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As it is evident to me that you lack anything resembling discernment, your assessment about "everything wrong with religion" does not mean much to me.
Neither does what you believe.
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Pride preceeds a fall.
A haughty spirit before destruction.
Wasn't an urge to kill yourself.
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Oh no!It's a sin, do you hear that boys and girls?!!!Stop the Pride march immediately... We have to be good Christians and love each other without judgement... Oh I mean judge each other for having pride!
No need to stop, that'll happen after you walk off the cliff at the end of the parade.
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@Vader
Better to be thankful than prideful
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Pride is a sin.
Pride even has a funny way of corrupting virtues.
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@DebateArt.com
If you were to do such a thing, it might be a good idea to have the images load seperately from the page. Like, click a link to show the image.
If you were to implement images, that is. It isn't an issue I particularly care about.
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@WisdomofAges
Why do you say "Jesus" and "Allah" in the same breath when Christians and Muslims don't believe in the same thing? Why is it that you are putting us Orthodox Christians in the same category as those who persecute us relentlessly? We certainly don't persecute Muslims.
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@3RU7AL
What is an example of a robotic sorting system making a choice?(IFF) freewill = choice (THEN) robotic sorting systems have freewill.
Because I find it hard to accept that the giant machine at the package handling facility is making a choice when it makes sure all the packages find their way to the right truck. It is simply following directions.
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If they ban all the guns, that means only a military with Donald Trump as commander in chief will have the guns.
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@ludofl3x
Would you say there is one reality?
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@ludofl3x
We aren't having the same experience.
The reality I am experiencing is different than the reality you are experiencing.
So are you going to acknowledge this or make an appeal to solipsism?
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@ludofl3x
What about The Ultimate Reality existing isn't self evident?
If you doubt the existence of ultimate reality, it is invariably due to some superstition. That being the case, your unbelief can only be addressed through the examining of your beliefs concerning the matter. I am not going to be able to prove the existence of a superstition.
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@3RU7AL
Because free will is choice.
That is actually what it means.
You yourself confess free will.
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You continue to conflate "choice" and "freewill". Spiders can make choices, DO YOU BELIEVE SPIDERS HAVE FREEWILL?Please answer "Yes" or "No".
MAYBE
And that really sums it up.
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@keithprosser
Modern and even late medieval western philosophy evolved out of bad theology. It is mostly garbage.
But that is like, just my opinionated observation. I'm sure there are some golden nuggets in there somewhere.
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@3RU7AL
He is taking "freewill" in a far too literal sense.
And I am pretty sure I said earlier in the topic that I did not feel that "free will" is really an accurate translation of this concept.
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@keithprosser
@3RU7AL
3ru7al is defining free will in such a way as to be impossible. At the same time is not talking about a free will that anyone believes in.
He is taking "freewill" in a far too literal sense. Then he mocks the idea by asking if spiders have free will(which truly is irrelevant).
All of this is very dehumanizing really.
Certainly, you can use your free will to bind yourself to all manner of causal influences. You can also use your free will to bind yourself to other causal influences.
But hey, if someone wants to believe that they have no other choice than to be who they are, I would say that this is in fact their choice to make. They don't have to be trapped. And if they want to say that me telling them this is what caused them to make different choices, I will throw my arms up in the air and say what I have been this whole time...
This debate is absurd.
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@3RU7AL
Caused events are incompatible with freewill.Uncaused events are incompatible with freewill.Freewill can be neither caused or uncaused or any combination of the two.
This is nonsense.
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@3RU7AL
As I said, this debate is absurd. I do think that your bias is what is causing you to dismiss evidence as non-existent.
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@3RU7AL
The fact that you experience the ability to choose is an evidence.
That is not an evidenced that can be dismissed simply through mental gymnastics.
Also, you are the one asserting that choice is uncaused. Obviously, I don't believe that chouce is uncaused, because I believe God is the uncaused cause of everything.
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@ludofl3x
And you can't prove God doesn't exist, because to even do so would disprove your argument.
Without even a belief in God, there is no such thing as science in any meaningful sense.
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@ludofl3x
Yes, I understand you are talking about the faith not the building.
I think you are operating under the assumption that the only reason anyone would be a Christian is because they are "indoctrinated" as children.
Truly though, the faith would not be as big as it is today if not for converts. It would not have survived for thousands of years. There will always be converts. And though we live in an anti-Christian and even an anti-intellectual age, there will always be a remnant. The gates of hades will not overcome the church. This is a promise from Jesus that I certainly believe.
