Meaninglessness

[Fist and Faith]

Fist, the idea that a particular view is actually true - and others actually false - is always opposed to the idea that no one idea actually is and/or that it does not matter. If materialism is true, then Ali's belief in many gods as the ultimate truth, and mine in Christ as the Way, the Truth and the Life, are false. If Ali's is true, then mine is false - and so is yours, your not having seen evidence of it notwithstanding. if mine is true, etc...
If my view is THE Truth, then what I have said, in general, follows. It is not arrogance anymore than Galileo insisting on a heliocentric solar system was arrogance. We disagree on what is true. That is all. That is what all threads, all conflicts, all disagreements come down to.

I'm not talking about whether or not your worldview is THE Truth. For the sake of argument, we can say it is. I'm talking about how you present yourself. Maybe you don't care what readers here think of you. Maybe the message you're trying to deliver is more important. Even infinitely more important. The thing is, how you present yourself strongly influences the message you're trying to present. If you think humans, in general, listen to any given message the same way no matter how it's presented, you're wrong. If you think that's not what should matter, that the message should be what everybody concentrates on, too bad. That's not how it works. You want everyone to devote huge amounts of time and energy to learning all we can about Orthodoxy. But the strongest feeling we get for Orthodoxy is arrogance. That seems to be what Orthodoxy imparts. Many of us have told you this repeatedly. You're not the teacher, and we're not your students. Don't treat us like you're in a position of authority, and we need you to correct us. Go ahead and ignore us. Keep telling us all we're wrong all the time. And you will not achieve what you seem to be attempting.

Or, tell people what you believe. It's as simple as that. There's no need to lead up to "I believe there is only one God because..." by telling somebody they are wrong to believe otherwise. You can simply tell people your beliefs. Teach without teaching. Lead by example, not by commanding. Yadda yadda.

As to band wagon, I meant the one where people support you in saying that you have clearer knowledge of my motivations and feelings than I do - one no one would accept about themselves, but which there is evidently no problem in doing so if it is aimed in my direction. It is not logical - but it IS human.

Yes, as you suspected, you sly dog, I now say: Funny, you have no problem telling ME all about MY motivations and worldview, and that your knowledge of them is superior to my own. You are the Watch's authority on ALL of our motivations and worldviews.

But I'm also right. And the reason others agree with me is because you're not the first person like you any of us have known. Very vocal, righteous, opinionated Christians who came to their deep, sure faith later in life, after having searched in various places and putting themselves in various dangerous situations - as opposed to those who always had deep, sure faith - are fairly common.

[rusmeister]

Whatever, Fist.
You started the thread, and practically invited my input. I gave it. You want to ad hominem my arguments, fine. That's what it is. That you cannot tell the difference between personal attacks - what you DO do to me, and attacks against ideas -what I do to you, is probably a contributing factor.
I'm done with it.
God bless, anyway.

[Fist and Faith]

I started this thread to explain my worldview. Discussion, questions, comments, comparisons... All cool. "You do not understand your own worldview as well as I do, and you do not understand that your worldview does not say what you claim it says." is another matter. It's sorta insane. It's like claiming you look more like me than I do.

[aliantha]

Lordy, rus. Fist is not trying to "ad hominem" you -- he's trying to *help* you. So am I, come to that. Drop your defenses for a minute and reread what we've said.

[rusmeister]

Ali, I've read it often enough, thanks.
The issue is not about "helping me". It is about whether one holding my views may speak to an idea at all. There is a simple test - I have admitted that I am not the world's best poster, or even a great one (more likely not a terribly good one, although I try), and have said perhaps five hundred times that people ought to read or listen to better people than me - I've referred people to Chesterton, Lewis, Schmemann, Hopko, Men', and so on. And yet almost no one does. The difficulty, as you admitted yourself, is in swallowing the ideas themselves, even when the speaker is jolly, avuncular, obviously wise, intelligent, thoughtful and considerate (which I'll admit may be argued about me - but not about those I have referred to) and otherwise non-offensive. Most point-blank refuse to engage any ideas stated by anyone else BUT me. So even if I offer the wisest and kindest people there are, the ideas are not engaged. For example, people LOVE to go on about all the wickedness that "God allowed" in the Bible - and when I offer a thread not full of "me presenting myself", but the idea minus me - and the thread stands empty. OK, Orlion hinted that he might listen. One 'cast only takes 40-50 minutes and I'm still waiting for a response. I posed a major question in Doriendor Corishev on something that affects us all, and refrained from throwing out my opinions 'all over the place' and likewise - the thread stands empty with nary a response. Fist has read (I understood only part of) TEM, and has REFUSED to say why it's bad - that is, he has refused to engage the ideas. With probably over a thousand quotes in my posts over the years, I'd have to struggle to find more than a dozen individual responses to them.

