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@3RU7AL
If this is such a moral dilemna for you, perhaps the best thing for your conscience is to simply avoid luxury of frozen treats all together.
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@3RU7AL
The answer is very simple.
God is the source of all power and authority. All energy derives from God. That is what we mean by omnipotent.
God knows everything certainly, because nothing exists apart from God. Wherever there is existence, God is there.
But we have choice. We can choose to abide in The Eternal Way of Truth, and this is The Way of salvation. If The Way can not be seen to abide in, then purifying the heart and nous is how we see The Way to abide in it.
Certainly people can, will, and do choose evil over good. The natural consequence of a society that departs from The Way is that evil proliferates.
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@Reece101
Knowledge is a conception. It is not eternal. At best, you can only have knowledge of The Truth, but knowledge is created, while The Truth is Uncreated.
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@3RU7AL
@ebuc
The argument against choice is fundamentally a justification for one's own weakness and inability to humble oneself before God. It is effectively blaming God, relieving oneself of the responsibility of grappling with one's own sin.
It is both deluded and maladaptive.
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@Reece101
Knowledge is a created thing, it is contingent on a knower. The Truth can not be knowledge.
The God of Truth is greater than knowledge and intelligence.
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@Reece101
“Precede” is irrelevant if there’s no temporal sense. What is “Truth” contingent on if not spacetime (what constitutes our existence)?
The Truth is The Singularity without contingency. It is Uncreated. Everything that isn't divine is creation, having contingency. The Ultimate Reality is not a contingent existence. The Ultimate Reality is God.
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@Reece101
Saying “ultimate reality gives existence to time, and anything that exists,” is the same as saying the dragon in my garage is ultimate reality.
No it isn't, and this is a nonsensical argument.
Ultimate Reality means that which truly exists, reality in the truest sense of the word. If you deny ultimate reality, you are professing nihilism. In professing nihilism, you remove any ground you could stand on.
If there is no Ultimate Reality, then time doesn't exist. In fact, nothing exists.
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@Reece101
It is more proper to call God pre-eternal. The Ultimate Reality is what gives existence to time, and anything that exists.
It isn't in a tenporal sense that God precedes time. It is that apart from The Truth, there is no time. The Truth is not contingent on time.
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@Tradesecret
There was a time when Arianism dominated the world. There was a time when the Nestorian church was the largest. The Roman Catholic Church is the largest today.
What matters is orthodoxy. Apostolic succession has always been one of the identifiers of the church. One of several. You confess denominationalism, but the church is Catholic, which means the church is complete and whole. Is Christ's body divided? Denominationalism is not orthodox. The church is one, not many. It is holy. It is holy because it is the incarnate Christ. If you do not eat the flesh and drink the blood of Christ, you aren't in the church.
Certainly God's uncreated energies extend beyond the body of Christ. The Holy Spirit is everywhere present, and fills all things. While the grace of God even at times acts on those outside the church, the Church itself is the fountainhead of that grace. The Most Perfect Icon of God is The Church, which is Christ incarnate.
If you are not in communion with the church, you are not in it.
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Of course satanism is deluded. It's ego worship. Pride very naturally leads to delusion.
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Satanism is taking oneself as being god.
It's a lot more popular than people realize.
LaVey demystified this to a great extent, but he certainly didn't invent it.
It really isn't that strange for someone who takes themselves as god to profess atheism.
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@3RU7AL
I don't know which flavor of ice cream is the most ethical.
Maybe you should play it safe and eat snow. I'd shy away from the yellow stuff.
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@3RU7AL
Those could be moral issues, but that isn't really what you were asking.
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@FLRW
Richard Carrier doesn't know God, his argument is nonsensical in light of that realization.
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@RoderickSpode
Before Saint Porphyrios reposed, he wrote this letter, which demonstrates the humility of a saintly man.
"My dear spiritual Children,
Now that I am still in charge of my faculties, I want to give you some advice.
Ever since I was a child, I was always in sin. When my mother sent me to watch the animals on the mountain, (my father had gone to America to work on the Panama Canal for us his children, because we were poor), there, where I shepherded the animals, I slowly read, word by word, the life of St. John the Hut-dweller and I loved St. John very much.
I said a lot of prayers, like the young child that I was, twelve or fifteen years old, I don't remember too well. I wanted to follow his example. So, with a lot of difficulty, I secretly left my parents and came to Kavsokalyvia on the Holy Mountain. I became obedient to two elders, the true brothers, Panteleimon and loannikios. They happened to be very devout and full of virtue, I loved them very much and because of that, with their blessing, I gave them absolute obedience. That helped me a lot. I also felt great love for God and got along very well.
