Mopac

A hesychast has no need for laws since they by nature fulfill what it is the law is made for.

The Truth doesn't change.

If you want to be like the child who is magnetically attracted towards drinking dish soap, sure.

Your inability to discern God is not much different than a child who has not yet learned to trust their parents.

Either way, the parents are still directing their child. Either way, God is still directing your steps.

The humanists see God as something other than The Ultimate Reality, which actually makes them the ones who are superstitious.

To deny The Ultimate Reality is manifest foolishness.

A tree of logic built off of faulty premises will still yield results that are technically "logical" or "rational". That is why the idolatry of reason is a very dangerous thing. 

The end result of making reason an idol before God is nihilism.

Because as the old discordian mantra goes(chaos and strife worship)

"All affirmations are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true, false, and meaningless in some sense."

The end result is nihilism.

That is why Orthodoxy long ago rejected the wests attempt at replacing hesychasm with scholasticism. We know hesychasm is superior.

Oh, in fact, I'd say that a lot of these so called "intellectuals" that may have even helped bring about the revolution will be some of the first to go before the firing squad.

That seems to be the historical precedent.

As long as you keep talking about these "gods" I am going to have trouble accepting that you are taking our conversation seriously. 

I am speaking of no hypothetical "god" or "gods", I am talking about The One True God, The Ultimate Reality, of whom there is no reasonable doubt about the existence of.

And without faith, it would be very difficult for you to get any real understanding on these matters. Does a child come to have faith in their parent after understanding everything they are taught? Of course not. There has to be a certain level of faith present to begin with in order for them to be taught. A rebellious child is going to retard their own development.

And coming before God like a child is very difficult if you have a lot of pride, yet the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to such.

If my spouse dies, I might end up at Mt Athos! In fact, both of us are on the same page about this. We will become monastics if the other dies.

Greece is a beautiful country.

I do love The United States though. Very diverse and beautiful.

The Roman Catholic Church broke away from Orthodoxy, rewrote the ecumenical councils, and have commited many evils in the name of Jesus. Orthodoxy has always rejected the idea that The Pope or any other bishop as king over Christendom. They are schismatics.

We Orthodox do not call for crusades, we do not torture people into submission. 

We do get blamed for every evil commited in the name of Christ though, which is unfortunate. We take an awful lot of abuse, from people like you, who if they could get away with it would probably wipe us off the face of the Earth.

We are not Roman Catholics.

The Roman Catholic Church, by the way, has tortured, looted, and killed many Orthodox. The first Orthodox martyr in the lower 48 states was tortured to death by a Catholic Priest for not submitting to The Pope. 

There are countless evils I could go over that the Roman Catholics have done just to us Orthodox, but instead I will make this clear...

We are not Roman Catholics. 

Humanism was a theistic thing long before it turned into the secular humanism you see today.

Humanists don't really know what good is because they are spiritually blind. That is why so many of them are communists. Their idea of good is purely materialistic.

And fyi, we Orthodox don't thump bibles. That is a very protestant thing. A protestant is not much better than a secularist 90% of the time. Protestantism is secular as it is. Add some sentimentality and self righteousness to the mix.

I am sure they don't see it the same way as you.

That is your interpretation of these things, but your heart is clouded because you are in rebellion against God, so you aren't really discerning righteously.

God is the rightful judge of things. Who are you to judge God? It is pride, and a self condemning pride to boot. It doesn't really serve you.

It is better to make peace with reality.

You don't think it is logically coherent, but China puts pictures of their president at the altars of the Christian Churches they allow to exist, and well... look at North Korea....

Proving how good of a person you are is not a very Christian motivation.

All I can think of is that the Soviet Union's state religion was "scientific atheism".

I certainly don't trust the power grabbers to program these machines, because they always seem to see Christianity as a threat to their authority.

Even though we Christians are supposed to obey and pray for our civil authorities, we don't worship them as gods, which is what all these "the state is god" systems really want. 

Then they wouldn't really be Christians, because they are in opposition to what the church ruled at the first ecumenical council.

It is said that Mohammed got his ideas about Jesus after meeting an Arian monk. It is not really the Jesus we believe.

We Orthodox see Jesus all throughout the Old Testament because we know that Jesus is The Word of God. We don't worship a man as God, that would be an obvious error to us.

Discrimination means discernment. It is not an inherently bad thing unless you are a despot.

Not at all. Quite the contrary in fact. We believers are called to be ministers of God's grace in the world. We are called to help those who are afflicted.

But here is an excerpt from The Gospel according to Saint John the Theologian that may have an answer... 

There is no room for mercy with these robots.

Arianism is a heresy.

The Orthodox Church doesn't need to attempt the reconciliation of the two testaments. We have long since solved these things that protestant and secular west is struggling with, what with their anarchistic attitude towards everything.

The oldest protestant church has a memory that is 500 years old or so. The Orthodox Church has a thousands of years memory. We figured out these things within the first century.

And the multitude of heresies you find preached from the pulpit in the west, we identified and refuted them over a thousand years ago.

And The Orthodox Church is right because it is the very church founded by Jesus and the apostles. Every bishop and priest can trace their lineage back to the apostles. No protestant church can claim this. They are simply making things up as they go along. 

And many of their most educated are becoming Orthodox.

Jesus is not a created being. Jesus is The Word of God by whom there was not a thing created that was created apart from.

And you are confused if you think that God only began to exist when this word you are familiar with first was pronounced. Before the word "God" as a syllable to be pronounced came into being, God was written in the hearts of all.

Or as the Tao te Ching would say, "The name that can be named is not the eternal name"

It's not a pronouncement if syllables, it is a spirit. An essence. A being.

