Mopac

I think it is important to understand that behind the outward manifestations of the faith is something very simple.

It is Truth worship.

In general, I don't think coulda shoulda woulda postulations are useful.

You don't believe in God, so your questioning amounts to little more than mockery.

And I tell you this, if you find yourself in torment, blaming God or even denying God altogether isn't going to do you any good.

Here is a better question.

Who are you to question what God does?

You don't even believe in God. That invalidates your entire line of reasoning.

I don't know.

That would be a speculation into things that are not real.

In other words, you are denying freewill.

Disgusted doesn't believe anything he argues, he's a nihilist. 

The Church does not teach that some souls are destined to be damned.

Calvinists do! But those are Presbytarians, not Orthodox.

It is no strange thing that God can see what we are going to choose without having determined what we are going to choose.

Hey, aren't you that guy who ignores everyrhing that is said to them while pretending nobody ever tells you anything? I remember you.

As you deny the existence of God, I wouldn't expect discernment to be your strongest point.

That is certainly not going to be solved through the inevitable secularization that follows from intermarrying among faiths.

It was actually the culmination of all my experiences along with the grace of God that lead me to Orthodoxy. 

The Orthodox Church in America is kind of a hidden gem, it isn't really that big here.

But I am talking about God not god, and I know that no description of God can be exhaustive, and we even know that in our faith.

What I can tell you is that worshipping God in Spirit and in Truth is worshipping God through the trinity. That is what it means.

I am not talking about state law, I am saying if she really took her religion seriously, she would not have married a non-muslim.

In fact, Muslim women in particular are not allowed to marry non-muslims. This is a part of their religion.

And if you both were to get married in a mosque, they probably wouldn't do it.

So no, I think yours is a bad example. And really, no good example is going to convince me it would be good for an Orthodox to marry a Hindu. 

And no, it isn't because I dislike Hindus. It is simply a bad idea. 

And we can all get along just fine without intermarrying.

I suppose experiential knowledge would be the answer.

And really, I think once again it is worth noting that these mysteries of the faith are intended to be experienced. Mysteries to us are not things to be solved, but experienced.

To give an example, one of our sacred mysteries is the eucharist. You may know it as the lord's supper or communion in what is called Christianity in the west if you are familiar with it at all. Well, the word eucharist is Greek for "Thanksgiving". Thanksgiving is something to be lived and experienced, simply grasping it intellectually is not the same thing. 

I actually did read all of the posts.

How do I know?

It is called epignosis. I have experiential knowledge. Revelation. 

It really isn't something that is easily transmitted.

Can you accept that we, being human beings, do not deal with The Ultimate Reality directly, but instead deal with representations of reality?

Our experience is constructed based on our senses taking away pieces of information from the whole. Our experience is largely a constructed one. But it does come from somewhere. It is a source. If we had the whole thing we would be omniscient. We are not omniscient. The fact that we learn things, make errors in judgement, guess wrong, sincerely believe we are right and then later find we are wrong are all evidences of this. To admit this is to admit sin. 

We are dealing with representations of reality, not reality itself.

And we are using the medium of creation, as we are created beings in creation, to express The Uncreated. It should be apparent that there is a certain absurdity in this.

And believe it or not, all this has a lot to do with why there is a Trinity, because God The Father is manifested in creation through The Son and The Holy Spirit.

And we know The Ultimate Reality through an image. The Word. The Word is God. When God is realized, it is by The Holy Spirit that shows how we know God through The Word.

I am doing my best to explain, but simply apprehending these things mentally is like looking at a shadow. 

I'm pretty sure the "God told me to do it" is not a defense that will hold up in court.

Realize that the answer to the question comes from properly understanding the concepts involved, and once understood it is really evident. 

So to even stay topical, a little parable!

Say you are presented with a map, but you have never seen a map before. You don't know what a map is. As that is the case, the map is fairly useless for you. However, if you knew the map in truth, you would know that it represents a territory. Having knowledge of the map, you can now use it to navigate the unfamiliar territory depicted on the map.

The Son is like the map

The Holy Spirit is like true knowledge of the map.

The Father is like the territory.

The Faith is like using the map with knowledge to navigate the territory.

I can't say, but post-reformation evangelical/protestant theology tends to be way off from Orthodoxy.

This, as you can imagine presents a huge obstacle when it comes to presenting Orthodoxy to a protestantized culture. 

Well, she must not have taken her religion seriously because it isn't lawful for a Muslim woman to marry a non Muslim.

I have friends of just about every religious persuasion there is. We get along fine. We get along fine because Orthodox Christians are taught to love people, not beat people over the head with bibles.

So pardon me if it doesn't come off that way on a debate site.

You think that because you don't believe in any of these faiths. 

But your presumption is that a good Orthodox Christian is going to somehow be an obstacle to world peace, which is ludicrous. 

Your opinion comes from a secularist mentality.

And you k ow what? The emerging New Age new world order type of religion would probably agree with you. 

It is not compatible with Orthodoxy. For us it is a complete way of living. We are set apart as ascetics. A mixed marriage would only cause strife.

Ethnicity is not the same as sincerely held convictions. And maybe what you are saying makes sense if you take the average secularized keep it in the closet type post reformation evangelical, where their religion amounts to little more than lip service, but even in those situations... it is a bad idea.

Where is the standard? To us Orthodox, marriage means something. It means something that simply isn't compatible with the world's view of marriage.

