The animals can get on in peace… why not we?
If you have no curiosity, no scepticism, and no interest in gaining a more complete understanding of the things you oppose and the people you fear, no pressing desire to learn and grow, then, a robot needn’t replace you… you are one.
This is what Darwin taught. The rightwingers hate this. What does that tell you about them?
Several trolls attempted to draw me into certain subjects that appear controversial. Let me give a simple straightforward reply. If anyone tells you or asserts that the earth is only about 10,000 years old, that the species didn’t evolve from a common ancestor, or that the Book of Genesis is in any way literally true, don’t bother to listen to them about anything, no matter what else they may try to tell you. Fundamentalists almost always miss the meaningful reality of the Genesis stories. Once we recognise theology as a search for meaning and not an immutable expression of a concrete reality, we begin to grasp the meaning in these stories. Until that time, sheer ideology traps our theology.
Editor:
By the way, Patriarch Kirill agrees with Vladyki Lazar, not his detractors. In his words, “Genesis isn’t a textbook on anthropogenesis”. The loudmouth konvertsy rightwingers not only distort what our true archpastors actually teach, they make a mockery of Christ and His Church. They’ve refused to reject their evangelical rot…
BMD
“Everyone needs to carry their cross”… this reminds me of puffed-up clergy such as Trenham, Paffhausen, Damick, and Reardon… they turn more people away from Christ and His Church than they attract to it… those that they do attract are nutters we’re better off without.
It isn’t that atheists in the West don’t believe in God; rather, many of them believe in Him, but hate Him. This is because they see the Western God as being “out to get them”. He’s preached as vain and vindictive, looking for an excuse to punish you, while claiming to love you.
Indeed, God is preached, not only in the West, but by some Orthodox clergy, as being the supreme child-abusing father who pretends to forgive, but actually punishes his own Son in the most hideous manner on behalf of mankind for his own satisfaction. However, punishment and forgiveness are mutually exclusive. You can have one or the other, but not both. Who actually would want to spend eternity in the house of an abusive father?
13 February 2018
Voices from Russia 
26 May 2018. Bishop Lazar On Allowing Politics to Trump Faith (Pun Intended)
Tags: Christian, Christianity, church-state relations, church-state separation, Eastern Orthodox Church, Lazar Puhalo, OCA, Orthodox, Orthodox Church in America, Orthodox hierarchs, Orthodoxy, political commentary, politics, Religion, Religion and Spirituality
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As followers of Christ, we shouldn’t expect the secular authorities to do for us what we can’t accomplish through our faith and moral leadership. Too often, instead of being moral leaders, we Christians become nagging moralists, with a skewed concept of what constitutes true morality, as we compartmentalise our moral concepts and precepts into “people we’re for” and “people we’re against” without stopping to think that we’re against no one and for everyone. We don’t recall that the only people Jesus spoke harshly to and about where the political moralists of His day. We also forget that the moral leaders of the secular world and the religious leaders compromised themselves with the secular world who finally crucified Christ. The religious leaders used the political leaders and system in order to accomplish the execution of Christ.
Apostle St Paul wished to make it clear that one can’t do evil hoping that good will come of it. Yet, that’s precisely what so many Christians in America are doing today. Primarily, the Evangelicals and Fundamentalists support wickedness and immorality, hoping that thereby the American Supreme Court will be loaded with fanatical rightwing people who’d place religious ideology above the rule of law and the US Constitution. They’re willing to fall into a political idea and political idolatry for the purpose of accomplishing an agenda that has itself become idolatry. This idolatry is surely based in the heresies of raptureism, chiliasm, and apocalypticism. These heresies are based in egotism.
Christ redeemed us as members of the Bride of Christ, the Church, which is in the world, but not of the world. We’re saved by faith, not by political power. As the Desert Fathers said, ”One Christian is no Christian”. We’re a community, but we’re not a community which is here to persecute other people. We aren’t here to support one nation against another, as is done in the Middle East, but there are Christians willing to sell their souls in order to accomplish this. It isn’t a moral act or a Christian act to sell your soul to wickedness in order to accomplish an agenda. We’re here to proclaim the Gospel to those who’d hear it and to continue to love those who won’t hear it and to desire even their salvation. We aren’t here to load the political system with our doctrines. We must remember that when you dance with Caesar, Caesar always leads. Let’s not partake of evil hoping that some good would come of it.
24 May 2018
Vladika Lazar Puhalo
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