So yes, it IS ad hominem. If you can't beat the ideas, attack the man. Where are the responses to the ideas? What is this strange prejudice that says that one will NOT engage ideas from dead men, only from living posters? Are all ideas to be so temporary that they are to be dismissed as soon as we are dead? Are the ideas to be ignored in favor of amateur personal psychology of the people presenting them?

I have been guilty of ad hominem myself. I can see how it is not right to focus on what I think the state of another person is in accepting an idea, when it is my guesses that may or may not be right - and even if they WERE right, would likely be denied anyway. I don't think I've done it nearly as often, but I have done it. I do have opinions, and I do think that the difficulty other people have with my faith has a lot to do with its implications for them. But that is not useful in debate, and in the exchange of ideas, even if it could be shown.

So ad hominem is where I get off. This thread was supposed to be about meaninglessness. Let it be about that.

[TheFallen]

Just to try to make my own position clear here, there should be no relevance to the issue in the characteristics, psychology or personality of whoever the poster may be. It's a matter of the most obvious fact that nobody can tell me (or anybody else) why they believe what they believe - I suppose people could make guesses, based upon what little information they have either been told by the poster or have some intuition about, but those guesses de facto cannot have the accuracy that the poster him-/herself will naturally have about the foundations of their beliefs. (I'll leave aside counter-arguments about utter self-delusion on the part of posters, or we'll be here forever).

Rusmeister, I do see that you seem to invariably find yourself in a bear-pit being harangued from all sides. What I'd like to do for whatever it's worth is highlight that at least some of the "attacks" on you are in no way personal/ad hominem. I - and several others at least, including Avatar and Dukkha Waynhim - take no issue whatsoever with your personal beliefs in as much as they apply to you, your life and world view. We may not agree with them, sure, but I certainly do not doubt that your personal convictions are both rock-solid and experientially gained and justified by - to use your words - a mixture of faith and reason. So, in no way am I even calling into question the tenability of your beliefs - plus, I see no purpose in trying to psychoanalyse why you might hold these... how the Hell would I begin to know? You've gained them via your reasoning, your experiences and your faith.

However, the major issue that I have exactly revolves around tenability. Your belief set is - as I am sure you'd agree - absolutist... it's the one true view. As such, it allows precisely no tenability for any other world view that differs in any way from yours - from your standpoint, nobody else's belief set can hold the slightest possibility of any validity if it differs from yours, because yours is 100% cast-iron absolutely and objectively universally TRUE. (I've got that right so far, I think?).

This puts you in an invidious position - you're effectively forced by your belief sets to be intolerant. You are literally forced to tell others with differing beliefs that they're wrong, and as such they must be less experienced, less intellectual, less rational. If you try to take a step back from yourself for a second, can you not at least admit the potential for that level of forced close-mindedness to be seen at least as intolerance, maybe arrogance, possibly zealotry and maybe belief fascism?

What you're doing - or forced to do, if you'd rather - is to insist that your views (and therefore by necessity yourself, as spokesperson for those views) are superior to everyone else's - everyone else is "benighted" or ignorant in the strictest sense of that word. I'm sure you'd argue back that you only do that because they actually are - and you'd tell us not to shoot the messenger... I'm sure you'd say it's not your personal doing that you have had the only objectively true view revealed to you.

However it's this (if you like necessitous) intolerance, absolutism, superiority or whatever that gets everybody else's backs up. That is what I for one react so antipathetically to.

I'm not accepting your example of Galileo as relevant - that's a (sly?) piece of sophistry. Galileo had empirical scientific and therefore objective evidence that the earth revolved around the sun - it just took a while for others to repeat his experiments and scientific measurements and thus agree with him. Similarly, I note in another thread, you used Maximus of Nicosia (or someone like that) as another exemplar... I'm not accepting that as relevant either, for what seemed to happen there was not a matter of empiricism or science. Maximus - or whatever his name was - held a view on the duality of Christ's human and divine nature that was considered anathema at the time. After his death, the Church changed its opinion to mirror his - and note the word "opinion", because the subject matter could not be exposed to any empirical or scientific test... it was just a change of mind.

