Orthodixie

Ya know? … I dunno.
God help me.

Like a natural woman

Repliee Q1 is a robot that looks just like a woman. It gestures, blinks, speaks, breathes, and contains internal sensors so it can react to things “naturally.” As amazing as this technology is, even its co-creator Hiroshi Ishiguru of Osaka University gets weirded out by it: “When a robot looks too much like the real thing, it’s creepy.”

H/T: World

GetReligion plugged this story the other day about Vanity Plates. Seems that in the state of Vermont religious plates are not allowed. Good heavens. When will this nuttiness about the so-misunderstood separation of Church & State end? In fact, since cars are registered, taxed, inspected, etc … Maybe it’s only a matter of time before bumper stickers meet with State disapproval?
H/T: GetReligion

Regular readers know that I rarely listen to commercial radio, don’t watch TV, and have eclectic tastes in secular music — from Handel to Prince; George Clinton to George Strait. Recently I blogged about the fabulous return of Al Green. Though I bought some Kiss & Aerosmith back in the day, I’ve never been much of a Rock fan. But if it’s good, I’m not partial to genre. And this, the latest from the White Stripes, is artsy, grungy, garage band … good. It might be loud (parents). But it’s good & loud.
H/T: Thunderstruck

Jim Kushiner over at Mere Comments provides a Reality Check concerning the omnipresent hoopla about B16 and Ortho-RC union.

Rosie O’Donnell likes to eat, but can’t stomach breast feeding!
H/T: Fr John

Have you heard of the Legal Guide for Bloggers?

Too grisly for Words [WARNING]
A Kansas City abortionist is out of business after investigators discovered a grisly house of horrors at his clinic; with fetuses kept in Styrofoam cups in his refrigerator and one employee accusing him of microwaving one and stirring it into his lunch. Whole Story
H/T: Drudge

Michael Jackson. As stated a while back, they should imprison the whacko parents that let their children sleep with him. I maintained throughout that he would not be going to prison. I mean, if you could be isolated and punished for being weird, well … he’s already serving Life. Anyway, after the Not Guilty Verdict, a commentator at World had this to say:

“It proves there is a God but He is just different and ‘more child like’ than the rest of us.”
H/T: World

The best vitamin for a Christian is B1.

The wages of sin is death. Repent before payday.

Tithe if you love Jesus! Anyone can honk!

Stolen from the St George Cathedral newsletter; submitted by Olivia Saliba.

Today the West often views Islam as a civilisation very different from and indeed innately hostile to Christianity. Only when you travel in Christianity’s Eastern homelands do you realise how closely the two are really connected, the former growing directly out of the latter and still, to this day, embodying many aspects and practices of the early Christian world now lost in Christianity’s modern Western-based incarnation. When the early Byzantines were first confronted by the Prophet’s armies, they assumed that Islam was merely an heretical form of Christianity, and in many ways they were not so far wrong: Islam accepts much of the Old and New Testaments and venerates both Jesus and the ancient Jewish prophets.

Significantly, the greatest and most subtle theologian of the early church, St. John Damascene, was convinced that Islam was at root not a separate religion, but instead a form of Christianity. St. John had grown up in the Ummayad Arab court of Damascus, where his father was chancellor, and he was an intimate boyhood friend of the future Caliph al-Yazid; the two boys’ drinking bouts in the streets of Damascus were the subject of much horrified gossip in the streets of the new Islamic capital. Later, in his old age, John took the habit at the desert monastery of Mar Saba where he began work on his great masterpiece, a refutation of heresies entitled the Fount of Knowledge. The book contains an extremely precise and detailed critique of Islam, the first ever written by a Christian, which, intriguingly, John regarded as a form of Christian heresy related to Arianism: after all Arianism, like Islam, denied the divinity of Christ. Although he lived at the very hub of the early Islamic world, it never seems to have occurred to him that Islam might be a separate religion. If a theologian of the stature of John Damascene was able to regard Islam as a new- if heretical- form of Christianity, it helps to explain how Islam was able to convert so much of the Middle Eastern population in so short a time, even though Christianity remained the majority religion until the time of the Crusades.

The longer you spend in the Christian communities of the Middle East, the more you become aware of the extent to which Eastern Christian practice formed the template for what were to become the basic conventions of Islam. The Muslim form of prayer with its bowings and prostrations appears to derive from the older Syrian Orthodox tradition that is still practised in pewless churches across the Levant. The architecture of the earliest minarets, which are square rather than round, unmistakably derive from the church towers of Byzantine Syria. The Sufi Muslim tradition carried on directly from the point that the Christian Desert Fathers left off while Ramadan, at first sight one of the most foreign and alienating of Islamic practices, is in fact nothing more than an Islamicisation of Lent, which in the Eastern Christian churches still involves a gruelling all-day fast.

