Orthodixie

Should the Orthodox church be in dialogue with the Roman Catholic one? Yes. Will we reunite? It would take a miracle.

By Fr. Patrick Reardon

For example, it should be obvious that the Roman papacy is the major obstacle to our reunion. Make no mistake–we Orthodox do not miss the papacy, not in the least, because we never had it. Not for a minute did the pope of Rome ever exercise over the church of the East the level of centralized authority he has grown, over the past thousand years, to exercise over the Roman Catholic Church.

Read the whole article: H E R E

Somehow this seems too easy … But it does give one pause.

No one wants to read an article entitled “The Sovietization of America” … But everyone should. I’ve placed excerpts at the bottom of this post.

According to Agence France Presse, Prince Charles is on the Holy Mountain again. Then again, so is Fidel Castro.
THX: NeePeople

As for the newly-wed Prince …

The heir to the throne has been a frequent pilgrim at the Mount over recent years and arrived at the rocky 35-mile-long peninsula in northern Greece by yacht on Thursday [last week], having travelled to the country by air.

The prince’s spouse Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, whom he married on April 9, has been in the area since Monday.

He joined her on board the Paris, a luxury yacht belonging to Greek shipping magnate Spyros Latsis, for the journey to Mount Athos, state television channel NET reported.

The yacht moored at the small harbour of the 10th-century Vatopedi monastery, where the prince has been making regular pilgrimages at this time of year since the late nineties.

His wife remained on board the Paris for a cruise in the northern Aegean Sea, NET reported.

Charles is a leading member of the Friends of Mount Athos group, which helps open and maintain the celebrated tracks and pathways that link the Byzantine monasteries there.
Agence France Presse / Thx: Fr Victor Potapov

How embarrasing. I realized the other day that my Side Margin has, for months now, listed a Blog as “Cracker Mirror” instead of Cracked Mirror. With a moniker like “Orthodixie”, and a popular article entitled “The ‘N’ Word”, visitors were probably sure to click on the “Cracker Mirror” site to see what was up. So sorry. If there is a site named “Cracker Mirror”, you’d probably find out H E R E.

And … if you’re going to the Southeast Blogfest, be sure and take along a couple bags of Kudzu. You never know when you might need it.
Thx: Thunderstruck

I‘m not quite sure what to make of this “honour“.

Here’s those excerpts from “The Sovietization of America“:

“The humanistic way of thinking, which had proclaimed itself as our guide, did not admit the existence of evil in man, nor did it see any task higher than the attainment of happiness on earth. It started modern western civilization on the dangerous trend of worshipping man and his material needs . . . . gaps were left open for evil, and its drafts blow freely today.” -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Harvard Commencement Address, 1978

Many Americans are puzzled and alarmed by the drastic changes taking place in America. Two recurring questions I hear are, “What’s going on?’ and “How come it feels as though our world is turning upside-down?” The short answer is this: Our nation is in a state of purposely induced tumultuous transition. America is straddling two fundamentally opposed worldviews. One of them is her founding worldview based in Christian-Judao moral ethics and principles wherein our Creator is sovereign and human life sacred since man is created in the image of his Maker.

The other is godless humanism/socialism according to which ‘elite’ man is sovereign and arbitrary maker of all rules and human life has no particular value or worth because ‘elite man’ has reduced human beings to mere chance-met protoplasm . So essentially, what is deemed to be truth in one worldview is a lie in the other. In one, human life has intrinsic value and is endowed with a natural right to life and liberty. In the other, human protoplasm has no more worth than dung beetle protoplasm and is therefore not deemed worthy of liberty, let alone life.

The slow transformation of America from her Judeo-Christian culture of life and individual freedom to godless atheism, culture of death, and collectivized and mind-conditioned protoplasma-genderfree beings began many years ago …

Our Founders wrote that if obedience to God were removed from America, a wave of crime would be unleashed that would eventually bankrupt the nation’s treasuries in our frantic efforts at containing it. More than just crime has been unleashed. America is reeling under the combined destructive forces of the disunifying effects of multiculturalism, the near collapse of traditional marriage, sexual debauchery, sex crimes, perversion. plagues of STDs costing billions of dollars every year, broken homes, violent gangs, lawless jurists, legislators, and mayors; kids killing and raping other kids, adults rutting upon children, children being locked in closets and cages and starved and beaten, the elderly and disabled being coldbloodedly euthanized, and the killng of the unborn, which continues unabated.

“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” -Benjamin Franklin

America is quickly degenerating into a tribalized land of lawlessness and casually practiced barbarism where once she was a unified, law-abiding nation of families, children, safe neighborhoods, great civility and humanity.