My world view as I said allows for the co-existence of differing and indeed opposing beliefs as being equally valid - because for me, it's all about the personal and the subjective. I don't dismiss there possibly being one objective truth, but I'm not sure that - if there is - mere fallible humanity, with its perception of the external coming through five meagre senses and limited consciousness, can ever comprehend such. Let's face it, there have been countless examples of prophets claiming to exclusively know the One True Way.

Is this solipsist of me? Possibly, but given my previously posted respect for "cogito, ergo sum", how could it be otherwise? Whether solipsist or not, it's very definitely a "live and let live" standpoint, unlike yours. It also doesn't smack of any self-assigned superiority, unfortunately unlike yours - I'm finding it hard to equate your view and the necessity of its assertion of its own superiority with a teacher who revered the meek - aren't they the ones who will inherit the earth?

I simply do not understand why you refute any possibility of subjectivism in your own belief sets. You yourself have said that you came come to these by a mixture of reason, experience and faith... surely the latter two of those are by their very nature subjective and personal? Surely that makes the whole cornerstone of your belief set subjective and personal, at least in part?

And - this is a point I'd love a reply to - my view allows for my human fallibility. I could be utterly wrong and someone with an opposing view could be utterly right. I don't see any acknowledgement in any possibility of fallibility from you in your world view. Even if for the sake of argument, you have heard the one objective truth, how so you know that your fallible human ears have heard it correctly? Or fallible human brain interpreted it correctly?

Food for thought?

[Fist and Faith]

I'm not trying to beat the ideas, rus. I'm ignoring them. At least the ones I don't like. And there are plenty of aspects of Christianity that I don't. I've listened to some of the podcasts you've linked, read many things you've quoted and linked, read MC before I ever met you, and knew some stuff about Christianity before I met you. I don't like aspects of it, and don't believe any reason to believe even the parts I do like are real.

But this thread has nothing to do with Christianity. It's (supposed to be) about my worldview. My last several posts have nothing to do with any aspects of Christianity. They have been about you telling me you know my worldview better than I do (which is an impossibility), and telling you that you act as though it's your responsibility to tell everyone that they are wrong about everything (which is a sure method to lose your audience).

So, again, how's it working out for you??? Is digging in your heels about how you're right to tell everybody they're wrong about everything getting you what you're after?

[rusmeister]

I'm not trying to beat the ideas, rus. I'm ignoring them. At least the ones I don't like. And there are plenty of aspects of Christianity that I don't. I've listened to some of the podcasts you've linked, read many things you've quoted and linked, read MC before I ever met you, and knew some stuff about Christianity before I met you. I don't like aspects of it, and don't believe any reason to believe even the parts I do like are real.

But this thread has nothing to do with Christianity. It's (supposed to be) about my worldview. My last several posts have nothing to do with any aspects of Christianity. They have been about you telling me you know my worldview better than I do (which is an impossibility), and telling you that you act as though it's your responsibility to tell everyone that they are wrong about everything (which is a sure method to lose your audience).

So, again, how's it working out for you??? Is digging in your heels about how you're right to tell everybody they're wrong about everything getting you what you're after?

Well, Fist, I regret to tell you... but your worldview isn't true. I do know that better than you do. If everyone subscribes to it, then they are wrong. (But I don't think or insist that they all - or even most - do.) Our views disagree and cannot be reconciled and despite your claims to the contrary, they are mutually exclusive. It cannot be true that we are both consigned to oblivion after death AND that we face an eternity with God's love, either basking in it or suffering from our own rejection of it.

Like I said, I guess Maximus and Galileo seemed pretty "arrogant" to their audiences - and I don't think either of them had any personal aggrandizement in mind - but they were unpopular and were punished for it. Yet their respective audiences were eventually forced to admit that they were right. And that was what was at issue - not their character traits or personability - but whether they were right or not. Today nobody could give a rat's behind about whether they were arrogant or not - for they are seen to be far more right than their contemporaries.

In the end it doesn't matter if I "get" anything out of it. I have witnessed to what IS true. I've done what I could and have a clear conscience about it. You don't want to hear it and are free to ignore it. Feel free to see me as a buzzing and mildly irritating bee whose posts you are not obligated to read. I for my part am not offended when you say that I am wrong; I respect it far more than any effort to reconcile our views, to say that 'yours can contain mine' - but only as long as mine are not true on its own terms.

I don't think there's anything else to say to you.

The end.

[Fist and Faith]

So you're today's Galileo, eh?