What about the children? It does not benefit them to have parents who cannot agree on the essential fundamentals. And that is what faith is to us, the essential fundamentals.

Our faith is what makes my marriage work. I would not marry someone who wasn't my faith. Such an abominable error would only serve to corrupt. And indeed, there are many examples of this in the bible where marrying pagans ends up destroying the moral fabric of society.

And also your theological assessment is wrong.

The Christian Church is made of both Jews and Gentiles, and it is the real church.

Things got weird after the Bar Kochba revolt, which created a greater division between The Church and the Jews who decided to reject Jesus.

But hey, nobody cares about Bar Kochba anymore, but we are stilll talking about Jesus.

That event you are referencing happened nearly 150 years prior to the destruction of Jerusalem.

Yes, because it is reasonable when a someone claims to be the opposite sex than what their biology dictates.

Yes, it is reasonable to perform gender reassignment surgery on a minor because they claim to be the opposite sex than their biology dictates.

No wait, there is nothing reasonable about any of this. These are insane positions.

Isn't going to stop these moral nihilists from having opinions on what is moral though!

I think we all believed in really stupid things when we were kids.

Wouldn't it be a shame if you were somehow convinced by loonies that you were a man or a woman trapped in the opposite sex's body and that you needed to have irreversible treatments that would stick with you your whole life.

Oh, but you can't get a tattoo until you are a certain age.

There is no such thing as an honest nihilist, because they don't believe anything they say.

A nihilist has no ground to stand on.

To deny The Ultimate Reality is untenable, and I think it is truly a marvel that this isn't obvious to everyone.

Yes, and so you see, when somebody who doesn't believe in God asks questions like these, I can't help but interpret it as a form of scoffing or self justification.

Sure, you could blame God for allowing you to be born into this miserable world.

Guess how much good that is going to do?

None.  

It is not the right attitude to approach God.

Yet there are others who have been able to talk to me and get better information.

Just as God gives grace to the humble and resists the proud, so are you unlikely to learn if you adopt an unteachable attitude.

It is plain to me that you think you know better, which is why you are debating against something you don't really understand. To your own detriment of course, posterity will make plain your foolishness.

That sounds really naive. A very secular opinion. I simply won't agree with you on this.

What causes cancer and disease?

Maybe people should stop screwing with the environment. Maybe they should stop putting garbage in the food they sell to make a buck. Does God give you glowing puss filled lumps on your genitals or did you ask for it through a life of sexual immorality? If is a blame issue here, it does no good to blame God. 

Yes, innocents suffer for the sins of others.

Just as an innocent person is going to suffer when the sins of many cause a nation to be destroyed. 

And your question is dishonest because you don't believe in God.

You don't even know Jesus, so whatever I say is going to be meaningless to you.

Besides, you won't believe me anyway.

Responsibility? Like guilt?

No.

You are the one saying anyone who isn't Orthodox is going to hell, not me.

I'm sure you could blame God for everything if you root it back to God creating everything.

What good does it do to blame God?

Ethnicity is not the same thing as conviction.

I am in a mixed marriage. We are black and white. We are very much united in faith.

It isn't a scholastic wordgame. Your inability to wrap your head around it does not invalidate these things.

Omniscience does not negate free will.

Can't make sense of it? 

You don't have to, that is the way it is.

For the nihilist, reality is whatever you can get away with.

I hope your interaction here has given you some insight into the sheer amount of self restraint I have to practice in order to hang out in the mental hospital known as the religion section.

It really isn't that fun for me.

They are nihilists, they don't believe anything. It is really because they are selfish. If nothing is true, then they can be self righteous. They don't argue honestly because they don't believe anything they say. They say whatever is convenient. They don't have a love for the truth, which is why they have been cursed with strong delusion.

And yeah, it isn't surprising to me that they think it is ok to chemically castrate a child who lives in a very confusing culture.

Let me ask you a question instead.

If things in the world don't go the way you'd like, do you you curse reality for being contrary to how you'd like it?

You aren't really capable of understanding my faith because you have already determined that you know better. Really, you are simply mocking and trying to justify yourself.

If you wanted to understand my religion, I already told you that it is Truth worship. Since you can't reconcile this with what you think you already know, we are going through this silly game of you trying to accuse a God you claim to not believe in. If it was taken that you are asking this question because it is why you don't believe in God, you are implying that your reason for rejecting reality has to do with the fact that it isn't what you want it to be.

That of course comes from a very skewed idea of what constitutes good.

Freewill is a gift from God that is good. As we have freewill, we can choose to do evil with it. 

What is more evil than being seperated from God? The wicked will be tormented because they can't be seperated from God. It is their own delusion that puts them in hell. God can't be blamed for this.

Do you think it is preferable that we were all automatons?

The idea of a stable and healthy marriage must be obnoxious to you.

I can't say who goes and doesn't go to hell. God is the judge.

What I can say is that strife is likely to develop from a married couple with two different religions.

You attack God because the opposite of nihilism is accepting that God exists. You are trying to justify yourself.

You certainly aren't trying to help anyone. It is very apparent to me that you are only thinking of yourself.

No.

Anything to justify your hatred of God as usual.

People marry for a lot of different reasons.

Not at all. The individual made that choice when they decided they didn't care about the truth anymore.

We were given free will by God. Just because God knows what we are going to do does not mean that God dictates what we do.

So if you find yourself in hell, just remember.. God didn't put you there. You chose to be there.