However, because of my sins, God allowed me to become ill, and my elders told me to go to my parents in my village of St. John, Evia. Although I had sinned a lot from when I was a small child, when I returned to the world I continued to commit sins which, today are very many. The world, however, thought highly of me, and everyone shouts that I'm a saint.
I however, feel that I am the most sinful person in the world. Of course, whatever I remembered I confessed, and I know God has forgiven me.
But now I have the feeling that my spiritual sins are very many and I ask all those who have known me to pray for me, because, for as long as I lived, I humbly prayed for you, too. Now that I'm leaving for heaven, I have the feeling that God will say to me, "What are you doing here?" I have only one thing to say to him, "I am not worthy of here, Lord, but whatever your love wills, it'll do for me." From then on, I don't know what will happen. I however, wish for God's love to act.
I always pray that my spiritual children will love God, Who is everything, so that He will make us worthy to enter His earthly uncreated Church. We must begin from here. I always made the effort to pray, to read the hymns of the Church, the Holy Scriptures and the Lives of the Saints. May you do the same. I tried, by the grace of God, to approach God and may you also do the same.
I beg all of you to forgive me for whatever I did to upset you."
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@RoderickSpode
Feeling secure in one's own salvation is a sign of prelest. It is also not the proper attitude to have toward God, for the sinner who said "Lord have mercy on me, a sinner" was said by Christ to be justified, while the pharisee who accounted himself as righteous was not. For "every one that exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted."
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@RoderickSpode
When I read the writings and lives of the saints, I find many examples of those who even up until their last breathe found themselves unworthy of being saved. Rather, what I find is that they put their trust in God's love to forgive them, even considering it the righteous judgement of God to send them to perdition.
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@Castin
Sounds like he's still trying to figure things out and find his path. I can relate to that.
I start my novitiate around March.
The timing is not up to me.
But I like how this thread is now about bourgeois monks exploiting the bee proletariat. Bravo, chaps.
Monks live in poverty, do not have money, and live a life of prayer, temperance, and hard work. Exploitation is very foreign to what a monk does.
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Outside of the church and what we teach and believe, the bible is always taken out of context.
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There is no vain imagining or clever reasoning of man that can undermine and overthrow The Truth.
The Truth is God.
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@Juice
The God we believe in is The Ultimate Reality.
It is self refuting to deny God. It is like saying, "It is the truth that there is no truth!"
All atheist arguments are contingent on a heterodox understanding of what God Is.
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@Tradesecret
You don't know how we understand or believe things because you are leaning on your own understanding. Your reasoning is not the church's reasoning. Nor is your reasoning what the church teaches.
You certainly don't understand how authority in our church works.
My submission to the church is certainly less vain glorious than starting my own church.
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each teach the common tenants of the Gospel as understood in the bible from the early church on - and in respect of the the important creeds from the legitimate ecumenical councils.
Certainly not the case. The church itself is an object of faith.
That is why in the creed we profess "One Holy Catholic Apostolic Church"
The church fathrrs did not understand this as your church falsely re-interprets.
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We certainly do not share the same faith. Calvinist teachings are perverted from orthodoxy.
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@Tradesecret
If you want unity, become orthodox. Otherwise, there is no unity between us, your church is under anathema.
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@Tradesecret
According to your faulty reasoning, but not reality.
We wouldn't say that 2 Muslims were not married. They are not married in the church. It wouldn't be a sacramental marriage. They still have some type of marriage.
We wouldn't say that 2 Muslims were not married. They are not married in the church. It wouldn't be a sacramental marriage. They still have some type of marriage.
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@ebuc
To say that you do not have free will is to blame God for making you do evil.
This is a very impious way of going about things. It is also not the correct attitude one should have in their relationship with God, who gives grace to the humble and resists the proud.
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@RoderickSpode
Peter repented.
The problem with eternal security is that it leads people to arrogantly boast of their own salvation, which they themselves don't truly know they have. It also very easily leads to a dead faith without works(no faith) and even a dead conscience that feels no conviction from sin.
Walking with God necessitates a life of repentence. Which means to confess when you sin, and turn away from evil.
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@Tradesecret
Not only do we not consider your church's sacraments invalid, but we consider your church heretical, as did the fathers of the ecumenical councils.
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@3RU7AL
Which flavor of ice cream one prefers is not a moral issue.
Temperance in eating ice cream is a moral issue.
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@3RU7AL
Whether the string are visible or not, the puppet master acts with impunity.
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When The Truth became incarnate, it gave reality to all things.
When The Incarnate Truth became death and rose again, death itself was conquered, and all things that came to be and ceased to be rose up again with Him. All that was, is, and will ever be will be present at the ressurection of all things, where the very Light of Truth that is paradise to all who put their trust in Him will be the same fire of hell that burns those who preferred unrighteousness to The Truth.
