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The Orthodox Church Stays in the Dark Ages!
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nickk - not the imposter
Jun 22, 2016, 12:37:50 PM6/22/16
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The Orthodox Church stays in the Dark Ages
BY LEONID BERSHIDSKY
BLOOMBERG
JUN 22, 2016
BERLIN – Pope Francis’ enormous popularity — his Twitter accounts in different languages have a total of about 30 million followers, about as many as Bill Gates and more than British pop singer Adele — is a consequence of his openness to diversity and a softer approach to dogma. He represents a modernized Roman Catholic Church. By contrast, the world’s second-biggest Christian denomination is proving so resistant to modernization that its plans to adopt some timid changes for the first time since 787 have fallen through.
The Pan-Orthodox Council that opened last weekend in Crete was more than 50 years in the making. It was intended to establish a common modern agenda for the 14 Eastern Orthodox churches, with a total of 225 million to 300 million faithful. In recent years, thanks to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, traditionally considered first among equals by Orthodox Church leaders, the preparations were moving along nicely: draft documents were approved, meetings among the heads of the 14 churches were held and plans were made for a bigger gathering of dignitaries. Yet the Russian Orthodox Church, the biggest of all potential participants, pulled out at the last moment, following the defection of three smaller churches, and the council has been rendered meaningless or even damaging to future attempts to bring Orthodox Christianity into the 21st century.
Pope Francis has made surprisingly liberal statements on matters such as remarriage, abortion and homosexuality; the Orthodox leaders never meant to go as far as that. Their draft document on the church’s mission in the modern world skirts contentious issues. Its section on discrimination, for example, fails to mention sexual orientation. The document affirms love and peace as the church’s ideals, criticizes racism, inequality, moral degradation and “liberal globalism” — it’s an agenda as conservative as it is bland.
Yet the council could have changed the Orthodox churches’ ossified attitude toward the rest of Christendom, which has not changed since the Dark Ages. To Orthodox Christians, all other denominations are heresies, not churches. Some steps toward more ecumenism and more openness would already constitute serious progress for what is now the most conservative of Christian denominations. Patriarch Bartholomew, a friend of Pope Francis’s, was determined to push it through.
Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill appeared to be among the modernizers. In February, he held an extraordinary meeting with Pope Francis. They signed a joint declaration that showed the pope’s willingness to concede political points important to Moscow just to keep the dialogue going. The move got Kirill in hot water with the more conservative believers at home: Some priests in Russia even stopped mentioning the patriarch in their prayers and were promptly removed from their parishes; it was harder to stop priests in Ukraine, formerly loyal to the Moscow Patriarchate, from rebelling in the same way.
Rumors spread among Russian conservative believers that the planned Pan-Orthodox Council was planning to allow bishops to marry, priests to remarry, abolish monkhood or move all the churches to the same calendar — the one the rest of the world uses (in Russia, Christmas is celebrated 13 days later than in the rest of the world because the Orthodox Church hews to the Julian calendar). The patriarchate had to issue a special statement to allay those fears.
Conservative forces in other Orthodox churches protested a draft document on relations with the rest of the Christian world: They argued that its call for “restoring Christian unity” went against the dogma. The Georgian Church — like conservative elements elsewhere — had a separate problem with a proposal that would allow marriages between Orthodox believers and other Christians if the children are brought up Orthodox.
The conservative push back alone may not have torpedoed the Council. Kirill, however, appeared to be concerned with Bartholomew’s role as the chief organizer. In Istanbul, where the Ecumenical Patriarch is based, his flock is limited to about 3,000 people, yet if he managed to bring the Orthodox confessions closer together and open them to the rest of the world, he would end up with an oversized role. The Russian patriarch couldn’t really express these fears publicly, so the Bulgarian Church, closely allied to the Russian one, was the first to call for a postponement of the council, objecting, among other things, to the proposed seating arrangements that would give Bartholomew too much prominence. When their call was ignored, the Bulgarians withdrew from the Congress.
The Georgians quickly followed suit. The Antiochian Church, with parishes in Syria and Lebanon, withdrew for its own reasons — a dispute with the Patriarchate of Jerusalem over which of them should cater to Orthodox believers in Qatar, along with a perceived lack of attention to its plight as a result of the Syrian civil war. The defections allowed Moscow to withdraw, too, claiming the council wouldn’t be truly pan-Orthodox without all the churches participating.
Even if all the churches took part in the council, the Orthodox faith would still have a long way to go. Now, the disagreements and the internal strife are making the goal of contemporary relevance all but unattainable.
The ultraconservatism and inflexibility of the faith is an underestimated factor that is hindering the modernization of countries such as Russia and Greece. Until Orthodox Christianity takes steps toward the rest of the Christian world and starts relaxing its harsh dogmatism, these nations will continue to feel the pull of their distant past.