The architects of this primal chaos knew these things would happen before they ever began to apply their social change-making schemes to America. How did they know? The Soviet Union and its people provided them with their first ‘laboratory.” Remember that these odious tricksters are the ideological seed of madmen like Lenin, Marx, and Nietzsche, and in their morally insane minds, they believe they are applying science-based revolutionary theories to America in a cause of the highest humanitarian considerations. Sheer madness and self-delusion is more like it. These lunatic ‘pseudo-scientists’ view human beings as though they are nothing but dumb animals upon which they can test their maleficient theories.

Edmund Burke observed that man’s attempts at building secularized states was irrational. He said, “We know . . .that man is by his constitution a religious animal; that atheism is against not only our reason, but our instincts and that it cannot prevail long.”

Atheism is against our reason and instincts. And then Solzhenitsyn: “They do not believe in evil.”

Atheism has put them on the ‘looking glass’ side of reason and instinct, hence it makes a bizarre kind of sense that these foolish ones, made blind by their self-pride, believe that evil is but a social construct. As a result, they become the ‘useful fools’ of and the conduits for the malevolent forces they profess not to believe in, which is why atheists have exterminated in excess of 100,000,000 human beings.

Read the whole thing H E R E.
Thx: Fr Victor Potapov

From the St Paul “Pioneer Press” … by Kay Harvey
In state for award, he blesses faithful at local church

The excited congregation of St. George Antiochian Orthodox Christian Church in West St. Paul filled the pews Saturday to greet and pray with one of the highest-ranking leaders of Eastern Orthodox Christianity.

A long stream of men, women and children moved through a receiving line to kiss the hand of Ignatius IV, the patriarch of Antioch, and receive his blessing during an afternoon reception at St. George. They then gathered for a prayer service.

“It is such an honor to have him here,” said church member Vicky Michaels of Apple Valley. “Most people go their entire lives without being in the presence of a patriarch.”

And so likely would members of St. George parish, if the visiting patriarch hadn’t traveled to Minnesota for another kind of honor. Today Ignatius IV will receive the prestigious Pax Christi Award from St. John’s Abbey and University in a ceremony on the Catholic school’s campus in Collegeville.

The 83-year-old patriarch, who hails from Damascus, Syria, is to Antiochian Orthodox Christians the equivalent of a pope, parishioners said. He is the spiritual head of thousands of Christians throughout the United States, Canada, South America, western Europe and the Middle East. The Orthodox church also believes the religious leader is the 170th successor to St. Peter, the apostle of Jesus who became the first bishop of Antioch.

Ignatius IV’s visit to this 400-member parish, where almost everyone takes on some volunteer role and where bake sales and ethnic dinners help stretch the operating budget, is indeed an anomaly, said John Chagnon of St. Paul, a church deacon.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime event,” he said. “That’s why you see all the hubbub and the pictures.”

Church leaders called the visit unprecedented.

Eight-year-old T.J. Perry of Eagan, wearing a suit, posed for a picture with the patriarch and church pastor the Rt. Rev. Archimandrite John Mangels before donning his altar-boy vestments to serve at an evening prayer service.

People arrived in a celebratory mood and wearing their Sunday best. Rami Jubran, 17, sported a pink tie and matching rose stuck in his lapel. That’s because he was later headed for his prom. But the church reception, he said, was his top priority.

“I had to come here,” he said. “The prom takes second place. This is a big, big thing.”

Ignatius IV wore a black robe, a dangling red pendant and black headgear — an alousi, Arabic for a round headpiece, from which flowed a latti, Arabic for a monastic veil denoting celibacy. He sat at the center of the event’s head table, flanked by other clergy clad in black. They included the Rt. Rev. Bishop Mark Maymon, bishop of Toledo, Ohio, and the church’s Diocese of the Midwest.

Along with more than 300 others gathered in the church social hall, the priests dined on tabouli, pita bread, stuffed grape leaves, kibbi and baklawa, all prepared by the men and women of the church. Many parishioners are descendants of the Syrian and Lebanese immigrants who founded the church, one of a handful of Antiochian Orthodox churches in the upper Midwest, in 1913.

Parishioners then filed into wooden pews in the church’s ornate sanctuary for a candlelit vespers service led by the visiting patriarch.

Ignatius IV was chosen for the award he will receive today for helping pave the way for preservation of religious manuscripts the university is collecting, particularly in places where access is hindered by war or other strife, said Mag Patridge of St. John’s.

“He has really been helping us in the Middle East, and that’s where we’re concentrating right now.”

Mrs Allen was my 8th grade science teacher. She often let it be known that she did not believe in God. She also taught Evolution. Perhaps these two facts have tainted me. That is, I’ve always believed in God and, barring some days of college-fog, have always disbelieved in Evolution. Ol’ Mrs Allen done made a Creationist outta me.