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If there is existence, there must be an Ultimate Reality that precedes existence.
The universe is temporal. Before time even, there would have had to have been an Ultimate Reality.
Even if the universe has always existed temporally, God is pre-eternal. That is, existing before time. Before, not in a temporal sense, but in being necessary for time to exist.
The best argument for God is recognizing what God is rather than trying to arrive to a conclusion of God through reason. If God is recognized as The Ultimate Reality, it is irrational to require reason or evidence to validate God.
The fact that anything exists at all is proof of God. Your experience scientifically proves that there is some form of existence. If existence as you perceive it exists, then existence as it truly is by necessity must exist. Even if you are a naive realist who takes existence as you perceive it as being existence as it truly is, the fact isn't changed.
Reality in the truest sense is God.
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@Castin
That just sounds like some authoritarian bullshit to me. The exact kind of authoritarian bullshit that caused the Protestant movement to begin with.
There has never been a time in the history of the church where congregations apart from the church were considered Christian. Rather, they would be recognized as heretics.
Whether it appeals to your personal sense of aesthetics is largely irrelevent.
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@Tradesecret
If you were to enter the church, a bishop may make acceptable your baptism in Chrismation, but apart from the Apostolic church there are no valid sacraments.
I also don't believe the church would say you were in sin for being married while not in the church.
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I don't know, every time you come in here calling Protestants heretics of the "true church" it kind of makes me like them more.
Well, the truth doesn't always conform to our prejudices about what it should be.
I mean, wow. "You were not really baptized." Was he not really saved, then?
If there was a singular moment of salvation, the scriptures would not say to "work out your salvation with fear ans trembling" to those who are already in the church.
Protestants who teach otherwise are not expressing the orthodox or Christian position.
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@Stephen
I start my novitiate sometime around March.
If you become a catechuman, you will be educated in the faith so that you can make an informed decision about becoming a Christian.
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@3RU7AL
Rather, it reduces mankind to cattle.
Not being able to blame oneself is maladaptive.
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@3RU7AL
As you know, this is an absurd question.
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@Stephen
Go to an Orthodox Church.
Ask to become a catechuman.
Do everything you are told.
Get baptised and Chrismated into the Orthodox Church.
Be faithful.
Anyone who tells you of a Christianity apart from the church or apart from the holy orders of Orthodoxy's apostolic succession is giving you wrong information.
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@Amoranemix
Mopac 386The Truth isGod.[101]As atheism is adenial of Absolute Truth or Ultimate Reality, it is the position ofnihilism.[102]Nihilismdemolishes morality. Anything built off nihilism is like a housebuilt on sand. Morality becomes a matter of convenience for whomeverhas the ability to excercise authority.[103]
[101] What do you mean ?(The Truth is God)
I mean that The Ultimate Reality is God. That is, God is what is ultimately real. The singular reality, The Truth.
[102] Can you prove that ? (Atheism is denial of absolute truth, the position of nihilism)
As God is The Ultimate Reality, to be an atheist towards this God is very naturally the position of nihilism.
Nietzsche himself, who was instrumental in bringing nihilism to the forefront of philosophy said...
"That there is no truth; that there is no absolute state of affairs-no 'thing-in-itself.' This alone is Nihilism, and of the most extreme kind."
[103] If morality becomes a matter of convencience, then, contrary to what you claimed, it is not demolished.
It certainly is, because this is not morality. This is arbitrariness. From the orthodox standpoint, morality has everything to do with one's relationship with The Truth. If The Truth doesn't exist, there is no way of operating that can be properly called moral.
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@Theweakeredge
Really where I am coming from is that if we don't establish common ground on what terms mean, it is impossible to present proof. After all, we are not talking about the same thing.
What is spirit? It is like breathe. Like breathe in that it is animating. It moves. So what is The Holy Spirit? It is The Truth that gives life to all that exists. By life, I mean what animates it. This Holy Spirit we call a hypostasis, or an underlying reality. Jesus Christ himself, any time he mentions The Holy Spirit, within the same breathe he always calls it "The Spirit of Truth". The Holy Spirit is The Truth that animates.
When we begin our prayers, it always starts with this one...
"Heavenly king, the comforter, the Spirit of Truth who art everywhere present and filleth all things, treasurely of all good and giver of life... come and abide in us, cleansing us from every stain, oh Good One."
The "Ousia" or essence of The Holy Spirit is "Truth".
The "Logos" or Word is Truth, and when The Word takes flesh and dwells among us, The Spirit that is Truth confesses throuses Saint James the Just,
"Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.
Of his own will begat he us with The Word of Truth.."