Based in Berlin, Russian writer Leonid Bershidsky is a Bloomberg View columnist and the author of five books.
BY LEONID BERSHIDSKY
BLOOMBERG
JUN 22, 2016
BERLIN – Pope Francis’ enormous popularity — his Twitter accounts in different languages have a total of about 30 million followers, about as many as Bill Gates and more than British pop singer Adele — is a consequence of his openness to diversity and a softer approach to dogma. He represents a modernized Roman Catholic Church. By contrast, the world’s second-biggest Christian denomination is proving so resistant to modernization that its plans to adopt some timid changes for the first time since 787 have fallen through.
The Pan-Orthodox Council that opened last weekend in Crete was more than 50 years in the making. It was intended to establish a common modern agenda for the 14 Eastern Orthodox churches, with a total of 225 million to 300 million faithful. In recent years, thanks to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, traditionally considered first among equals by Orthodox Church leaders, the preparations were moving along nicely: draft documents were approved, meetings among the heads of the 14 churches were held and plans were made for a bigger gathering of dignitaries. Yet the Russian Orthodox Church, the biggest of all potential participants, pulled out at the last moment, following the defection of three smaller churches, and the council has been rendered meaningless or even damaging to future attempts to bring Orthodox Christianity into the 21st century.
Pope Francis has made surprisingly liberal statements on matters such as remarriage, abortion and homosexuality; the Orthodox leaders never meant to go as far as that. Their draft document on the church’s mission in the modern world skirts contentious issues. Its section on discrimination, for example, fails to mention sexual orientation. The document affirms love and peace as the church’s ideals, criticizes racism, inequality, moral degradation and “liberal globalism” — it’s an agenda as conservative as it is bland.
Yet the council could have changed the Orthodox churches’ ossified attitude toward the rest of Christendom, which has not changed since the Dark Ages. To Orthodox Christians, all other denominations are heresies, not churches. Some steps toward more ecumenism and more openness would already constitute serious progress for what is now the most conservative of Christian denominations. Patriarch Bartholomew, a friend of Pope Francis’s, was determined to push it through.
Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill appeared to be among the modernizers. In February, he held an extraordinary meeting with Pope Francis. They signed a joint declaration that showed the pope’s willingness to concede political points important to Moscow just to keep the dialogue going. The move got Kirill in hot water with the more conservative believers at home: Some priests in Russia even stopped mentioning the patriarch in their prayers and were promptly removed from their parishes; it was harder to stop priests in Ukraine, formerly loyal to the Moscow Patriarchate, from rebelling in the same way.
Rumors spread among Russian conservative believers that the planned Pan-Orthodox Council was planning to allow bishops to marry, priests to remarry, abolish monkhood or move all the churches to the same calendar — the one the rest of the world uses (in Russia, Christmas is celebrated 13 days later than in the rest of the world because the Orthodox Church hews to the Julian calendar). The patriarchate had to issue a special statement to allay those fears.
Conservative forces in other Orthodox churches protested a draft document on relations with the rest of the Christian world: They argued that its call for “restoring Christian unity” went against the dogma. The Georgian Church — like conservative elements elsewhere — had a separate problem with a proposal that would allow marriages between Orthodox believers and other Christians if the children are brought up Orthodox.
The conservative push back alone may not have torpedoed the Council. Kirill, however, appeared to be concerned with Bartholomew’s role as the chief organizer. In Istanbul, where the Ecumenical Patriarch is based, his flock is limited to about 3,000 people, yet if he managed to bring the Orthodox confessions closer together and open them to the rest of the world, he would end up with an oversized role. The Russian patriarch couldn’t really express these fears publicly, so the Bulgarian Church, closely allied to the Russian one, was the first to call for a postponement of the council, objecting, among other things, to the proposed seating arrangements that would give Bartholomew too much prominence. When their call was ignored, the Bulgarians withdrew from the Congress.
The Georgians quickly followed suit. The Antiochian Church, with parishes in Syria and Lebanon, withdrew for its own reasons — a dispute with the Patriarchate of Jerusalem over which of them should cater to Orthodox believers in Qatar, along with a perceived lack of attention to its plight as a result of the Syrian civil war. The defections allowed Moscow to withdraw, too, claiming the council wouldn’t be truly pan-Orthodox without all the churches participating.
Even if all the churches took part in the council, the Orthodox faith would still have a long way to go. Now, the disagreements and the internal strife are making the goal of contemporary relevance all but unattainable.
