orthodoxy

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

Heresy would like to think of itself as 'invented Truth'. But of course, all Reason and Logic would agree that no man can ever create Truth; he can only discover it. If heresy were ever at all beneficial, God would use it really to bring one right back to Truth, as countless 'inventions' have brought men to discovery.

A marriage which does not constantly crucify its own selfishness and self-sufficiency, which does not __ie to itself_ that it may point beyond itself, is not a Christian marriage. The real sin of marriage today is not adultery or lack of __djustment_ or __ental cruelty._ It is the idolization of the family itself, the refusal to understand marriage as directed toward the Kingdom of God. This is expressed in the sentiment that one would __o anything_ for his family, even steal. The family has here ceased to be for the glory of God; it has ceased to be a sacramental entrance into his presence. It is not the lack of respect for the family, it is the idolization of the family that breaks the modern family so easily, making divorce its almost natural shadow. It is the identification of marriage with happiness and the refusal to accept the cross in it. In a Christian marriage, in fact, three are married; and the united loyalty of the two toward the third, who is God, keeps the two in an active unity with each other as well as with God. Yet it is the presence of God which is the death of the marriage as something only __atural._ It is the cross of Christ that brings the self-sufficiency of nature to its end. But __y the cross, joy entered the whole world._ Its presence is thus the real joy of marriage. It is the joyful certitude that the marriage vow, in the perspective of the eternal Kingdom, is not taken __ntil death parts,_ but until death unites us completely.

Most of Jesus_ life is told through the four Gospels of the New Testament, known as the Canonical gospels, written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. These are not biographies in the modern sense but accounts with allegorical intent. They are written to engender faith in Jesus as the Messiah and the incarnation of God, and not to provide factual data about Jesus__ life. This left the door of exaggeration open. And through that door all kinds of mystical non-sense crept in and made place right alongside the good philosophical teachings of Jesus.

I will not glory, even in my orthodoxy, for even that can be a snare if I make a god of it... Let us rejoice in Him in all His fulness and in Him alone.

Jesus recognized that God within him and became Christ - so did Siddhartha Gautama and became Buddha - so did I - and so can you.

If we ask a random orthodox religious person, what is the best religion, he or she would proudly claim his or her own religion to be the best. A Christian would say Christianity is the best, a Muslim would say Islam is the best, a Jewish would say Judaism is the best and a Hindu would say Hinduism is the best. It takes a lot of mental exercise to get rid of such biases.

Christ did to the Jewish orthodoxy, what Buddha did to the Hindu orthodoxy.

Mother Nature gave Jesus, the Son of Nature the biological elements to see things that nobody else could, or rather nobody else would. And you are the child of Nature as well. As such you have all the powers within you, just like Jesus, to rise above the laws of the society that tend to bind your conscience with textual mysticism and fanaticism.

It is possible for a Christian to be perfectly orthodox and yet to be defeated, and to be living a defeated and a useless life.

Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty__r indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne__ thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or __urocentric_; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the __adical_; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly __ommitt

[T]he imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.

The very fact of having fixed conclusions to strive for in orthodox belief does not render the Christian philosopher dogmatic but rather intellectually fruitful, willing to take and follow reason further than the putatively undogmatic unbelieving philosopher

I will admit that we as young rebels always wanted fundamentalists to understand our take on their religion, but rarely, if ever, the other way around. The fundamentalists are the real artists. If you saw only a masterpiece of an original painting and someone threw a splash of red across it saying that their version is better, you would be offended too.

The creative members of an orthodoxy, any orthodoxy, ultimately outgrow their disciplines.

What is the basic difference between saying 'I know that God exists' and saying 'I know that love exists'?

(About changing faith) At our best, Christians embrace it, leaving enough space within orthodoxy for God to surprise us every now and then.

...The life of the parents is the only thing that makes good children. Parents should be very patient and __aintlike_ to their children. They should truly love their children. And the children will share this love! For the bad attitude of the children, says father Porphyrios, the ones who are usually responsible for it are their parents themselves. The parents don__ help their children by lecturing them and repeating to them __dvices_, or by making them obeying strict rules in order to impose discipline. If the parents do not become __aints_ and truly love their children and if they don__ struggle for it, then they make a huge mistake. With their wrong and/or negative attitude the parents convey to their children their negative feelings. Then their children become reactive and insecure not only to their home, but to the society as well...