And you continue to hijack other threads, telling all that their views are wrong, and you are right. Even other followers of Orthodoxy are not exempt. In all your time here, you have never tried simply telling people about your faith. You think the best method for getting people to believe what you believe is to tell them they're wrong about what they currently believe. You're failing. But, by all means, keep it up! It drives people away from your views, which serves a couple of good purposes.

And my worldview is true. Fortunately, so is yours. We both get from our worldviews what our psyches require.

[rusmeister]

Just to try to make my own position clear here, there should be no relevance to the issue in the characteristics, psychology or personality of whoever the poster may be. It's a matter of the most obvious fact that nobody can tell me (or anybody else) why they believe what they believe - I suppose people could make guesses, based upon what little information they have either been told by the poster or have some intuition about, but those guesses de facto cannot have the accuracy that the poster him-/herself will naturally have about the foundations of their beliefs. (I'll leave aside counter-arguments about utter self-delusion on the part of posters, or we'll be here forever).

Rusmeister, I do see that you seem to invariably find yourself in a bear-pit being harangued from all sides. What I'd like to do for whatever it's worth is highlight that at least some of the "attacks" on you are in no way personal/ad hominem. I - and several others at least, including Avatar and Dukkha Waynhim - take no issue whatsoever with your personal beliefs in as much as they apply to you, your life and world view. We may not agree with them, sure, but I certainly do not doubt that your personal convictions are both rock-solid and experientially gained and justified by - to use your words - a mixture of faith and reason. So, in no way am I even calling into question the tenability of your beliefs - plus, I see no purpose in trying to psychoanalyse why you might hold these... how the Hell would I begin to know? You've gained them via your reasoning, your experiences and your faith.

However, the major issue that I have exactly revolves around tenability. Your belief set is - as I am sure you'd agree - absolutist... it's the one true view. As such, it allows precisely no tenability for any other world view that differs in any way from yours - from your standpoint, nobody else's belief set can hold the slightest possibility of any validity if it differs from yours, because yours is 100% cast-iron absolutely and objectively universally TRUE. (I've got that right so far, I think?).

This puts you in an invidious position - you're effectively forced by your belief sets to be intolerant. You are literally forced to tell others with differing beliefs that they're wrong, and as such they must be less experienced, less intellectual, less rational. If you try to take a step back from yourself for a second, can you not at least admit the potential for that level of forced close-mindedness to be seen at least as intolerance, maybe arrogance, possibly zealotry and maybe belief fascism?

What you're doing - or forced to do, if you'd rather - is to insist that your views (and therefore by necessity yourself, as spokesperson for those views) are superior to everyone else's - everyone else is "benighted" or ignorant in the strictest sense of that word. I'm sure you'd argue back that you only do that because they actually are - and you'd tell us not to shoot the messenger... I'm sure you'd say it's not your personal doing that you have had the only objectively true view revealed to you.

However it's this (if you like necessitous) intolerance, absolutism, superiority or whatever that gets everybody else's backs up. That is what I for one react so antipathetically to.

I'm not accepting your example of Galileo as relevant - that's a (sly?) piece of sophistry. Galileo had empirical scientific and therefore objective evidence that the earth revolved around the sun - it just took a while for others to repeat his experiments and scientific measurements and thus agree with him. Similarly, I note in another thread, you used Maximus of Nicosia (or someone like that) as another exemplar... I'm not accepting that as relevant either, for what seemed to happen there was not a matter of empiricism or science. Maximus - or whatever his name was - held a view on the duality of Christ's human and divine nature that was considered anathema at the time. After his death, the Church changed its opinion to mirror his - and note the word "opinion", because the subject matter could not be exposed to any empirical or scientific test... it was just a change of mind.

My world view as I said allows for the co-existence of differing and indeed opposing beliefs as being equally valid - because for me, it's all about the personal and the subjective. I don't dismiss there possibly being one objective truth, but I'm not sure that - if there is - mere fallible humanity, with its perception of the external coming through five meagre senses and limited consciousness, can ever comprehend such. Let's face it, there have been countless examples of prophets claiming to exclusively know the One True Way.

Is this solipsist of me? Possibly, but given my previously posted respect for "cogito, ergo sum", how could it be otherwise? Whether solipsist or not, it's very definitely a "live and let live" standpoint, unlike yours. It also doesn't smack of any self-assigned superiority, unfortunately unlike yours - I'm finding it hard to equate your view and the necessity of its assertion of its own superiority with a teacher who revered the meek - aren't they the ones who will inherit the earth?