I already said of course God could solve what you call problems of they were in fact problems for God, and they aren't. 

But things are the way they are because that is the way they are. It is better to make peace with these things, because making peace with these things is in a great way making peace with God.

And of course, I did give you an answer.

I don't trust the robots or their programmers.

Of course, and it is silly to think otherwise.

But doing things in a godly way is overall better for everyone. It's better for the environment. It's better for humanity. It's better in every single way.

Consider...

You sound like the very evil you are describing.

Your hateful heart turns your many words into a clanging symbol. Perhaps you would be better to adopt a more charitable attitude.

None of your acusations are true. You are off the mark. Very off the mark. And really, you are saying very hurtful things. Hurtful things that simply aren't true. You are not describing my faith.

In a way it doesn't mean?

Why should I explain anything to you when you adopt such a haughty attitude? You are simply mocking me.

Nevertheless, some of these who are poorest when it comes to money have great riches stored in heaven. 

I was homeless for 8 years and I broke my back when I was 18. I am also an orphan.

I don't think you understand.

Not what you think I mean is the truth.

I mean THE TRUTH. Exactly what that means.

Are you telling me that The Truth is meaningless to you?

So now that you established what you believe not to be the right way, what can you say is the right way?

I am more interested in what you have to say about this than what you have to say about my faith.

I am sorry that this is the impression you get of my faith based on a very shallow surface level observation of it, but fear, intimidation, and violence has nothing to do with my faith. In fact, it seems you have a poor grasp on my faith. I will happily help you through your misconceptions and superstitions if you are willing to learn.

My faith is love of The Truth. The Truth itself.

And those who receive not a love of The Truth will be cursed with strong delusion.

That is a self evident fact, not fear, intimidation, or violence.

Yes, this is a common protestant/secularist viewpoint that I even bought into for a while but there actually is a Holy Apostolic and Catholic Church, and it is The Orthodox Church.

The church has priests and bishops. Not only can this be seen in the new testament, but the earliest writings of the church make it very clear that this was always the case.

And the anarchy of protestantism is where that type of thinking leads. I will take the church founded by the apostles over the churches of heretics who are only truly united in their opposition to Orthodoxy. For us to say, hold an ecumenical council with heretics would be absolutely unheard of and could only serve to compromise the integrity of our church which has carried The Truth for thousands of years faithfully even to this day.

We do not share the same faith. 

If these protestants really cared about unity, they would join the historic church that they are two steps detached from! Indeed, many do. There are at least 3 former pastors at my parish who lead churches for over 20 years. They came to Orthodoxy because all the evidence points to it as being the true historic church. That is what lead me there!

You really think rules enforced by a computer intelligence is ideal?

By all means, tell me what you believe to be the right way.

Yet you refer to them as "problems".

And certainly, they are problems for people.

As written the book of Isaiah the prophet..

"I am the LORD, and there is none else, there is no God beside me: I girded thee, though thou hast not known me:

The "evil" that is spoken of in this scripture very specifically refers to calamities such as natural disasters, disease, etc.

So you are wrong to say that God struggles to fix these problems, as God created these things. 

But detachment from God is certainly the worst poverty, and animosity towards God the worst disease.

No, and a lot of this stuff was sorted out in the early church. 

We Orthodox do recognize Saturday as the Sabbath, but we do usually have a liturgy on Sunday. At my parish, we do have a vespers on Saturday which I attend every week. 

A lot of these things are actually explained in the new testament, particularly the letters written by Paul.

I am speaking of no gods, I am speaking of God.

The problem of evil amounts to little more than denying reality because it doesn't conform to one's arbitrary sense of aesthetics. If you recognize God as being The Truth, The Ultimate Reality, it is a nonsense argument.

And there are actually many instances where the scenes depicted in the Gospels actually take place in synagogues. In fact, there is a scene not much later in Luke where Jesus reads from the scroll of Isaiah in a synagogue! 

Jesus and his disciples were all observant Jews.

The Existing One has given us the gift of free will. That means we can choose to work with God or reject God. What greater poverty is there than to be bankrupt of God? What greater disease than a heart sick against God?

I would not blame God because people out of their own freedom have rejected The One who saves them.

That is easily refuted by reading the gospels and the book of acts.

Deism is simply the belief that God exists.

It has come to mean that God created the Universe, and has no other part in it. This, like gnosticism, would be considered a dualistic heresy by us Orthodox as it denies the incarnation. The implication of this being, there is God, and there is creation. As God is not in creation, and God is good, creation cannot be good as God is not in it.

With the incarnation, all of creation is sanctified as God is present everywhere through his Word, and all of creation is enlivened by The Holy Spirit.

In this respect, creation is no longer seen as being dead apart from God, but it is seen as being sanctified by the presence of God who is truly with us.

It isn't the case that God created everything and left it alone with no hand in it whatsoever. God is present in creation through His Word and Holy Spirit.

Father, Son, Holy Spirit. 3 hypostases, 1 ousía. 3 hypostases homoousion

There is only 1 God, and the "old testament God" is the same as the new Testament God.

Perhaps godliness can be described as...

"charity out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, and of faith unfeigned."

Jesus and even the apostles after him taught in the synagogues. They observed the sabbath. They observed passover. Not only can all this be seen in The New Testament, but in historical writings from the church.

James The Just was even killed at the temple. He was known for his piety among the Jews, and spent a great deal of time praying at the temple. He was asked to rebuke the Christians. He did the opposite of what they thought he was going to do, so they murdered him on the spot. He was the first Bishop of Jerusalem. 

Salvation is of God, not me. I am not the savior.

And you don't know what you are saying.