And to be clear, the one doing the converting is ALWAYS Jesus.
And a good sizable chunk of the saints glorified in the church were converts.
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@zedvictor4
Then you are confident that God exists.
As I said....
"...our theology deals with HOW God is rather than WHAT God is..."
And our religion, our discipline is about purifying the heart. The nous. Abiding in Truth.
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@zedvictor4
I don't worship the gun by any stretch of the imagination, but I do live in Texas.
Come and take it.
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We Orthodox Christians certainly do not believe in killing those who disagree with us. You have heard wrong.
Jesus loves you.
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@WisdomofAges
You have a wild imagination.
I believe it would be better for you if you discarded your hatred and replaced it with charity.
Jesus loves you, WOA.
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@zedvictor4
I am quite confident that denying ultimate reality is a foolish and self defeating position.
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@WisdomofAges
Death and destruction is far from us Orthodox Christians. Quite the contrary, our saints, who are our role models, often times willingly went to their deaths, facing gruesome tortures, all the while blessing their persecutors... FOR THE SAKE OF LOVE.
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@ludofl3x
It wouldn't die out. I dispute that sssertoon.
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@ludofl3x
It sure is. Faith without works is dead. It is not simply belief, it is not simply a belief in confidence. It is always accompanied by action.
Faithfulness.
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@Goldtop
Lord have mercy.
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@Goldtop
Jesus loves you, goldtop.
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@ludofl3x
I think that scripture you are referencing makes a lot more sense when you realize that we are talking about The Ultimate Reality. We don't see God directly, but in creation.
It should be obvious that some level of faith is required to believe that anything can be gained through scientific process.
And for the record, The Orthodox Church has always understood faith as faithfulness. Sure enough, believing what you read doesn't make you a scientist. Faithfulness to the scientific method is at minimum required to even be called a scientist.
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@ludofl3x
The ascetic life has never sounded appealing to the majority.
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@Goldtop
I honestly don't know how you would get this impression from me, but I'd be lying if I said I put much stock in it.
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@ludofl3x
It is a stretch to refer to someone as a scientist who is not faithful to scientific methodology.
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@zedvictor4
The Ultimate Reality existing is not a theory. It is a 100% certain thing. Maybe not to you, but that is because you are wrong.
Not up for debate. Also not what this topic is about.
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@ludofl3x
The same reason that less people would know how to read if we didn't teach reading until "the age of reason"
Oh Jesus would go out and reach people. He does even now.
See, you are implying something nefarious that isn't there. Maybe we shouldn't teach kids to share or be nice to eachother until they reach the age of reason either.
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I don't know what you mean by "singularity." As far as "contingent", yes, I got from your previous posts that reality is contingent on this meta-reality you call the Ultimate Reality, in that it cannot exist independently. My question of how you know this remains, however. How can we know anything about an unobservable Ultimate Reality? How do we know this Ultimate Reality is not itself contingent on an even more ultimate reality? Simply saying "it's defined that way" isn't a satisfactory answer.
The Ultimate Reality by definition cannot have a reality over it. If there is a reality over it, that reality would be The Ultimate Reality.
Sorry you don't find that a satisfactory answer.
That is very close to what physicists say about physics, that we cannot say what anything is, only how it behaves.But again, how can you discover anything about how God is, when God is unobservable? By what method do you reach the conclusion that the Ultimate Reality is a Trinity as you describe?
The context of all of this stuff is that our religion is Truth worship.
All of creation testifies of God, we know God exists.
Our discipline can be summed up as follows...
"Blessed are the pure in heart, they will see God."
And so that is our approach. The purifying of the heart, or to use a more technical term, the nous. Our discipline is about purifying the nous.
It is not sufficient to have gnosis, but epignosis. That is, not simply knowledge but experiential and true knowledge. In fact, to us, a theologian is not someone who is well studied in books, but someone who has experienced these mysteries and truly knows. The difference between a scientist with experiential knowledge and someone who reads a textbook.
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@Stronn
The Ultimate Reality is singularity. It is true in itself. All other truths or realities are contingent on other realities. This is one of the defining differences between creation and The Uncreated. Created things are contingent existences. The Uncreated is not contingent. The Ultimate Reality exists in itself. Yet, nothing else exists without it.In logic, propositions are either true or false. There is no concept of one proposition being truer than another. So it is hard to know what is meant when say that the Ultimate Reality is reality in its truest sense. It's like someone being the most dead, or someone being the most absent from a room right now.