I simply do not understand why you refute any possibility of subjectivism in your own belief sets. You yourself have said that you came come to these by a mixture of reason, experience and faith... surely the latter two of those are by their very nature subjective and personal? Surely that makes the whole cornerstone of your belief set subjective and personal, at least in part?

And - this is a point I'd love a reply to - my view allows for my human fallibility. I could be utterly wrong and someone with an opposing view could be utterly right. I don't see any acknowledgement in any possibility of fallibility from you in your world view. Even if for the sake of argument, you have heard the one objective truth, how so you know that your fallible human ears have heard it correctly? Or fallible human brain interpreted it correctly?

Food for thought?

Thanks, TF,

I consider that a much better thought-out post than most. It does try to take one of the bulls by its real horns.

I agree on the bear-pit, and also that not EVERYBODY does ad hominem. My objections are to some particular posters that do; that respond to that when there is nothing else to say.

One thing that I get from some of you, is that you see only absolutes in everything I believe - as if there were only "good guys and bad guys", black and white. The fact that I DO see absolutes does not mean that I think in those black-and-white terms; as Solzhenitsyn said, I think the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. Since everyone has free will, and in general, personal responsibility for action, we could all choose to be better than what we are.

I see nothing illogical or untenable in believing that there really IS a definite answer to these questions - it is self-evident , for example, that this universe came about in one definite way, and not many different ways, each according to his beliefs. Therefore it is eminently logical that there is either a creator or there isn't - but there is not BOTH a Creator and NOT a Creator. That is absolutism - and it is the rational stand, and the other, that says that both/all are true or that it doesn't matter at all that is irrational nonsense. So I certainly respect the atheist who says there is no Creator. Huxley was far more rational than many thinkers today in that sense.

I think that when you say things like "less experienced", etc - you take my words some place that I do not. Being right does not mean being more experienced. A little dumb dog might be the one to rip open the curtain where the Wizard of Oz is hiding. Doesn't make him more experienced - but it DOES mean he managed to see through something that the others didn't. So coming from that angle, there's no fascism, etc involved. It can be blind luck (except that I don't believe in luck - which is an atheist concept - I believe in Divine Providence). I'm not better than any one else, and I don't secretly think that I am just because I've learned something that many of you don't know. It was how my life worked out. There are many things where you could say similar things about what you have learned - and I would respect that on a great many of those things.
I recognize that this is unpopular. Christianity is an unpopular faith. If really engaged, it means renouncing a great many things that many embrace in this world. It is a fighting religion in a sense - it is a great many things, and I only bring a couple of its many facets here - the ones I can do well. As Zahir may deliver God's love far better than I, I think I deliver its uncompromising character - for that is what it is. Christianity (above all orthodoxy) is the opposite of compromise - although God accepts us all where we are, but is satisfied with nothing less in the end than our totality.

That you do not accept things that are not empirical evidence reveals that you hold the fundamental dogma of materialism. OK. I believe that there are aspects of truth that are NOT amenable to the physical sciences, and so consider that to be a short-sighted dogma. But all that says that you hold different dogmas than I do. I don't know how well-thought out those dogmas are, but I know that simply claiming the materialist (what Lewis called "naturalist") view does not by any invocation of empirical science make the person one whit more rational than the super-naturalist.

It's interesting that you seem to know that the Church "just changed its mind" after the death of Maximus. I wonder in what detail you know that story, and from what sources that causes all these people to "just" change their minds? That sounds extraordinarily far from what true human behavior and ego are.

Now meekness is fine - in people who have the truth. But Jesus was not meek and mild with everyone. He called the Pharisees 'a nest of vipers' and other epithets that I don't even take on myself. Meek does not mean "let everyone do and say what they want at all times". It DOES mean to recognize one's place, and that it is usually a good deal lower than we'd like to think.

Some aspects of my faith ARE subjective and subjectively arrived at. It is precisely the demand that something somewhere be subjective and personal - but in the right place - one's discovery of THE Truth - rather than in the wrong place - a belief in one's complete inability to do so.