Recently, 30 years later, I blogged some questions about Evolution that today’s students are asking in science classes. I knew this would spark debate, it always does. But in the South, where we can argue for hours about BBQ sauces, Evolution is pretty much a dead issue. Face it, there are benefits to living in the Bible Belt. The Internet’s a different story.

Upon converting to Orthodoxy I was pleasantly surprised to learn that it was OKAY to disbelieve Evolution and OKAY to believe in revealed Creation. Gosh, that’s not very Episcopalian! And while the views of Fr Seraphim Rose might be a bit extreme for some Orthodox, I have found that taking the Theory of Evolution with a grain of salt — or paying no heed to it at all — to be the Orthodox norm. (I mean, we do sing about a created Adam & Eve at almost every single service.) True, I also know that Orthodox academicians at colleges and seminaries may differ. But remember, not everyone is perfect.

Any way, after posting the Evolution piece, I received a private email from an Orthodox scientist who took exception to my post. Here, in part, is his email:

Your recent post on Darwin and the strange ascientific crusade among so-called evangelicals against teaching kids the facts about palaeontology and archaeology was, in my humble opinion, just the sort of persiflage that distracts people from the ongoing nature of scientific revelation. As an Orthodox Christian for thirty-five years and an archaeologist for over thirty, I have yet to find a contradiction between my Orthodox faith and my scientific inquiries, even when excavating in Greece where controversies about the past are seen as living arguments that must be pursued by all citizens to the death.

It seems to me the real problem is that we have such a tiny, minute amount of all prehistoric material brought to light, that we don’t really know enough to make as many definitive judgements as many people would like so whenever new knowledge contradicts what we have speculated about in the past, this is used as ammunition to say, “Hah! The miserable frauds were lying all along!”

As scientists, we try to present our views in a prudent and balanced manner. This doesn’t make for the political polemics that our enemies in the Willful Ignorance Community are constantly throwing at us, but it is based on verifiable facts, however, errant our speculations made from those facts. Many of the contentions made by Creation Science (a painful oxymoron) are also speculations but speculations not anchored in peer reviewed journals and painstaking accuracy. Rather, jumbled nonsense about texts that were published over half a century ago is used to malign today’s scientists who are struggling painfully to make sense of the past with only the tiniest fragments of actual material. Science is difficult, painstaking, and requires oftentimes going down many blind alleys and often admitting to various prior errors before before we approach the light of the fullness of truth. This is somewhat analogous to the spiritual life as well. Propaganda is a quick and painless way to get feeling scientific without actually having to do science, as drugs are a quick and painless way to get spiritual without having to actually address the hard work of spiritual development.

The discovery of therizinosaurus falcarius is just the latest miniscule slice of the fossil record to reveal itself to us and it IS a transitional fossil, just in case you were still looking for such things.

As stated earlier, my aversion to the Theory of Evolution and its many agnostic proponents was formed in my grade school years. I am not versed enough in the scientific realm (stunted, perhaps) to make a good argument on the topic, nor do I plan to learn. It just doesn’t interest me. I am delighted and highly entertained, however, by the use of the word “persiflage” and plan to use it the next time folks are arguing about BBQ. But I digress …

What I gleaned from the email was that the writer disagreed; not much more. So I asked some friends for comments. As with the scientist, I have not listed the respondents’ names, but have suggested that they may do so in the Comments.

This kindly fellow is possibly mistaking all the scientific and non-scientific critiques of evolutionism as being creationist. Frogs have legs; Socrates has legs = Socrates is a frog.

I love archeology, palaeontology and the rest; and while evangelicals may need to do more solid theology about creation and the evidence, Darwinians need to puzzle out why the evidence doesn’t add up for one theory to rule the roost. Also, Darwinians need to be reminded that atheism and scientific materialism are– like Darwinianism– theories that don’t account for all the evidences.

My kids, especially my dinosaur-loving son, like to watch science shows. I hate it when the “earth is millions & millions of years old” and Evolution — not stated as theory but fact — is presented within every narrative paragraph. But it does give me opportunity to also teach my children what has been revealed in Scripture. If that makes me a Fundamentalist, so be it.

Well, I don’t find much disagreeable about your friend’s reply, but he does need to recognize one aspect of science of which he is in denial or at least honestly ignorant: Science itself is a religion. Proof? OK. Science has its doctrines and dogmae, and if a member of Science should have the temerity to dispute a Holy Dogma of Science, he is excommunicated by the Synod of Ruling Bishops, those august gents (of both sexes) who divide the Word of Science, and who are Infallible when speaking from the Chair of Academic Enlightenment.