The Word is Truth. The Spirit is Truth. These two hypostases are one in "ousia", The Truth. The Word and Breath confess The Father, who is also one with them in that He is Truth. But He is The Singularity, The Truth set apart from all as being without comparison. Where the duality of this and that is now made singular in What Is. Where The Truth is set apart as The Purest Light, where no darkness can dwell. Being united to His Will, The Holy Spirit and The Incarnate Word share in His Divinity. What is Divinity? The Ultimate Reality. God The Father is One with His Word and His Spirit.
To confess that God is One with His Word and Spirit is to confess The Holy Trinity. To make confession of The Holy Trinity is to say that Undefiled Wisdom has given birth to The Incarnate Truth. To confess that The Truth became incarnate is to confess that God Is With Us. To confess that God Is With Us is to confess that The Uncreated and The Uncreated have been united in One Hypostasis, the Hypostasis of The Son. To confess the Hypostasis of The Son is to confess Jesus Christ as having come in the flesh.
If you confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh, you are acknowledging that All That Is, Ever Was, and Ever Shall Be is united to Divinity, that death has been trampled, that all will be resurrected in unity with God. That the Same Divine Light that fills all things has even filled the grave itself and raised all dead things alive. That this same Saving Light will be the bliss of heaven to Life. This same Life will be The Fire that eternally burns death. Eternally burning death because the present of The Light of Truth reveals all things, being the death of death.
To believe and confess this is to give witness to the ressurection of Christ.
To abide in the ressurection of Christ is to worship God in Spirit and in Truth. Worshiping God in Spirit and Truth is living The Trinity, which is The Eternal Way of Truth.
To abide in The Person of Christ. To walk humbly with God.
The Person of Christ is The Church. The visible body of The Incarnate Truth being as the human physis or that has been made one in hypostasis with The Divine physis.
The Son of The Father, as The Holy Spirit spoke through the prophets.
The Ultimate Reality. The One True God.
Orthodox Christianity. The Orthodox Catholic Church. The Virgin of humble and undefiled wisdom that through The Holy Spirit conceived and gave birth to The Truth Incarnate, Jesus Christ.
To the glory of God The Father.
On that note, it is the season leading up to the nativity of Christ. I will be gone til Christmas at least. Shouldn't be posting here during that time.
May you find Christ.
The universe is defined by Oxford as "All existing matter and space considered as a whole."
We
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@Tradesecret
Lord Jesus Christ son of God, have mercy on us sinners.
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@Theweakeredge
"Observable universe"
Right there, these words limit reality to what has been observed.
But it is a scientific fact that there is more to reality than what has been observed. There is plenty that has not been observed that certainly exists. That should not be controversial.
Who knows the thoughts of a man? Who can read a man's heart? Their intentions? This is the realm of soul. It is no strange thing. The soul is the psyche. That is where psychology comes from.
There is nothing extraordinary about what I am saying. It is simply a matter of not being presumptuous, which leads to superstition.
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@Theweakeredge
I recall what is written by the ancient Chinese sage...
"Truthful words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not truthful. Good words are not persuasive; persuasive words are not good. He who knows has no wide learning; he who has wide learning does not know."
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@Theweakeredge
I can't help that you feel the way you do, but I do not feel convicted about the way I am engaging you.
If you feel this way, what can I do but ask that you forgive me? I say what I say out of love, not ego. Who am I? A nobody.
I still maintain the verity of my words. They are not even just my words, it is what has been passed down. It is my intent to faithfully speak of what has been passed down. I cannot compromise on this, because to compromise truth is to destroy it.
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@Tradesecret
Then you should repent of saying things like "There will be homosexual people in heaven.", because a repentent sodomite is not a homosexual.
"It is reported commonly that there is fornication among you, and such fornication as is not so much as named among the Gentiles, that one should have his father's wife. And ye are puffed up, and have not rather mourned, that he that hath done this deed might be taken away from among you."
If we should mourn for someone who sleeps with his own mother as someone who is to be taken away from us, that is, to be denied the kingdom, it is certainly the same with sodomites.
"...if any man that is called a brother be a fornicator, or covetous, or an idolater, or a railer, or a drunkard, or an extortioner; with such an one no not to eat.....put away from among yourselves that wicked person."
The so called "progressive Christians" are liars, not only to those who they encourage in their sin by calling such behavior no sin, but even liars about their Christianity. They are certainly not Christian who teach these things.
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@Theweakeredge
You are a 16 year old. You haven't even finished high school. You make pretense of having an education because you are arrogant, not because you are educated.
It would be better for your own education to abandon this idea that you are educated, and adopt a more humble approach.
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@Tradesecret
So lets make it clear then.
An unrepentent and practicing homosexual is an idolater, and has no place in the Kingdom of God.
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