I can be wrong on many things. I admit a great deal of fallibility. But I insist that there are SOME things that I can be certain of, and am quite sure that I am not wrong on. I am quite sure that you are not a figment of my imagination. You could be a sock puppet of Fist, for all I know, but I am certain that I am not dreaming you. If I may be granted that, I may be granted other things that I may be certain about. I also hold that the natural sciences are incapable of determining supernatural truth, and are useless in an appeal to determine it. I am quite certain of this, and cannot be mistaken. As to my faith, it is called a faith. I CHOOSE the certainty, just as you have the right to a faith - even a blind faith - in a different certainty. If I have a brother or friend that constantly borrows money and fails to pay it back, I will be prone to not trust him - but I can always choose to trust him again, whether it be through love or foolishness. Or the Indiana Jones example:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_-BOvWVycM
A leap of faith that is revealed to be rational in hindsight - but is not at all obvious when the leap is made. In hindsight it is all lit up, so to speak, and is obvious to me. It confirms my certainty.

Does that clear up a little bit of where I stand?

[Fist and Faith]

I agree on the bear-pit, and also that not EVERYBODY does ad hominem. My objections are to some particular posters that do; that respond to that when there is nothing else to say.

This is a deplorable tactic you've adopted of late. I am not attempting to link your beliefs with your style of interacting with us. I'm trying to distinguish between the two, and tell you that, even though they are different things, you will find that people generally dismiss someone's beliefs when their style of interaction is insulting.

And you take that as an attack on your beliefs.

I've gotten several PMs from various people over the years, complimenting me on how I manage to keep going with you, relatively calmly, despite your treatment of everyone. But enough's enough. Your continued insults will be met in kind from here on. Not agreeing with my worldview is fine. I don't agree with yours, either. But I'm not arrogant and ignorant enough to imagine I know yours better than you do.

[Fist and Faith]

I also hold that the natural sciences are incapable of determining supernatural truth, and are useless in an appeal to determine it. I am quite certain of this, and cannot be mistaken.

You are correct. By definition, the supernatural cannot be determined by the natural sciences.

My own worldview does not address the supernatural. I don't have reason to believe there is a supernatural.

As to my faith, it is called a faith. I CHOOSE the certainty, just as you have the right to a faith - even a blind faith - in a different certainty. If I have a brother or friend that constantly borrows money and fails to pay it back, I will be prone to not trust him - but I can always choose to trust him again, whether it be through love or foolishness. Or the Indiana Jones example:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_-BOvWVycM
A leap of faith that is revealed to be rational in hindsight - but is not at all obvious when the leap is made. In hindsight it is all lit up, so to speak, and is obvious to me. It confirms my certainty.

Does that clear up a little bit of where I stand?

I interpret that scene otherwise. Because of multiple direct experiences, Indy had every reason to believe that leap would be successful. It went against his eyes, but was entirely supported by his rationality. I was once in my parked car, which was not even running. An 18-wheeler was doubleparked next to me, preventing me from leaving the parking space. I was looking down onto my lap reading comic books as I waited for the driver to show up. I didn't see him get in, since his door was on the other side of his truck from where I was sitting. When he started to pull away, the sight of his truck moving from the corner of my eye made it seem that *I* was moving. Because of where I was looking, the only thing outside of my car that I could see was the huge side of his trailer - and it was moving! I thought my car had started to roll backwards! It was a startling moment of panic. And I lifted my foot to slam it on the brake. BUT, for the same fraction of a second, my mind was screaming that I couldn't be rolling. I knew I was in park, and the car was turned off. And I stopped my descending foot from slamming down onto the brake.

[DukkhaWaynhim]

I recognize that this is unpopular. Christianity is an unpopular faith. If really engaged, it means renouncing a great many things that many embrace in this world. It is a fighting religion in a sense - it is a great many things, and I only bring a couple of its many facets here - the ones I can do well. As Zahir may deliver God's love far better than I, I think I deliver its uncompromising character - for that is what it is. Christianity (above all orthodoxy) is the opposite of compromise - although God accepts us all where we are, but is satisfied with nothing less in the end than our totality.

Christianity is a wildly popular faith...among its adherents. However, one of its basic tenets is the quest to preserve everyone's souls, which requires first convincing others of three big concepts:
1) They have souls
2) Those souls are in peril
3) Christianity can perchance remediate that peril

For Joe Non-Believer, meaning anyone unwilling or unable to be convinced of any one of these three items, he may simply desire to stand apart, or may feel compelled to oppose and even perhaps harden his heart against Christians that try to reveal to or impose those three upon him. If simply passed the plate he can politely refuse -- thank you but no thank you. But there are some who would force him to live his life by the rules of a faith that he does not share. And that's the umpopular part -- the busybody clause. Christianity not only knows whats best for you, it is compelled to tell you that for your own good. It has decided it is the celestial hall monitor.

dw

[rusmeister]

I recognize that this is unpopular. Christianity is an unpopular faith. If really engaged, it means renouncing a great many things that many embrace in this world. It is a fighting religion in a sense - it is a great many things, and I only bring a couple of its many facets here - the ones I can do well. As Zahir may deliver God's love far better than I, I think I deliver its uncompromising character - for that is what it is. Christianity (above all orthodoxy) is the opposite of compromise - although God accepts us all where we are, but is satisfied with nothing less in the end than our totality.

