Mopac

Abortion is child sacrifice.

You don't want the child, so you sacrifice it.

It is evil.

Stare into this microscope and see THE TRUTH.

Insanity.

You aren't going to be convinced because you have made up your mind and aren't having an honest conversation about the subject.

There is an Orthodox Church in China, but the overwhelming majority are some type of protestant.

Here is a clearer expression of our position from scripture...

If you refuse to accept what is meant by God, you are setting it up so that nothimg can be proven to you.

You aren't really willing to sccept being wrong.

When it comes to Christianity, he has a very western academic skeptical viewpoint which is more interested in undermining or casting doubt than anything

Besides thst, it is inaccurate.

Well, we certainly wish the best for them and that God keep them safe.

Fyi Most Christians in the Middle East are Orthodox.  

Poe's Law

Our issue with the papacy is pretty much the same thing.

However, we don't actually see them as the Catholic Church. They broke away from the Catholic Church a thousand years ago.

The Orthodox Catholic Church is the official title of our church. The Roman Catholic Church broke away with from us. This iis confusing to people, so we usually just say Orthodox in America. We are technically Catholics.

All of western Christianity descended from Roman Catholicism, protestantism is literally a protest against the Roman Church.

The Orthodox Church is tiny in the US, and we get confused with the Latins a lot. Protestants will say we are "too Catholic", which turns them off at first.

However, we get a lot of converts thst were formerly clergy in protestant churches. It is hard to avoid us if you study church history. In fact, there is a former Roman Catholic priest at my parish who says one of the reasons he became Orthodox is that the first thousand years of church history is all very much centered in the east!

Sexual immorality leads to unwanted pregnancies and aborted children.

Maybe instead of debating the ethics of child sacrifice, people should re-examine what passes off as moral sexual behavior. 

Creation does exist.

God does exist.

Is this not a fundamental commonality?

To say that God doesn't interact with the "scientifically verified world" is rather silly considering it is God that gives everything its existence.

It was Saint Paul who wrote to Saint Timothy....

"And the servant of the Lord must not strive; but be gentle unto all men, apt to teach, patient, In meekness instructing those that oppose themselves; if God peradventure will give them repentance to the acknowledging of the truth; And that they may recover themselves out of the snare of the devil, who are taken captive by him at his will."

God is omnipresent, enlivening all things, omnipotent, etc.

There is however a subtley in what we are speaking of that you aew not appreciating that we recognize as being very important. The distinction between Orthodoxy(correct belief) and heterodoxy(other than correct belief). 

That is, The Uncreated and Created have distinct physis or natures.

These two natures ARE united in the hypostasis of The Son. 

To simply merge these two distincy physis into 1 physis is the error of monophysitism.

1 hypostasis, 2 physis is the correct formulation. Dyophysitism.

If you want it that bad, I can take a week off.

I don't care about being "number 1 on the forums"

Never got a response.

What is negativity?

There is always a way to get a gun. It is kind of unenforceable.

Of course making guns illegal will mean less guns, just as building a wall will mean less unauthorized border crossings.

Compared to God, I certainly am a poopy head.

Oh, even I thought he was. I might have been mistaken. 

He don't really come round here no more.

I challange you right now to create an ant out of nothing.

The Jews, like all people were made in the image of God. To love them is to love Christ, as it was Christ who said, "Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."

And it was Jesus Christ who said, "A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another."

Who Saint Paul who rightly interpreted, "Now the end of the commandment is charity out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, and of faith unfeigned."

As well as Saint John the theologian when he wrote..

And so to love even those who curse and revile you, even the heretics and the godless... is to love Christ Himself, as we are all bearers of that image, even if this image has been obscured by the filth that is our sin.

Nothing is impossible!

Really though, if you didn't catch it, this nothing isn't truly nothing because God is there. The point is that creation was brought into existence by The Uncreated, and not through the configuring of pre-existing material.

When you say "made of God stuff", you are not recognizing the distinction between essence and energy.

When you are saying that exluding nothing means that God isn't the first and only thing in existence, it sounds like you are implying that nothing existed before God, as if nothing has any existence. There always was,bis, and forever will be God. To say thst nothing existed before God is not giving existence to nothing. Nothing is the absence of existence.

In an attempt to clarify, it is meant no created thing existed. Nothing IN creation. Before creation, there was only God. Pure existence is God. Creation did not exist before creation existed. Got it?

But to take it a step further, no, creation is not made up of God bricks. It is given existence by God's energy. Not the same thing.

To you, something doesn't exist truly unless you know it. This is an aberration of your post Kantian worldview, which is why you speak of noumenons and such. The fruit of this worldview is seen in how you struggle with God. To you, "The Ultimate Reality" is a meaningless pronouncement of syllables and an arbitrary placeholder.

Even if you were telling the truth, your words lack charity which would make you a clanging symbol to any Jew, especially since they won't believe you.

Really though, steal God? This is a preposterous assertion. You can't steal God.

Well, I will butt out respectfully, but I am sure you will get confirmation from the Rabbi.

Yet it is the truth, and another example of how The Uncreated and created are of two different physis.

Created things can not create out of nothing, they simply reconfigure what is already there.

Yet creation was spoken into existence by God. The Ultimate Reality by nature precedes everything, even time. Not simply eternal, but pre-eternal even. Time itself, being creation, is contingent on The Ultimate Reality to exist.

He wouldn't like me then, and though for those reasons I don't disclose my sex or race, I can say that I am married and at least one of us is black!

You really need evidence that God is more clever than we give Him credit for?