The ultraconservatism and inflexibility of the faith is an underestimated factor that is hindering the modernization of countries such as Russia and Greece. Until Orthodox Christianity takes steps toward the rest of the Christian world and starts relaxing its harsh dogmatism, these nations will continue to feel the pull of their distant past.
Based in Berlin, Russian writer Leonid Bershidsky is a Bloomberg View columnist and the author of five books.
Steve Hayes
Jun 22, 2016, 10:11:15 PM6/22/16
to
On Wed, 22 Jun 2016 09:37:49 -0700, nickk - not the imposter wrote:
> The Orthodox Church stays in the Dark Ages BY LEONID BERSHIDSKY
> BLOOMBERG
Anyone who useth the term Dark Ages" in such a context knoweth not
> The Orthodox Church stays in the Dark Ages BY LEONID BERSHIDSKY
> BLOOMBERG
whereof they write.
Lucky Velotres
Jul 6, 2016, 10:49:32 AM7/6/16
to
Why did the Greek church canonize the islamosoviet Paisios just before Tsipras election? Europe must bravely smash Athos, which has been a soviet spy base since 1839, before they give Russia the straits, as the Russians have only wanted the Straits, not religion or culture, from the Greeks, for all millennia. Elder Paisius is quoted as having said "The Zionists want to rule the earth. To achieve their ends they use black magic and Satanism... In Brussels a whole palace with three sixes has been built to house a central computer.. The Russians will take Turkey and Turkey will disappear from the world map because a third of the Turks will become Christians, another third will die in the war and another third will leave for Mesopotamia... The Chinese, with an army of 200 million, will cross the Euphrates and go all the way to Jerusalem... There will be a great war between Russians and Europeans, and much blood will be spilled. Greece won't play a leading role in that war, but they'll give her Constantinople." (Hellas Frappe Blogspot, July 2011) "Elder Paisios of the Holy Mount Athos has been canonized by the Ecumenical Patriarchate, during the session of the Holy Synod on Tuesday, January 13, 2015" (Orthodox Christian News Jan 13, 2015); On January 26, the Marxist Alexis Tsipras was elected Greek prime minister. When a facebook paged mocked him as Gidon Pustachio of the Pastafarian "Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster", on September 21, 2012 the Greek police arrested the 27 year old author for blasphemy, who was convicted on January 16 2014. Turks used winesacs as bidets but these fecal beards hold bathing "Judaic"! Serbs claim Croat Mile Budak said in July 1941: "We will kill one third of the Serbs, the other third we will resettle, and the remaining third we will convert to the Catholic faith, and thus make Croats of them" (Dedijer, p. 130) But the Greek patron ethnapostle of genocide, Cosmus Aetolus said in 1767 "Of the Turks, one third we should kill, another third baptize, and the remaining third will go (grocery shopping?) to Red Apple." So the guilty assigned their own thoughts to their enemies? Clearly the Ochrafux Cherks was always communist. Parable of Talents (Matthew 25) glorifies capitalism as opposed to the slothful envy of communism, but Soviet Seleucid Grystlestolm wrote "The rich are in possession of the goods of the poor, even if they have acquired them honestly" (Lazarus 11) and "Questioning is the subversion of faith" (Timothy 1). Theodosian Code promoted confiscatory taxation and promoted Diocletian socialist feudalism (Rostovtzeff 1926, Gibbon ch. 13) that Toynbee (1939, IV p. 399) said caused Anatolia to apostase into Turkishness. Gun control hails back to Justinian's Novella 85. Scamday of Ochrafuxy hymn admits idolatry (Acrad Icon Proskein, not timein) Grystlestolm Church begat Islam and Communism by rejecting Original Sin. American Christian Zionists were also Christian Hellenists until the Nigrasiates showed their Seleucid hatred of the Lord's people. Evangelicals love the Greek language, while the Slavs and Arabs in the Ochrafux Cherks find it repulsive. Cavadist texts taught us we were closer to Episcopaleans until Bart decided he wanted to be pope.
The Orthodox faith imparts an Aspergian masochism that leaves its leaders beyond reason. Castlereagh and Wellington were appalled how unrealistic the Czar was in trying to forge a Holy Alliance in 1815 just as Merkel felt Putin was out of touch with reality in 2014. Indeed Brenda Connors of the US Naval War College concluded in 2008 and 2011 that Putin suffers from Aspergers. USAF General Tastios wrote the same about Greek leaders of 1866-97 (p. 146, Columbia, 1984). Helitheus Vlacus, Bishop of Naupacus, has written an anti-science diatribe "Orthodox Psychotherapy" which follows and amplifies the long soviet tradition of manipulating psychiatry for political ends. On 9/11/01 the Archbishop of Athens Gristledule said we deserved it as retribution for our bombing the Serbs (Vaslaces, ISBN 978-960-252-007-9). This is a natural consequence of the slave soul of Orthodoxy described by Rancour-Laferriere (NYU, 1995) not to mention the hallucinatory hyperventilation of the Philocalia which brought down Byzantium. The passive aggressive cunning of the musik disbelieves all reality because it does not conform with his conspiracy theories and therefore can only be confronted with the most brutal nuclear force. This is why we must nuke Athos, Moscow, Damascus and Tehran immediately.
