Most of what I know about Catholicism I learned after becoming Orthodox. I've been seeing more Catholics here, which makes sense, as the history of Western thought is rooted in post-schism scholasticism, which eventually birthed rationalism and the Enlightenment and our modern presuppositions. So there is a sense that modern people will feel at home in the ancient expressions of the ideals we already have.
One worry I havr about the Catholic faith is that I see a lot of emphasis on miracles, which I think would astonish a lot of atheists and agnostics if they had the interest to look at it, and trust in the sources for those evidence. Hinduism is also known for this, and obviously occult practices and witchcraft is also real. But once you're past the point of incredulity, which I am, I would be interested in learning more about the framework that is used to discern between genuine holiness and deception.
Orthodoxy has a word for deception, "prelest", for example, and there are guidelines to not communicate with or pay attention to apparitions when they appear or to be skeptical of them, and to be mindful of whether the encounter is producing the fruit of repetance and humility, or if it produces pride— as a way of discerning if it is from God or something else. I have an orthodox friend who says thr miracle of Guadalupe which converted Mexico over night was genuine, but recent (relative to the age of the Church) saints displaying stigmata or the eucharist blossoming hear tissue in a test tube are treated with less eagerness. I'm not sure how this compares to the Holy Fire in Jerusalem, which is probably our most famous miracle.
I am also interested in the relationship between reason and trust, which I haven't figured out yet, since in the Christian worldview, reason is fallen, which I think denotes the danger of over-rationalizing the faith at least, but I am astonished by things like thr Christology unearthed by the Ecumenical Councils, which is only really motivated when the Church is forced to answer heresies with the Grace of correct explanations, so I don't quite understand the impulse to proactively crank the engines of reason, so to speak, to systemize things in the way the Latins have done.
This is the Orthodox perspective I've picked up in the past few years, but I am in awe of the feeling of irreducible belief that I think this touches on.
sorry, I was tempted to draw a connection between the coincidence of dustified steel recorded during a magnetic disturbance and the locations of megalithic sites, but I’m not committed to their connection. I find it fun to hypothesize but I don’t want to dismiss their achievements.
I think debates are interesting because it’s obvious that people are temporarily imprisoning any devastating arguments within their higher sense that something about it is wrong.
The attempt to “rationalize” and discover what this higher intuition is saying might look like rejecting reason, even if temporarily. But I think it underscores what is really meant by “rejecting reason”— that understanding the true meaning of a logical argument requires a vigilant process directed by a higher moral directive, to ensure nothing “evil” is laundered through it.
Maybe a “heresy” is simply that which is valid but not sound.
The ecumenical councils were in some ways the means by which they imprisoned and cut away what is valid (according to some presuppositions) to leave only what is sound (according to the presuppositions of the apostles).
It is the opposite of enlighenment carte-blanche thinking, to take a multivariate attack on delusion through reason anchored in a legacy of wisdom. Too bad the schism broke our understanding of this, but it is still preserved in Eastern Orthodoxy.
The differences between East and Rome are very substantive in my mind. The Holy Spirit operates in the Church differently (decentralized vs centralized), and they experience God differently (directly vs indirectly), and they even shape the Trinity differently, not to mention preservation vs development of doctrine.
To me, this means they differ on major categories: corporate, individual, divine, and temporal.
But consider how each sect defines unity and the criterion for uniting to others. In my mind, to simplify:
Evangelicals: we must agree to a common *subset* of beliefs
Catholics: we must agree to allow contradictory belief systems under the primacy of a single “politically” unifying belief
Orthodox: we must agree to unite under one belief system
> mortality is fundamentally ingrained in not just the human condition, but the fabric of our universe
church fathers say that creation fell because of the fall of man
> Without the finality of death, life seems to lose its meaning. Not only do we need to die, we are compelled to die, we should die
deadlines help. the soul is eternal and there is a deadline for the body
> [Job] somehow reconciles this tragic finality with transcendent faith
he later falls into despair when things get worse, who wouldn’t, but he is made well after he is humbled. this golden moment of humility forges him into a true person, winning him heaven not death
“If you die before you die, then when you die you won’t die.“ Death to the world is the last true rebellion.[1]
> "interpretations"... which are different from what the law literally says.
We have to remember that the letter and spirit of the law can grow apart over time, and loopholes are often gamed before that naturally happens anyway. So obviously we still need judges to keep the "spiritual" aspect of intent alive, so that evil isn't laundered through technicality.
"Literal" should really be a concrete thing, but it does feel strangely connected to a problem that has existed since Sola Scriptura, up to Gödel's theorem. I think about this everytime software and law collide. That article on "what color are your bits"[1] also comes to mind.
The St Nicholas Orthodox church sat at the base of the Twin Towers, because it was there for 100 years and they wouldn't take the money to rebuild it elsewhere. They probably served their last Divine Liturgy there on Sunday 9/9/01 as a last blessing before it was destroyed that Tuesday.
I was on a break at work reading a lot about 9/11 for some reason. Went back to fix an easy bug where our timestamps were printing wrong dates (milliseconds vs seconds) so I became curious what dates would show up if I added zeros in front of 1, to get a ballpark of where dates are. I freaked out after the ninth zero, you know, being so close to the event I was just reading about.