By Archpriest Symeon Elias
My comments will be in bold/italics.
V. The Church in the face of contemporary challenges
10. The Church of Christ today finds herself confronted by extreme or even provocative expressions of the ideology of secularization, inherent in political, cultural and social developments. A basic element of the ideology of secularization has ever been and continues to be the full autonomy of man from Christ and from the spiritual influence of the Church, by the arbitrary identification of the Church with conservatism and by the historically unjustified characterization of the Church as an alleged impediment to all progress and development. [Really? Where does this flat earth picture of the mentality of the Church come from?
Did it just develop in a vacuum?
Has the Church played any roll in creating it?
Or has there been a consistent overarching plan of deconstruction, an insurgency inside the Church to subvert it, and an overt attack on all things Christian in the public square, starting with the massive lying propaganda, created by the Protestants of Northern Europe, with the invention of the printing press, who even sent disinformation agents to operate in Constantinople. [LINK] and publish lying propaganda purported to be the words of Eastern Saints. - Think! How can you explain this radical autonomy you describe, which in history corresponds with the co-called Enlightenment Movement, and all it has produced, which in the 17th century created the first the World Revolutionary movement, that brought upheaval all over Europe, and North America, and the 19th century created Marxism and spawned more revolution creating Marxist Socialism and Marxist Communism, that brought us both Nazi Germany, The Communist Soviet Union and Communist China, and hundreds more bloody events in history, and when that failed to create the utopia the Luciferians (Enlightened ones) had dreamed, they created a second plan, the deconstruction of Christian Civilization and the Church by mean of Cultural Marxism, the systematic Globalization of Cultural Marxist ideas, some of which YOU "Holy Fathers" express in this document, expressed with a mere facade of "the Gospel" and a whiff of Orthodox Catholic Tradition.
After a thousand years of silence all you can offer is a shallow assessment of symptoms without identifying the disease, or the mechanism by which the disease is delivered to Orthodox Christians and indeed to the people of the world? You can't identify it, because you speak inside the artifact of Globalism, which the Cultural Marxist have created for you, and inside that paradigm you want to yourselves appear "enlightened" and "relevant." You have stated that in this document, that you are "speaking to the whole world." However, if you cannot, as in are unable to, answer these questions for all to see, most of what you have said in this document is without context:
(1) As to Culture, Society and Governance, Where are we?
(2) How did we get here? - This second question is so very important and one you have totally neglected as you make a rather shallow anatomization of the "state of things." You have successfully told me that my arm is broken. I am left in a quandary as to how I broke my arm. Okay, my arm is broken, what must I do to mend my broken arm? Can you answer that question without the knowledge that someone put my arm in a vice and broke it. Can I truly go about healing my arm before I confront the reason and source of my injury, that being a criminal gang purposely injuring me? Do I dare try therapy on my broken arm, while ignoring the violence perpetrated upon me as they are breaking my second arm?] In contemporary secularized societies, man, cut off from God, identifies his freedom and the meaning of his life with absolute autonomy and with release from his eternal destiny, resulting in a series of misunderstandings and deliberate misinterpretations of the Christian tradition. [Really?
What are these deliberate misinterpretations of the Christian tradition.
From whence came these misinterpretations?