Christianity is a wildly popular faith...among its adherents. However, one of its basic tenets is the quest to preserve everyone's souls, which requires first convincing others of three big concepts:
1) They have souls
2) Those souls are in peril
3) Christianity can perchance remediate that peril

For Joe Non-Believer, meaning anyone unwilling or unable to be convinced of any one of these three items, he may simply desire to stand apart, or may feel compelled to oppose and even perhaps harden his heart against Christians that try to reveal to or impose those three upon him. If simply passed the plate he can politely refuse -- thank you but no thank you. But there are some who would force him to live his life by the rules of a faith that he does not share. And that's the umpopular part -- the busybody clause. Christianity not only knows whats best for you, it is compelled to tell you that for your own good. It has decided it is the celestial hall monitor.

dw

Funny - I see the exact reverse - I see a secularism which is actually a mix of atheism and agnosticism that has established control over both public schools and the media and has decided that IT is the 'celestial hall monitor'. A person is free to believe whatever they want - with the proviso that what they believe is not important, does not reflect a reality that also affects others and certainly should not be allowed to do so in the sphere of practical politics.

The wonderful thing about my faith - certainly as far as the most traditional ones go - the inclusion of Catholicism, Anglicanism, etc wherever possible - is that they do really let you go to hell in a handbasket if you so choose. You are free and have free will. No one forces you to accept faith. What I have noticed is that many people seem completely unable to keep the distinction between 'what I would do were I king' and what my faith actually teaches and does. As a private person, I'd like to think that I could proffer what I personally think best without having it being taken as a teaching of the Orthodox Church. Thus a great extent of my proposals and ideas about same-sex marriage for example, while logical outcomes of Orthodox teaching, are not themselves Orthodox teaching. They are what I think best for civil society.

All faiths, including atheistic ones, have, at their worst times, enforced compliance in the form of apparent membership. Orthodoxy is not an exception. In the early twentieth century before the Russian Revolution, it is known that soldiers were, in some instances, required to present certificates that they had partaken of the Eucharist - something in general against the tenets of my Faith. Public schools require the profession of pluralism before granting a teacher certificate (my personal experience, so not up for debate). This is why I think that the Church should (strangely enough for those of you that have thought differently of me) NOT be identified with the state. But I still think, logically enough, that the state would be best off if its government used actual principles of truth in determining what its laws and governance should be.

[Fist and Faith]

This is why I think that the Church should (strangely enough for those of you that have thought differently of me) NOT be identified with the state. But I still think, logically enough, that the state would be best off if its government used actual principles of truth in determining what its laws and governance should be.

You only think that as long as those principles of truth are the same as the OC's. What's it called when you say you don't think the Church should be identified with the state, but that the state should follow the Church's principles of truth?

A lot of people think some principles of truth are freedom and equality, tolerance and diversity. Some think that something should be allowed if it does not harm anyone (even the person doing whatever it is in question) and that has not caused harm to anyone in the past.

[DukkhaWaynhim]

Back when Christianity was just getting started, persecution was literally a matter of life and death. The Christian message, and the entire psychology expects persecution for its beliefs, for that is the environment in which it was birthed. This has continued, even when it became the majority. At its conception, it can be argued that it really was a significantly improved alternative to the overblown decadence of the times, if the Christian-centric histories are to be believed.
If this were a business, upper management would recommend changing the strategy from a growth mode to a sustain and broaden mode. It's hard to do that if it is forbidden to change the employee training manual.

dw

[rusmeister]

This is why I think that the Church should (strangely enough for those of you that have thought differently of me) NOT be identified with the state. But I still think, logically enough, that the state would be best off if its government used actual principles of truth in determining what its laws and governance should be.

You only think that as long as those principles of truth are the same as the OC's. What's it called when you say you don't think the Church should be identified with the state, but that the state should follow the Church's principles of truth?