It sounds like you are describing a meta-reality, a reality above observable reality. If so, I can go with that as a plausible conjecture. I don't see how the nature of such a meta-reality could ever be more than conjecture, however. How could we possibly discover anything about it? After all, by definition it is not observable.
The essence of God is unknowable. Our theology has more to with HOW God is rather than WHAT God is.
If we can't observe this meta-reality, how can we know this? On what basis can we ascribe divisions to it, as in the Trinity? How can we possibly know that it has any theistic attributes?
Father, Son, Holy Spirit. One in essence, undivided.
It is a mystery, but these are not divisions in God. God is absolutely One. Remember how I said our theology deals with HOW God is rather than WHAT God is?
The Father is where The Son and Holy Spirit originate. The Son and The Holy Spirit are how God is manifested in creation.
The Son is The Truth. The most perfect image of God. You could say the name "the ultimate reality" and what that means is that image.
The Holy Spirit. The Spirit of Truth. This proceeds from The Father, through The Son, and itnis by The Holy Spirit that we recognize The Father through The Son.
And so by acknowledging The Son, it is demonstrated that The God we worship is not a conception while simultaneously acknowledging that as created beings we relate to God through creation.
And so God is incarnate in Creation. God is with us.
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@disgusted
The defilement that has tainted God's image in us.
And so salvation is union with God.
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@Goldtop
Well why don't you tell us what you think Jesus was about?
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If everybody had guns, I think people would be more polite.
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@Goldtop
Jesus loves you, goldtop.
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I agree with that definition but I do not see Christians as a building but a people who believe in Jesus Christ.
We don't see it as a building either, for Christc said, "the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him."
What is/are the criteria/criterion to be a Christian?
To become an Orthodox Christian you must go through a period of catechisis where you are educated in the faith. To be baptized and Chrismated you need someone to sponsor you. If you have already been properly baptized in the name of the father, son, and holy spirit, you only need to be chrismated because your baptism is considered valid. By this point, you should already know how to be a disciple of Jesus.
I do not deny the church as the body of believers. Our rule of faith is God's word alone - sola scriptura.
Yet the scriptures themselves point to Jesus Christ as being God's Word. The church wrote the scriptures, and the church decided which scriptures would constitute the New Testament hundreds of years after the events of The New Testament. The church did not wait around for hundreds of years before the bible was canonized. On that note, the bible that you use isn't even the bible that the church uses, because the old testament you use is not the septuigant. Since you use the Jesus denying Jewish canon you miss out on some obvious prophecies such as...
"We are esteemed of him as counterfeits: he abstaineth from our ways as from filthiness: he pronounceth the end of the just to be blessed, and maketh his boast that God is his father. Let us see if his words be true: and let us prove what shall happen in the end of him. For if the just man be the son of God, he will help him, and deliver him from the hand of his enemies. Let us examine him with despitefulness and torture, that we may know his meekness, and prove his patience. Let us condemn him with a shameful death: for by his own saying he shall be respected."
Holy orders were established by the apostles. Titus was a bishop of Crete. Timothy a bishop of Ephesus. The New Testament Canon we all use today is identical to the list suggested by Saint Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria.
This is The Orthodox Catholic Church, the church of Christ.
You say you trace your church back to the Apostles. So do the RC's.
The Roman Catholic Church broke away from The Orthodox Catholic Church. They made 2 major errors.
1. The false doctrine of Papal Supremacy.
2. They altered the Nicene Creed which on multiple occasions the ecumenical councils of the church rulled would lead to anathema or a curse.
The Latin church has corrupted the faith.
So The Roman Catholic Church inherited that apostolic succession from Orthodoxy, because they used to be Orthodox. However, they are in error and church history proves this.
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@PGA2.0
We would certainly.say the same thing about Jesus being the savior.
But ours is the church founded by Jesus and descended from the apostles. Your church is not older than 500 years, in all likelyhood younger, and it is at variance with the church fathers who all professed One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.
Denominationalism or nondenominationalism(really the same thing in tat they deny the church) is a recent development that has no precedent in the ancient church.
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@PGA2.0
I would argue that if you "fall away" and deny Jesus that you were not truly saved, just made a profession that was not sincere. I would argue that when you repent and turn God gives you the Spirit of truth as a seal and guarantee of your eternal salvation.
I can maybe go with that.
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