Have these misinterpretation infected the Church itself, like all heretical thoughts and errors do? Or is this just a sickness outside the bounds of the Church? ] The bestowal on man from above of freedom in Christ and his advancement “to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Eph 4.13) is thus seen to go against man’s tendencies for self-salvation. Christ’s sacrificial love is regarded as incompatible with individualism while the ascetic character of the Christian ethos is judged as an unbearable challenge to the happiness of the individual.[What is Liberty - LINK]
The identification of the Church with conservatism, incompatible with the advancement of civilization, is arbitrary and improper, since the consciousness of the identity of the Christian peoples bears the indelible imprint of the diachronic contribution of the Church, [The contribution of Christendom to society is boundless, regards science and philosophy, in ignorance to most scientists and philosophers, they stand on the shoulders of creative and intelligent Christians. Outside the paradigm of Western Christian Civilization there are no parallels. ] not only in their cultural heritage, but also in the healthy development of secular civilization more generally, [Why do you bow to the ideal of Secular Civilization, when instead the Church should strive for the toleration of secularist inside Christian Civilization. Is that thought too primitive for you, too much of a stretch for you, viewing as you do, from your perspective inside the philosophical constraints Cultural Marxism has built. After all it would be Politically Incorrect, not to bow to the superiority of the grand achievement of the Luciferians, that being Secular Civilization. To say that a Christian should desire a Christian Home, a Christian community, a Christian Culture and a Christian Society, even a Christian civilization, smacks of knuckle dragging Conservatism, doesn't it?] since God placed man as steward of the divine creation and as a co-worker with Him in the world. The Orthodox Church sets against the “man-god’ of the contemporary world the ‘God-man’ as the ultimate measure of all things. “We do not speak of a man who has been deified, but of God who has become man” (John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith iii, 2 PG 94.988). [Yet doesn't this bow to "secular civilization" which is built upon the "man-god" contradict these last pronouncements?] The Church reveals the saving truth of the God-man and His body, the Church, as the locus and mode of life in freedom, “speaking the truth in love” (cf. Eph 4.15), and as participation even now on earth in the life of the resurrected Christ. The divine-human character [“not of the world” (John 18.36)] of the Church, which nourishes and guides her presence and witness “in the world,” is incompatible with any kind of conformation of the Church to the world (cf. Rom 12.2). [Yet, you participate with, cooperate with Cultural Marxist groups claiming to be "ecological groups" and you helped to create the Cultural Marxist World Council of Churches, which has fostered the creation of the Cultural Marxist's new Ecumenical One World Religion. You claim to participate as "witness" when in fact you are an active participant and have to hold co-responsibility, in the construction of another religious Tower of Babel. You bowed to this Cultural Marxist Idol, mimicking the format of the heretical Vatican II Council of the Globalist Vaticanists. You have already conformed. (1) By calling a Great and Holy Pan Orthodox Council, to make pronouncements in a worldly fashion, to the world, like a meeting of the G20, or a U.N. Commission, (2) by turning the focus of the Council toward the secularist civilization, and speaking inside the Cultural Marxist Paradigm, instead of arming YOUR people with the tools to SMASH the false consciousness the Cultural Marxist have succeeded in spreading all across the world. You have neglected to provide these tools, to the struggling people of the Orthodox Church, who are knowingly or unknowingly victims, struggling against and/or suffering the attacks of the "strong arm gang" you will not name. (3) In making papist like claims for this council, and conversely democratic claims for this council, YOU have already conformed.]
11. Through the contemporary development of science and technology, our life is changing radically. [Who owns and controls the science and technology? There is "intelligence" behind the trends of science and technology. These "advancements" are not introduced into the world by happenstance. Inventions do not appear in the world by ideas bubbling to the top by the force of creative free men, men at liberty. Rather all advanced technology is controlled by the Globalist State which is comprised of the Criminal World Bankers, who have operated multiple genocides across the decades, whose goal is publicly stated to be population reduction through the violence of corporations and governments they control.]
And what brings about a change in the life of man demands discernment on his part, since, apart from significant benefits, such as the facilitation of everyday life, the successful treatment of serious diseases and space exploration, we are also confronted with the negative consequences of scientific progress. [The Beast is Loosed and it is Technology] The dangers are the manipulation of human freedom, the use of man as a simple means, the gradual loss of precious traditions, and threats to, or even the destruction of, the natural environment. [Without exaggeration you have to add to this the possible loss of the human species, transmuted into something less than human.]
Unfortunately, science, by its very nature, does not possess the necessary means to prevent or address many of the problems it creates directly or indirectly. [You state this as if science exist as a creature, separate from the human drive for wealth and power. It does not.] Scientific knowledge does not motivate man’s moral will, and even though aware of the dangers, he continues to act as if unaware of them. [You see here you did personify science as a creature, referring to science as "he"] The answer to man’s serious existential and moral problems and to the eternal meaning of his life and of the world cannot be given without a spiritual approach. [Is "a" spiritual approach an Ecumenical/Globalist substitute for Life in Christ? Is this suggesting that any "spiritual approach" with some vague notion of the eternal is sufficient?]