A lot of people think some principles of truth are freedom and equality, tolerance and diversity. Some think that something should be allowed if it does not harm anyone (even the person doing whatever it is in question) and that has not caused harm to anyone in the past.

I believe in the same things - but we have different understandings of those words. That's the trouble - we don't speak the same language. What many people mean by those words are things that I DO believe harmful and/or are applied where they should not be applied - freedom to sell Grand Theft Auto to children, equality meaning identicality, tolerance meaning to tolerate anything at all (except for some things decided, not by a clear moral code, but by a vague and indefinite lack of one piggy-backing on the remains of the Christian one) and diversity meaning we should love all other cultures and people more than our own. That's what I see in practice today, although I do believe that each one of those ideas has a place in a truly free and prosperous society - where the people both rule and determine their own lives. This society, driven by schooling and media, is not a self-determining one. It is determined by a tiny elite, and so the parent has practically no say in what the public school will teach or what may be shown/performed on devices that are for all practical purposes free and regularly accessible by our children and their friends, and so external bombardment by forces outside the local community in the name of freedom has reached unprecedented levels, and this forms us, rather than local communities forming and determining themselves. Our ideas are not independently arrived at. WE are indoctrinated long before we even begin to think. When we do, we already think in certain ways that our indoctrination has ensured. That is not self-determination - it is equally true of utopian/Orwellian-style governments, it was true of the Soviet Union, it is true of China, and is true of western nations today.

As to your first question, it's called "good sense" - when it is universally held that there is a power and moral law above kings, rulers and governments so that they may NOT be despots, and DO have to answer before God, and not merely to themselves (or a bureaucracy to nobody), when there ARE people who may tell the highest rulers what truth is, but do not themselves hold political power, you've got some good things going for that state. You might even get to see a king or oligarch whipped in public for violation of that morality (Henry II, anyone?) - something we can only dream of today. Of course, it seems you all feel about "separation of church and state" much the same way I feel about marriage - it is something sacred that may not be co-opted and understood by different people in different ways, neh? (though the western tradition of SCS is much more recent and its understanding has morphed from the original one.

[Fist and Faith]

If the priests tell the king what laws to make, and the priests can whip the king, in what way are the priests NOT in charge?

[rusmeister]

Back when Christianity was just getting started, persecution was literally a matter of life and death. The Christian message, and the entire psychology expects persecution for its beliefs, for that is the environment in which it was birthed. This has continued, even when it became the majority. At its conception, it can be argued that it really was a significantly improved alternative to the overblown decadence of the times, if the Christian-centric histories are to be believed.
If this were a business, upper management would recommend changing the strategy from a growth mode to a sustain and broaden mode. It's hard to do that if it is forbidden to change the employee training manual.

dw

But it is not a business - and thank God. If it were a business, its aim would be to take maximum advantage of each of us for the profit of its ultimate owners - corporations or private owners, elites or despots. As it is, it is something that can rebuke any elite or despot, precisely because it holds standards that do not blow with the wind, with the human heart trying forever to find ways to increase advantage for self, to get something for nothing, and is never satisfied with what it DOES have, and willing to go in any direction, to claim and say anything to justify that. Christianity is something that correctly understands the true condition of the human heart and can always expose the lies we tell ourselves and others for what they are.

It is very facile to speak of "a psychology of persecution", but what exactly IS psychology? What exactly caused - and causes - Christians to expect persecution? (not in all places and times, I might add) I think a serious examination of that statement would cause it to fold like a house of cards.

It's a side note, but any history is going to be something-centric. What history CAN be believed? I now hold great suspicion for most of them, above all modern ones written by people formed by our modern schooling and media. I now find more truth about, say, life in the family for average people, not in history textbooks, but in legends, myths and fairy tales. For example, I find that Pushkin's "The Fisherman and the Golden Fish" ( a codification of a much older oral tradition) busts the (purely modern) myth that the woman has always been a dominated figure in the home - the general idea that oppression of the other sex has always been a one-way street.

[Fist and Faith]

The idea that women were, on the whole, dominated is purely modern because it's only now that women can say it out loud without being beaten by their husbands. And that's only in some cultures. In other cultures, women are still brutalized for speaking such things. The fact that they don't dare say it out loud doesn't mean they are not dominated. Do you suppose there were a lot of blacks in the USA in 1800 speaking out about blacks being oppressed? A fairy tale describing a place where a woman was not oppressed by her husband is not remotely as powerful a statement on the subject as an amendment to the US Constitution wherein men gave women the right to vote is.