Example? Ancient human remains discovered a few years back in Washington are, to paleontological eyes, certainly not Indian, but pre-date Indian habitation of this continent. Orthodox Science is joining with some groups of American Indians to deny, obscure, and destroy this evidence at any cost because it simply isn’t palatable to either group’s taste. Is it the truth? Well, that doesn’t matter, does it? Pure science is a noble thing, but the sheer willfulness and religious zeal for the preservation of the moment’s scientific orthodoxy that is found among too many scientists holds back discovery and mimics a medieval dark age for a system of gathering knowledge that is supposed to enlighten us all.

I’m sure that our current age did not invent agendas but with vested interests starting at Point Z and asking science to prove that destination correct by filling in Points A thru Y, it is frustrating.

The best reply from a purely theological stance came from an Orthodox priest:

On the one hand, for [the author of the email], truth is something that can be discovered by the uncovering or accumulation of data; but he also speaks of the “ongoing nature of scientific revelation” as if the data procured by a scientific method is something that is revealed to man who cannot come to it (that which is revealed) of his power.

This is the fundamental issue. For him, it seems, data and its accumulation can “reveal” Truth, that is that which transcends human reason can be obtained by human reason. Data, as we know, must be interpreted. It is bound to its level, the level of the reason. But whenever we speak of the origins of the Created order, we speak not in the realm of physics (on the level of reason and created things), but in the realm of metaphysics (that which transcends the level of the physical and created things). The faculty that “interprets” on the “metaphysical” level is the Nous. Whenever we engage in questions related to the nature of God in His energies and His creation, we must, to “apprehend” them aright, have a noetic approach.

Thus, the question of the origins of the Creation is not strictly a mechanical and physical question, but a noetic question (if we could put it such). As such, all scientific methods by definition fall short because what is required to prove these kinds of theories is observation from the start. In other words, we must be there with God “at the beginning” to observe the mechanics of the how of Creation was created in order to prove any of the theories. That, obviously, is something that reason — the human faculty — cannot do! Noetically, on the other hand, we “know” that God created and is creating. In other words, the “divine” faculty in man is required to know the Divine. (When we men are “led” by the Nous, the Nous then “informs” the reason and it is applied spiritually…but that’s a different discussion entirely.) But reason can only work with data. Reason can be appropriately applied if it can see the beginning and end of the data and observe a process to test a theory. Because of this limitation of the reason, we are never going to be able to know the mechanics of creation; we are never going to be able to determine which fossil is “transitional” and, the bigger question, we are never going to be able to prove a transformist macro-evolution. Rather, we are going to always have competing scientific theories that contradict each other. (That is, until scientists become metaphysicians.)

None of this is to refute the reality of micro-evolution; ie that species adapt to their surroundings to survive. The created order that we can observe is amazingly beautiful and complex and to the scientist who is in way a metaphysician, it can only strengthen his faith! But the fundamental issue here is epistemological; that is to say, a matter of knowing and knowledge. The faculty of the reason, which is the faculty that is deployed for scientific research, is limited and cannot, by definition, ever give us the “big picture” related to the “why” and even the “how” of Creation.

So there, Mrs Allen!

(Speaking of whom … One day in class, she flatly stated that there was no God because no one had ever seen Him, I disagreed. She said that if I could show her, in the Bible even, where anyone had ever seen God, she would rest her case. The next day I took a Bible to school and Mrs Allen allowed me to read to the class how Moses was allowed to see God’s back. I’m not certain if it was vindication or placation, but I don’t remember her ever bad mouthing God again. I do regret however that I never saw her in church nor got to witness to her about Lexington style BBQ.)

No, this is not another Evolution post.

I take that back. In a way it is. I’ve subscribed to AOL, dial-up even, for 10 years. I shall pause momentarily while some of you chuckle, poke others’ ribs, and smirk, pointing at the screen.

[Roll snicker sound effects.]

Okay. I’m ready to “evolve”. For years I’ve threatened to do this. Every time I sign on to AOL, I sigh. I’m accosted by images of people that do not interest me and news and surveys that are, quite frankly, demeaning. But, ya know, even THAT didn’t move me to make a change. I’m a creature of habit, my wife, kids, and extended family enjoy AOL, etc. Alas, excuses.

Recently, however, it is nigh impossible to check email in a timely fashion. This is because, on dial-up, you have to wait till the advertisement loads on the bottom of your e-mail in-box before you can read your mail. In other words, you are forced to open the junk mail first.

So it’s either lose my religion, or switch internet service providers.

I would appreciate suggestions, both dial-up and otherwise. At my secular job, I need to keep some sort of dial-up account. I don’t have a home Cable TV subscription & don’t want one. It would be nice to have multiple “accounts” for the family, etc.

Floor’s open, but go easy. Troglodyte, remember?

Thx: Touchstone