12. In our age, there is a very prevalent enthusiasm for the impressive developments in the fields of Biology, Genetics and Neurophysiology. These represent scientific advances, the wide-ranging applications of which will, in all likelihood, create serious anthropological and moral dilemmas. [This is anachronistic language, when in FACT Christians Ethicists have been struggling with the preternatural effects of technology upon human existence for 130 years, starting with the scientific claims of the Fabian Marxist Eugenicist Movement, which began in earnest in the 1890s] The uncontrolled use of biotechnology at the beginning, during, and at the end of life, endangers its authentic fullness. Man is experimenting ever more intensively with his own very nature in an extreme and dangerous way. He is in danger of being turned into a biological machine, into an impersonal social unit or into a mechanical device of controlled thought. [Where this is all true, it is stated as if floating in space without a foundation where one may plant their feet, or without a schematic so one may view and examine the construction of this biological/technological and existential threat to humankind. First, let us stop talking about Science as if it is a cognitive being. SCIENCE is NOT doing this. SCIENCE is not a person. SCIENCE does not posses moral values. SCIENCE does not posses a will. SCIENCE is a discipline and CRAFT in the control of powerful PEOPLE. Modern Science cannot be separated from modern political power, and later in this document you are rather self-congratulatory stating that "The Church does not involve herself with politics in the narrow sense of the term." Another vague obfuscation. ALL science, ALL technology, ALL philosophy and ALL religion is ultimately political. Jesus is the greatest political figure in Human History. His Body the Church had been a force of not just society and culture, but political power for centuries. When the Church abdicated this Political Roll, the Ethical restraints on technology and science were left to Satan, the destroyer of humankind, in the person of the Enlightened Ones (the Luciferians) who OWN and Control the governments, corporations and and the Science. You do not want to confront, or maybe you do not have the understanding to confront this reality of Science from the edifice, the structure created by Cultural Marxism. Maybe you don't want to appear unenlightened and out of touch with the Zeitgeist, the mindset, of the world." Romans 12:1 & 2. Surely, to ignore the means by which humanity is threatened by SCIENCE cannot fit the "good, acceptable and perfect will of God." And we haven't even touched upon the purposeful hoarding and suppressing of life engendering technologies that threaten corporate profits and government's economic control. But then again these subjects are probably too "political" for such Holy gentlemen.]
The Orthodox Church cannot remain on the sidelines of discussions about such momentous anthropological, ethical and existential matters.[Then why have you side stepped? You have only named symptom after symptom without the slightest reference to the sicknesses, and the delivery mechanisms that carry the sicknesses.] She rests firmly on divinely taught criteria and reveals the relevance of Orthodox anthropology in the face of the contemporary overturning of values. Our Church can and must express in the world her prophetic consciousness in Christ Jesus, who with His Incarnation assumed the whole man and is the ultimate prototype for the renewal of the human race. She projects the sacredness of life and man’s character as a person from the very moment of conception. The right to be born is the first of human rights. The Church as a divine-human society, in which each human constitutes a unique being destined for personal communion with God, and she resists every attempt to objectify man, to turn him into a measurable quantity. No scientific achievement is permitted to compromise man’s dignity and his divine destination. Man is not defined only by his genes. [This is an excellent statement.]