— Taken from The Holy Mountain: A Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East, by William Dalrymple

Many of you may be familiar with David Klinghoffer’s writings in National Review. Thanks to Steve Beard’s Thunderstruck, I discovered an interview with Klinghoffer (DK) conducted by Roman Catholic, and all-round good gal, Kathryn Jean Lopez (KJL). Here’s a few excerpts — or you can read the whole interview H E R E.

KJL: How can the whole of Western Civilization rest on the rejection of Jesus?

DK: Because the earliest Christian church was initially hobbled by insisting that new converts adhere to Jewish law — keep kosher, be circumcised, etc. For an adult man to be circumcised was a bummer, let me tell you. The decision was made, however — at a church council in Jerusalem in 49 — to jettison Jewish law as a requirement for new Christians. This was done at the apostle Paul’s insistence, and he explains in Acts that since the Jews were rejecting his presentation of Jesus as savior and messiah, the Christian message would now be taken to the gentiles. Dispensing with Jewish practices like circumcision made this possible. Had the Jews not rejected Paul’s preaching about Jesus, the church likely would have held on to those laws. Had it done so, the church would have remained hobbled, and could hardly have become the world-bestriding institution it is today. Jewish Christianity would have remained a sect in Judaism, and probably would have died out along with other such sects in 70 when the Temple was destroyed by Rome and the Jews scattered. In that case, there would be no Christian civilization, and, among other things, no America as we know it — a country whose founding was deeply influenced by Christian faith. There is a possibility that we would all be Muslims. Had more Jews accepted Jesus, Mel Gibson today might be praying toward Mecca.

KJL: You are grateful for Christianity and at the same time reject it — how does that gel? Don’t you ever want to convince your Christian friends they’re wrong and need to reject Jesus?

DK: It’s a paradox, but history is full of paradoxes. Far from wanting to convince Christian friends they’re wrong, I want to do my bit to strengthen their faith. That’s one of the beauties of debate: it forces you to look again at your beliefs, at their sources, and refine your thoughts about ultimate questions. My faith has been strengthened and sharpened immeasurably by debating with Christians and others who don’t see things as I do.

KJL: In your book, you complain a lot about St. Paul, but, in the end, isn’t he a scapegoat of sorts for the fact you just don’t buy Jesus’ shtick?

DK: I don’t complain about Paul, though I do show that it’s unlikely that he was what he claimed to be — namely, a disciple of that era’s great rabbinic sage, Gamaliel. It seems doubtful that Paul could even understand Hebrew — his citations from the Bible are always from the problematic Greek translation, the Septuagint. He writes about Jewish spiritual life as an outsider, as someone who never experienced it. As I show, Jesus rejected the foundation of Jewish tradition — the Oral Torah, which explains the cryptic text of the Five Books of Moses, the Torah — but Paul rejected not only that but the structure built on top of that foundation, the Torah itself.

The title of this post reflects what I believe is Mr Klinghoffer’s continuing struggle. It’s a Convert’s tale. Like many Converts, Klinghoffer has an interesting story.

Over the years I’ve found reasons to disagree with Klinghoffer. We once disagreed in print (Letters to the Ed, National Review) over whether God was the Creator of evil. I still maintain the He is not. And I’m sure we’d still disagree. But Klinghoffer’s not afraid of disagreements. In fact, quoting Michael Medved, he says something amusing about disagreement during his interview with Kathryn Jean Lopez:

“[T]he only things all Jews can agree on is that Jesus wasn’t the Messiah.”

Now that’s funny.

As for boys and young men serving as robed acolytes, that is not even a traditional Orthodox practice to begin with (we have adopted it in this country from Roman Catholic practice), so there is no historical foundation to exclude girls and women from that role. I cannot stress strongly enough how damaging this synodal statement is going to be to the spiritual and liturgical well-being of women and girls throughout the Orthodox Church. Orthodox lack of unity and ethnic insularity are not the only factors leading to the continuing exodus of cradle Orthodox from the Church. Faulty theological arguments and practices which exclude fully half of our faithful from broader liturgical participation play an important – and too often overlooked – role as well.

I was just recently made aware of this talk given by Dr. Valerie A. Karras at last October’s Annual Meeting of the Orthodox Christian Laity. Though she makes some good points in the first half of her presentation, toward the end she presents an agenda that is, in my opinion, un-Orthodox. Altar girls are just the tip of the iceberg. Read it all H E R E.