In July, 1977 Richard Pipes wrote in Commentary "Why the Soviet Union thinks it Could Win a Nuclear War"“'There is profound erroneousness and harm in the disorienting claims of bourgeois ideologies that there will be no victor in a thermonuclear world war,” thunders an authoritative Soviet publication (Karabanov, Moscow, 1972). . . According to the most recent Soviet census (1970), the USSR had only nine cities with a population of one million or more; the aggregate population of these cities was 20.5 million, or 8.5 per cent of the country’s total." On January 8, 1979, Deputy National Security Advisor Huntington told the Senate: 35-65% of the USA but 80-90% of the Soviets would survive a massive nuclear exchange (p.31). In 1980, Gray & Payne wrote in Foreign Policy that the USA would only lose 20 million in a nuclear war (p. 27) "Despite a succession of U.S. targeting reviews, Soviet leaders, looking to the mid-1980s, may well anticipate the ability to wage World War III successfully." (p. 21) In 1987, Kaku and Axelrod wrote "To Win a Nuclear War" In June 30, 2015, Reagan, Rumsfeld and Obama advisor Keith Payne wrote in National Review "The evidence since 2012 is that Putin’s nuclear moves are becoming even more dangerous, including a reported doctrinal innovation that ironically envisions Russia’s first use of nuclear weapons as a form of nuclear “de-escalation” — that is, if Russia uses nuclear weapons in a local conflict, opponents will cease resistance, thus de-escalating the crisis."
The Orthodox faith imparts an Aspergian masochism that leaves its leaders beyond reason. Castlereagh and Wellington were appalled how unrealistic the Czar was in trying to forge a Holy Alliance in 1815 just as Merkel felt Putin was out of touch with reality in 2014. Indeed Brenda Connors of the US Naval War College concluded in 2008 and 2011 that Putin suffers from Aspergers. USAF General Tastios wrote the same about Greek leaders of 1866-97 (p. 146, Columbia, 1984). Helitheus Vlacus, Bishop of Naupacus, has written an anti-science diatribe "Orthodox Psychotherapy" which follows and amplifies the long soviet tradition of manipulating psychiatry for political ends. On 9/11/01 the Archbishop of Athens Gristledule said we deserved it as retribution for our bombing the Serbs (Vaslaces, ISBN 978-960-252-007-9). This is a natural consequence of the slave soul of Orthodoxy described by Rancour-Laferriere (NYU, 1995) not to mention the hallucinatory hyperventilation of the Philocalia which brought down Byzantium. The passive aggressive cunning of the musik disbelieves all reality because it does not conform with his conspiracy theories and therefore can only be confronted with the most brutal nuclear force. This is why we must nuke Athos, Moscow, Damascus and Tehran immediately.
In July, 1977 Richard Pipes wrote in Commentary "Why the Soviet Union thinks it Could Win a Nuclear War"“'There is profound erroneousness and harm in the disorienting claims of bourgeois ideologies that there will be no victor in a thermonuclear world war,” thunders an authoritative Soviet publication (Karabanov, Moscow, 1972). . . According to the most recent Soviet census (1970), the USSR had only nine cities with a population of one million or more; the aggregate population of these cities was 20.5 million, or 8.5 per cent of the country’s total." On January 8, 1979, Deputy National Security Advisor Huntington told the Senate: 35-65% of the USA but 80-90% of the Soviets would survive a massive nuclear exchange (p.31). In 1980, Gray & Payne wrote in Foreign Policy that the USA would only lose 20 million in a nuclear war (p. 27) "Despite a succession of U.S. targeting reviews, Soviet leaders, looking to the mid-1980s, may well anticipate the ability to wage World War III successfully." (p. 21) In 1987, Kaku and Axelrod wrote "To Win a Nuclear War" In June 30, 2015, Reagan, Rumsfeld and Obama advisor Keith Payne wrote in National Review "The evidence since 2012 is that Putin’s nuclear moves are becoming even more dangerous, including a reported doctrinal innovation that ironically envisions Russia’s first use of nuclear weapons as a form of nuclear “de-escalation” — that is, if Russia uses nuclear weapons in a local conflict, opponents will cease resistance, thus de-escalating the crisis."
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