Bioethics from an Orthodox point of view is founded on this basis. At a time of conflicting images of man, Orthodox bioethics, in opposition to secular autonomous and reductionist anthropological views, insists on man’s creation in God’s image and likeness and his eternal destiny. The Church thus contributes to the enrichment of the philosophical and scientific discussion of bioethical questions through her scriptural anthropology and the spiritual experience of Orthodoxy. [Again without naming Arius you cannot defeat him. - Reference statement in Part One]
13. In a global society, [Can you tell me where this Global Society exists? I see very distinct and different cultures and societies, and cannot for the life of me picture the "Global ONE" except in the imagination of the Globalist Cultural Marxists, who would make of every person a "citizen of the world." There is no true Global Society that does not rest in the Person of Christ. To speak of a conglomeration of secular, pagan, Christian, Jewish, Muslim societies as a Global Society, bows to the homogenizing language of Cultural Marxist Multiculturalism, where Culture and Religion is relegated to the museum and for anthropological study, and the Globalist unity is held in the person of the Oligarchs and the Globalist institutions that own and operate. The ONE percent who own more than FIFTY percent of the world's wealth see their world and power as a Global Society. This is an enemy of Christ and his Church. This is the reality of the enemy against which Christ battles, "not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of the world, against spiritual wickedness in high places."] oriented towards ‘having’ and individualism, the Orthodox Catholic Church presents the truth of life in and according to Christ, the truth freely made incarnate in the everyday life of each man through his works “till evening” (Ps 103), through which he is made co-worker of the eternal Father [“We are co-workers with God” (1 Cor 3.9)] and of His Son [“My Father is working still, and I am working” (John 5.17)]. The grace of God sanctifies in the Holy Spirit the works of the hands of the man who works together with God, revealing the affirmation in them of life and of human society. [This begs the question of the massive displacement of humans by technology. These noble words about work, ring hollow to the increasing societies of men who cannot earn a living by the sweat of his brow because every means of labor has been mechanized, robotized. I did a study in 1991 and proved that a single days operation of the largest combine, operated by one man, replaced some 24 thousand workers, by the production capacity of the 1700 harvester with a single blade and crowds of people to gather and tie the sheaths and to load them on vehicles. Like trends exist in every area of man's labor. So, there is a "gloss" created in the words you quote in scripture, a real challenge to their analogous meaning, since they were written in a time when a man's value, even if he was a slave was based upon what he could do, what he could produce. He thus had a place in society by virtue of the service to all society by his labor. When his labor is not needed for the survival of others, and he has become as the Cultural Marxist point out, "a useless eater" how do these words of labor apply to him? how can he make sense of them? I don't propose an answer, merely pointing out the shrinking context of the analogy of man's physical labor as analogy for his spiritual labor.] Christian asceticism is to be placed within this framework; [I would submit to you that many millions of Christians exist in Globalist produced poverty, and many millions in refugee camps, by a standard of forced asceticism few of your council could endure.] this differs radically from all dualistic asceticism that severs man from life and from his fellow man. Christian asceticism and the exercise of self-restraint, which connect man with the sacramental life of the Church, do not concern only the monastic life, but are characteristic of ecclesial life in all its manifestations, as a tangible witness to the presence of the eschatological spirit in the blessed life of the faithful. [I don't want to take away from this accurate description of Christian asceticism, as loving actions, engagement etc., vs, dualistic asceticism. This is quite frankly the difference between true religion and the sickness of religion.]