I believe the issue was not so much with foreign wives in a genetic sense, but wives who did not practice the faith. That is what made them foreign. 

There are many instances in our commonly shared scripture of those who were not biologically Israelites becoming Israelites.

We understand that there is a distinction between essences and energies.

Creation comes as a manifestation of these uncreated energies. It would be wrong to say that creation was made of a previously existing substance. It would also be wrong to say that creation is a necessary emanation of the divine essence. God created everything out of nothing by the grace of God, and everything is sustained also by the grace of God.  The grace of God being uncreated energy of God.

Creation is united to God through these energies, not the essence of God. To say otherwise would be to imply that God could be divided or broken in to pieces. Or it would be to say that God is composed of created things that are part of Himself.

No, God is The Supreme and Ultimate Reality, unchanging, eternal, undivided, perfect. If God wasn't these things, God would not be The Ultimate Reality. However, The Ultimate Reality is God. We do not call a rock by the name of a tree. 

There is a distinction between the essence of God and the energy of God.

If you want something other than the bible, you should hear what the church says.

Fyi, James was the one who made the ruling thst gentile converts didn't have to be Jews.

There was an early community of Jewish Christians who did not marry gentiles. They died out, because there was no good reason for this to be a practice given that Jews and Gentiles were made one in Christ. 

The church still has their writings.

You assume there is an exception here, but that is because you are too lazy to confirm the veracity of what I am saying.

But I understand, being someone who takes their understanding as their god, anything you don't understand is automatically unknowable, logically incoherent, and incomprehensible.

This of course reflects more strongly on your hubris than anything, Mr know-it-all.

There is nothing about this that is logically coherent, comprehensible, or within epistemological limits.

You are simply too lazy to confirm the veracity of this.

Words are not arbitrary placeholders.

This childish non-argument is beneath you.

Nobody who ever embraced socialism expects it to be what it looks like in real life.

You are mocking because you are too lazy to confirm the veracity of this, not because you are saying anything insightful.

Fallacy misidentification.

The Ultimste Reality surely exists.

If you deny this, you don't know what it means, so it is a comprehension issue.

The Ultimate Reality is what the word God means.

That is why it is not written in vain,

The Ultimate Reality exists.

Can you count how many things you can be 100% certain of? There truly aren't many, if any, but there is one thing that there is no room for doubt about. That God exists. I am more sure of this than anything. How can I be? I know The One True God. You do not know The One True God, so you have doubts.

They would say the bible says it, I believe it, and thats that!

Or

I believe in Jesus Christ and that's that!

Maybe ignoring their own interpretation of these things!

Well, Jesus Christ left a church. The beginnings of which are accounted in The New Testament. The Church is still around today in The Orthodox Catholic Church. 

It isn't that we de-emphasize the Bible. Quite the contrary, we revere it as a holy icon. We love the bible. We kiss the bible even. We do everything in a very biblical way. Protestants tend to(I have to say tend to, because there is no unified protestantism) overemphasize the bible. They do this because they reject The Church!

As I explained to you, the works/faith dichotomy you present is a false dichotomy. This was only an issue in protest land post Luther because of his own theological idea. Theological ideas that he felt strongly enough to add and subtract words from scripture. Something he felt so strongly about that he even at one time called James the epistle of straw.

The Orthodox Church never had controversy about this, because we know that faith and works are inseparable from eachother.

The dispute about circumcision and dietary laws is what lead to the first proto-ecumenical council as we call it. The one who presided over it was James, who was the bishop of Jerusalem at the time. James, being a very devout Jew even, agreed that it was not necessary for Gentilles to become Jews to follow Christ.

So that other controversy you are speaking of was resolved and written of in The New Testament itself.

Somehow they sounded even more like commies tonight. Everyone must be trying to one up Bernie on the 1% schtick.

Yang was easily the most invisible candidate. I swear he had two opportunities to speak, and he said the exact same thing both times.

"Yo America, you crazy, elect me and everybody gets a crazy check!"*

*not actually what Yang said.

Protestants would love to believe that the apostles were as divided as they are!

Nonbelievers as well would love to believe the apostles were divided, but so they can throw their arms up in the air and use it as an excuse not to figure out what is true.

Keith doesn't know what he's talking about. He doesn't really understand our faith, so him claiming that Paul and John differed is a matter of his faulty interpretation not reality.

They were both Orthodox Christians with common faith.

Well, it isn't the authority of men to begin with. The Holy Spirit is with the church. The faith isn't really in men.

But if the protestant says they have no faith in men, what they are really saying is they have faith in man. Themselves!

Just them, the bible, and their interpretation.

The Orthodox Catholic Church wrote The New Testament and determined its canon. We are the church. The bible is a part of our Holy Tradition, it isn't the source. 

The church didn't wait around for 300 something years wondering what to do before The New Testament was compiled. No, we knew what we believed before.

And if you were to go back and pluck a Christian out from those ancient times and plop them in an Orthodox Church today, they would know exactly what was going on, even if they didn't speak the language.

You can't say that about any protestant church, and you can't even say that about The Roman Catholic Church.

Well, it is unavoidable.

The Most Perfect Image of God, that is, The Son in The Trinity or The Word of God is.. The Truth!

It is called a divine mystery for a reason! It is even more confusing with heterodox Christians because they don't understand The Trinity at all. It is a subject matter of great fumbling for them. 

In a really profound way, it acknowledges the fact that we worship God through an image. We would say that other monotheists, such as Muslims, do not acknowledge the image and are thus mistaking a conception of God for God.