… If I met someone wise, accomplished and with very good judgement on other things who believed the moon landings were faked, then I'd listen to what they had to say, but I have never met such a person.

Sad to say, that's about right. Certainly with respect to the Apollo 11 moon landing, such persons can be found in the thousands in cyberspace, but they all turn out to be "challenged" in the flesh-and-blood department.

As it happens, my brother was one of the dozen or so designers of the engine powering the command module, the vehicle piloted by Michael Collins. Before I sign on to the roster of skeptics, Matthew is going to have to persuade me that my brother has been lying to me for fifty years. I wish him good luck with that.

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It's for such sensible comments as the one quoted above that ggreg will be missed. It's a pity that talking sense to the senseless has never been enough to satisfy him.

Ok, so your brother and Uncle Gene built space stuff.  So what?  Did they physically go to the moon?  Just because rockets were sent up to space and a space station was built and all the trimmings, doesn't mean that it's ALL a lie.  Some of the tech is marvelous stuff.  What's at question here is the specfic fact of landing on the moon, which neither your brother or Uncle can attest to.  So their "evidence" is circuмstantial.

My great Uncle was one of the men who first rode into the nαzι camps at WWII.  He was sworn to secrecy by his superiors.  I just heard that he went to the VA hospital a month ago and opened up to a bunch of doctors for 3 hours, telling war stories, including stories about the camps.  Does this mean that the h0Ɩ0cαųst happened because my relative visited the camps?  No, 2 separate and totally different questions.  Yes, the camps existed.  Yes, people were killed there.  Were 6 million killed?  Not yet proven.

Well, they paid my Uncle Gene very well to work on a hoax, much better than at NYU!

Of course they did!
No one is denying that astronomical amounts of real money were spent.
And I agree with Pax -- no one is saying that your relatives were lying. They were working on very real components. They just didn't go to the Moon.

One of the arguments against the Moon Landing Hoax theory is "there's no way they could keep such a big secret with thousands of contractors and employees involved!"
Actually, it would be easy. It's called compartmentalization. Or in layman's terms, "need to know basis". The guy working on the deployment mechanism of the landing gear doesn't know *squat* about any other element of the mission. Each person or group had a VERY narrow focus of what they were working on. Only a very few men sat at the top with a bird's eye view and knew the whole picture. So only the very highest level administrators would have been privy to the truth or falsehood of the actual moon landing.

One of the arguments against the Moon Landing Hoax theory is "there's no way they could keep such a big secret with thousands of contractors and employees involved!"
Actually, it would be easy. It's called compartmentalization. Or in layman's terms, "need to know basis". The guy working on the deployment mechanism of the landing gear doesn't know *squat* about any other element of the mission. Each person or group had a VERY narrow focus of what they were working on. Only a very few men sat at the top with a bird's eye view and knew the whole picture. So only the very highest level administrators would have been privy to the truth or falsehood of the actual moon landing.

And, of course, we have the Manhattan Project which was kept secret through compartmentalization.  Even Harry "Freemason" Truman didn't know about it until he assumed the presidency.

"claudel, have you ever attacked ggreg for thinking the h0Ɩ0h0αx happened?"

I wasn't aware that I was obliged to or that any fruitful purpose would be served thereby. I say more about this question of yours below.
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"Are you aware that he fell for the Jєωιѕн swindle of 9/11 and encouraged trads in 2002 to fight their wars?"

Of course I am. He was far from being the only CI denizen who did so, alas. Surely you have read the sycophantic rubbish about the US military that Ekim, for instance, has written for years. Even so, neither Ekim nor ggreg has ever represented the danger to the Faith that I consider cassini (just for one) to represent—and at bottom, concern for the True Faith ought to be the motivating rationale for anyone's presence here. Besides, even Bishop Williamson is willing on occasion to be in the same room as h0Ɩ0h0αx affirmers, isn't he?

There is a rather more rudimentary concern as well. In common with most other adults, I had then, as I have now, a notably circuмscribed quotient of time to devote to the frivolity of blog and forum crawling. As ggreg seldom if ever paid the slightest attention to anything I wrote, I chose and continue to choose to use that limited time in ways I deem more useful. Time spent shouting at someone with a formidable ego structure who, incomprehensibly to me, is so blind as to have fallen for the Jєωs' lies hardly strikes me as time well spent.
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"Really, I always thought you were a smart guy, but I'm scratching my head over your enthusiasm for such an obvious Judaizing windbag like ggreg."

Are you quite sure that this is a useful or effective, let alone courteous, mode in which to address me?
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"I remember you popping up on his previous ban thread some years ago expressing sorrow at his departure."

I'm not sure I regard "sorrow" as the mot juste here, but I certainly did write that I would miss him—at least in the extraordinarily narrow sense in which I might be said to "miss" anyone in this cyberworld, a world whose importance to my terrestrial life as a whole is minuscule, especially now that my end is not far off.

The foregoing being said, why then did I write, both then and more recently, what I did about ggreg? I did so simply because he was one of the small minority of commenters here who did not regard rationality as trivial and dispensible. As a rule he was one of a very few who did not—either in so many words or in effect—write "I'm utterly ignorant of the matter at hand, but here's what I have to say about it, and the rest of you darn well better treat it as a prophetic utterance." (Isn't this in fact the virtual norm hereabouts?)

Most of all, I wrote what I did several years ago because, on at least a dozen occasions, he forthrightly offered other CI participants assistance with job placement, with résumé preparation, and with similar matters where his secular experience and credentials could be of measurable benefit to others. As I have admitted, I don't spend oodles of time here, but if you can name ten other commenters who have given visible evidence of taking the Corporal Works of Mercy seriously, you will amaze me.

I'm done. Say or think of me what you like.

There is a certain poetry, isn't there, in seeing someone whose thought processes are invariably mundane equate engine design with toilet cleaning? What's more, he goes on to offer it as a specimen of sweet reason and sound reflection!

And, despite your poetic (yet entirely gratuitous) rejection, the analogy holds, with the point being along the lines of the compartmentalization noted by Matthew.  One deals with the toilet compartment, while another deals with the engine compartment.

You falsely asserted that those who believe that the moon landing was hoaxed effectively call your uncle a liar.  Most who believe the moon landing was hoaxed do in fact hold that the Apollo missions did orbit around the earth ... which would have required engines.