14. The roots of the ecological crisis are spiritual and ethical, inhering within the heart of each man. [This is a Cultural Marxist meme, parading as spiritual knowledge. The ecological crisis is spiritual and ethical, but it is NOT something "inhering within the heart of each man." For the most part such matters are in the purview of faceless corporations and derelict governments. To lay the burden of real ecological harm, and the Scientistic mythology of the Religious Ecological movement on each man, even worse, laying it on each CHRISTIAN person, is tantamount to the Judaizer laying the 613 commandments of the Moasic Law upon the Gentile Christian Believers. It is merely creating a false guilt construct, responsibility for what is beyond his means. The Cultural Marxist Ecology Movement is a modern expression of the mythology of GAIA, and has to be rejected in every way it is religious and mythological. True care for the environment, which is 80% clean water and clean air measures, and 20% agricultural precautions is to be commended and fostered in every way possible. But the failure of the Ecumenical Patriarchate to distinguish between what is true "ecological conservation" and what is the Scientism of Cultural Marxism is legend and known throughout the world and is frankly an embarrassment to Orthodox Christians who are not indoctrinated and deluded by the same Scientism. The pretension of Scientism are not exposed in this document, on this subject, and without it the pronouncements made, and cautions suggested about ecology are without context.] This crisis has become more acute in recent centuries on account of the various divisions provoked by human passions – such as greed, avarice, egotism and the insatiable desire for more – and by their consequences for the planet, as with climate change,[There has never been a period in human history when climates were not changing - this is more Cultural Marxist indoctrination. The theory of man made climate change, is the second iteration of the Global Warming Hoax, which was before that the threat of a new Ice Age, which in each instance is a Cultural Marxist Mechanism, designed for Globalist Redistribution of Wealth, further impoverishing the poor and further enriching the wealthy one percent. The history of Al Gore's Chicago Carbon Credit Bank, and the exposure of the NASA data that refute global warming and the purposeful manipulation of data by the U.N., Climatologists at East Anglia is clear. In the face of this Globalist fraud being discovered the Cultural Marxists being relentless, changed the name from "Global Warming" to "Climate Change" and continued to create their Globalist Wealth Redistribution Scheme. The previous participation of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, and the participation of the Council purporting to speak for Orthodox People around the world, in this Ecological Cultural Marxist scheme, is shameful, scandalous, and of the LIE and the LIAR.] which now threatens to a large extent the natural environment, our common “home”. The rupture in the relationship between man and creation is a perversion of the authentic use of God’s creation. [This mythology of man's threat to the earth is without scientific basis. And as for the threat being worse today, I wonder what the earth would look like, if the 7.3 billion inhabitants lived the primitive agrarian life of say 1800, with homes dumping soot from every chimney, where outhouses were the standard, and treatment of fresh water was unheard of and raw sewage was commonly dumped in streams. A great many things have been improved over time, and these things, including the automobile are ECOLOGICAL improvements. If the transportation needs of 7.3 billion people were met with the technology of 1800, man's effect upon the environment would be exponentially worse. This browbeating the common man, on the evidence of Cultural Marxist Scientism is simply shameful. What are the facts? The two countries that are the worse ecological offenders are never pressed on ecological matters. (India and China.) Why? The answer is simple because to pressure them does not fit the Cultural Marxist Agenda. ] The approach to the ecological problem on the basis of the principles of the Christian tradition demands not only repentance for the sin of the exploitation of the natural resources of the planet, namely, a radical change in mentality and behavior, but also asceticism as an antidote to consumerism, the deification of needs and the acquisitive attitude. [I agree here, but this can be stated as good stewardship, without the Cultural Marxist Mythologies, and Gaia guilting. But again we have to ask, can we approach the subject of consumerism without placing it in context. Consumption is a symptom. Is it merely a matter of man's greed, in the general sense, or a natural lust turned hostile with the invention of massive Mind Control Methods, first created in the early 20th century for Globalist Purposes, to swing public opinion to support World War One, which no population of any country wanted, the which Mind Manipulations science was adopted by the Corporatists, through Madison Avenue, the child of Edward Bernays, then adopted by both Hitler and Roosevelt for WWII, and Stalin in his great plan, and Mao in his Cultural Revolution, etc., etc. You keep exposing the "symptoms" but without understanding the disease, (you say greed) and the mechanisms by which the disease is delivered, in this day, is very sophisticated Mind Manipulation via powerful engines of media. Those unknowingly enslaved to it cannot be freed, without cognition, knowledge, consciousness of the tools used against them. What are they? How do they work? You dare not mention it, for fear of angering your corporatist supporters, the American CIA/State Department. ]
It also presupposes our greatest responsibility to hand down a viable natural environment to future generations and to use it according to divine will and blessing. In the sacraments of the Church, creation is affirmed and man is encouraged to act as a steward, protector and “priest” of creation, offering it by way of doxology to the Creator – “Your own of your own we offer to You in all and for all” – and cultivating a Eucharistic relationship with creation. This Orthodox, Gospel and Patristic approach also turns our attention to the social dimensions and the tragic consequences of the destruction of the natural environment.
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