Star Trek Actress Fronts Geocentric Documentary for Apologist who Accuses Jews of Occult Conspiracies

A while back Bill Nye got booed by some biblical fundamentalists when he mentioned that the moon reflects the light of the sun because those fundamentalists felt this was a grievous insult to a literal interpretation of Genesis 1:16: “God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.” Accordingly, the moon must therefore emit rather than reflect light or else it would not conform to God’s design.

This was small potatoes compared to a new movie that has Star Trek: Voyager actress Kate Mulgrew inadvertantly promoting geocentrism on behalf of the conservative Catholic extremist Robert Sungenis, a geocentrist best known for his controversial views on Judaism that are often described as anti-Semitic. Aw, heck: They are anti-Semitic, as we shall see. (Sungenis denies being anti-Semitic, arguing that he does not hate Jewish people, only the actions of Jews.) The film, called The Principle, is based on Sungenis’s blog Galileo Was Wrong, based in turn on his doctoral dissertation of the same name, written for his PhD in religious studies earned from a correspondence school in the Republic of Vanuatu. His work holds that the sun goes around a stationary earth.

Mulgrew wrote on her Facebook page that she had been hired to narrate the trailer without knowing the content of the film or of Sungenis’s controversial views: “I do not subscribe to anything Robert Sungenis has written regarding science and history and, had I known of his involvement, would most certainly have avoided this documentary.”

Sungenis believes that “science is not all it’s cracked up to be” and doesn’t think much of historiography either. In 2002 he denied that the Holocaust happened, though he later recanted this view. He also believes, according to a 2005 series of articles in The Remnant, that world Jewry is involved in a satanic conspiracy designed to place Lucifer on earth’s throne. More of his claims about the nefarious intent of Jews, and their connection to a global Illuminati conspiracy, can be found in his Catholic Apologetics International article “Neo-Cons and the Jewish Connection.”

Sungenis describes the Jews as having abandoned the Law of Moses while living in Babylon in Late Antiquity and having everywhere and always fomented revolution against the authorities before turning to the satanic occult:

While in Europe the Jews became more prominent in society, especially in banking and other financial matters. At this time the religious Jews created the Kabbalah and the Zohar. Full of mysticism and the occult, they were the Jewish version of the Gnostic heresy of the first centuries AD. The Kabbalah taught that God is an unconscious being and unknowable by the world, but that he communicates with the Jews through levels of “sepharim.” It teaches that the Jews would one day rule the world, while the Zohar teaches that non-Jews do not have souls and therefore are not human; and that “redemption will not be complete until Amalek will be exterminated”

He identifies Amalek with Muslims, and seems oblivious to the fact that other religions’ mythologies also call for universal rule. The Christian myth of the Last World Emperor (from the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius) who will unite all the world in his Holy Roman Empire is just one such figure.

But it gets worse from here. He describes communism as a Jewish philosophy, the Bolsheviks as primarily Jews, and world finance as being controlled by Jews sympathetic to communism. Bolshevik Jews, he wrote, “raped the woman and girls and sodomized the men and boys while other children were sacrificed – all perhaps part of a Kabbalistic/Illuminati ritual for world dominance.” He accuses Jewish historians of hiding these facts, as well as what he claimed was Hitler’s simple mimicry of Jewish-Soviet practices, particularly Jewish-run anti-Christian concentration camps in Russia: “these camps have been systematically destroyed and their existence denied by the Jewish controlled media in Russia and the United States.” Stalin, in his reading, was a hero for attempting to suppress the Jews, and he was murdered for his efforts.

Needless to say, the Jews fled to America where they quickly became billionaires, financed the Democratic Party, and started movie studios and all three (!) major television networks to promote “anti-Christian morality,” particularly pornography and homosexuality, in order to destroy society “from the inside,” while glorifying Jewish suffering: “The ‘Holocaust’ is all we are allowed to see by the Jewish-controlled media.”

Oh, and of course this is going to lead to nuclear war as all good-thinking Christians resist the evil Jewish agenda:

Let’s all hope and pray that the heightened conflict engendered by Jewish power does not someday result in an all-out nuclear free-for-all. Let’s hope by the grace of God that the winner-take-all philosophy now present in the Neo-con, Evangelical and Zionist agenda does not end up producing the worst carnage the world has ever known.

There is much in Sungenis’s worldview that clearly falls in the framework of a classic conspiracy theory, and its anti-Semitic trappings are if nothing else a classic callback to the millennia of anti-Semitic conspiracies. Especially egregious is his claim of the sacrifice of children for the Illuminati, recalling nothing so much as the ancient claim of blood-libel, which falsely held that the Jews used the blood of sacrificed Christian children to reenact Jesus’ persecution and death, a claim first seen in 1173 in Thomas of Monmouth’s hagiography of William of Norwich, a child allegedly tortured and killed by Jews in 1144. Thomas said that an international council of Jewry chose a country each year where a Christian child was to be slaughtered to preserve the Jewish race through magic:

As a proof of the truth and credibility of the matter we now adduce something which we have heard from the lips of Theobald, who was once a Jew, and afterwards a monk. He verily told us that in the ancient writings of his fathers it was written that the Jews, without the shedding of human blood, could neither obtain their freedom, nor could they ever return to their fatherland. Hence it was laid down by them in ancient times that every year they must sacrifice a Christian in some part of the world to the Most High God in scorn and contempt of Christ, that so they might avenge their sufferings on Him; inasmuch as it was because of Christ's death that they had been shut out from their own country, and were in exile as slaves in a foreign land. Wherefore the chief men and Rabbis of the Jews who dwell in Spain assemble together at Narbonne, where the Royal seed [resides], and where they are held in the highest estimation, and they cast lots for all the countries which the Jews inhabit; and whatever country the lot falls upon, its metropolis has to carry out the same method with the other towns and cities, and the place whose lot is drawn has to fulfill the duty imposed by authority. (Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich 11, trans. Augustus Jessopp and M. R. James)

Sungenis has modernized the claim somewhat, but not significantly; it is of a piece with its medieval predecessor and is, in many ways, interchangeable with it.

So on the one hand it’s amusing that a Star Trek actress is accidentally promoting geocentrism, but behind the neoconservative Catholic extremism of the film lies a more disturbing worldview, and I wonder if geocentrism is, like creationism, a wedge issue designed to bring new audiences to its proponent’s real agenda.