perfect fools, of course, because Gagarin couldn’t disguise himself… When we arrived at the Lavra, a crowd of people approached him for autographs. The service hadn’t even ended when everyone, having heard about Gagarin’s arrival, rushed up to him. Such was the people’s love for Yuri, and he couldn’t refuse anyone.

Yuri Alekseyevich was a unique person: he never boasted of his fame. When you turned to him, he’d see and hear no one but you. It’s the same with his children, who weren’t (and aren’t) puffed up by the knowledge that they’re the children of the first cosmonaut.

Then, in the Lavra, the Father Superior saved us – and, of course, Gagarin in the first place. He took us to his cell where, according to Russian custom, he of course poured us drinks. After the third shot he said: “Well, who’d believe me that Gagarin was in my cell?” And Gagarin replied to him jokingly: “Well, who wouldn’t believe it?” He then procured a photograph of himself, signed it “To Father Superior from Gagarin, with best wishes,” and presented it to him. The latter said: “Well, we need to drink to this!” And of course we did!

... I got in trouble because of this trip: I was accused of “dragging Gagarin into religion.” But Gagarin saved me. He said: “How can a Captain drag a Colonel into religion?! He didn’t drive me: we went in my car.” As a result, I was reprimanded according to the party line for “leading Yuri Gagarin into Orthodoxy” – and now I take great pride in this.

Which I have to say I was kind of surprised to find out after the last half century of believing the propaganda of my youth.  It just goes to show you that you can't just assume you know stuff.  Though fact checking takes a lot of time, you can't reliably know the truth about history without it.

None of the atheists at Salon seemed to care much that one of them was spouting the most ignorant of phonied up history that a lot of us knew was phonied up because we remember being surprised when the astronauts started reading Genesis on Christmas Eve all those years ago.  Those self-appointed guardians of reality might as well have been denying that NASA landed men on the moon.  They didn't seem to be able to process the idea of looking stuff up to make sure you weren't lying about it.  I guess they subscribe to the Hollywood school of history.  But it's not surprising considering how many of them subscribe to the cabloid TV school of science.