@thoughtgypsy --
I appreciate that you took the time to articulate your response to me in a well-thought out and rational manner, so I hope that my response will be likewise measured. I'll address various relevant sections of your response, one at a time, though I'll have to copy-paste from your post because I don't know how to break up the reply-quote thing on these kinds of forums. Please bear with my boomer-tier incompetence with technology and hopefully the results will be worth it
You wrote:
“Where the resistance arises is the sentiment that only
their path is the right one, that the people on other paths must be blind, stupid, or immoral, and those who want to discuss the merits of different paths are trying to lead others to ruin. This sentiment is implied in your post, and comes across much in the same way as a smarmy ivy-league professor virtue signals their disdain for "backward Christians. This sentiment is dangerous, because it dismisses the life experiences and wisdom of anyone who does not subscribe to exactly the same belief as you. It leads to arrogance and the failure of critical thinking.’”
Whereas you chose the words “blind, stupid, or immoral,” I would choose words more akin to “lost,” “seeking,” or “misguided.” I don’t attribute malice to most of the people who disagree with my faith (Eastern Orthodox Christianity), though this depends on the person and their motivations of course.
Rather than “dismissing the life experiences and wisdom” of others, or having a “failure of critical thinking,” my current outlook is the result of a lifelong search - often if not usually in exactly the wrong place - for spiritual truth. Many Orthodox Christians, both laity and canonized Saints alike, found Orthodoxy at the END of the journey. St. Augustine (my patron saint) was a powerful lawyer who liked orgies and had a child with his concubine. St. Cyprian was the most prolific and notorious sorcerer in Antioch. St. Mary of Egypt’s promiscuity put even that of most modern “liberated” women to shame. St. Moses the Black took refuge in a monastery because he was hiding from people he’d robbed along the road. Father Seraphim Rose was a dedicated student of Rene Guenon and eastern philosophy…yet all of these people, and countless more, eventually were drawn to God enough to find the Church which the Apostles planted.
Of course there are Orthodox Christians who are born into it, never think about it, never ask questions, and just blindly obey and accept whatever they’re told. In a certain sense, they’re usually protected from spiritual harm for doing so (as long as they actually live by it as well). But many of us are not like that, and critically take apart each and every thing to see whether it holds up. Though I detest Jordan Peterson, he was correct in saying that if you really believe something, you should subject it to complete destruction by any means possible - really do your best to disprove it. Only if and when you can’t should you accept it as true. That’s what I’ve done with Orthodoxy, so in my opinion it’s actually an expression of humility and truth rather than than one of arrogance and a failure of logic.
You then wrote:
“To me, the greatest danger for most men is the rejection of all personal accountability. The self-worship that's pushed by modern culture, where every man and woman is their own god, and people can do whatever they want as long as they get away with it, not because it's the right thing. This moral relativism leads to the breakup of society, where psychopaths can operate with impunity, where love is a transaction, where people are soulless animals ready to kill or betray everyone else for the right price.
The path to God requires us to understand that we are imperfect. That we must be honest with ourselves about all the awful things we have done, or are capable of doing. That we must continually face our demons, and learn to overcome them. We must hold ourselves and our family accountable, and call on others to do the same. We must do what is right, regardless of the personal or financial cost, because this is the only way humanity will overcome evil.”
I completely agree with this, and it’s totally in line with the Orthodox worldview.
You then wrote:
“We can see the result of our failure to do this all around us today. There is a great evil pervading modern society which must be answered. There are millions, if not billions, of people trying to answer it. It has been part of the human condition since humanity has existed. Many groups have claimed to have the one and true answer to it, but the world we find ourselves in today has shown that they failed.”
Yes, but has Orthodoxy failed? Can you name one single institution, from the beginning of creation until the present day, that has lasted 2,000 years without changing one iota of its theology or core beliefs? Even our own country, or at least what’s left of it, went from the top of the world to a clown-tier dystopia in barely 200 years. It was a complete failure of an experiment, because it was ultimately based on the rejection of authority and the usurpation of divine rule by man’s reason. The Church is not just a group of people trying to figure something out - it's what we call “theanthropic,” it is the Body of Christ and as such is composed of both the divine and the human. It originates in eternity but is composed, at least in part, of what is temporary. Since the roots of the Church are in Heaven, it cannot ever fail or fall apart to the degree that literally everything else on the planet does. Christ promised us the gates of Hell would not overcome His Church - and they have not.
The 40,000 or so various groups of Protestants all believe different things while claiming to “just go by the clear teachings of Scripture.” It is in total disarray, because it started in total disarray. Two excellent books to read, if anyone’s curious, are “Orthodoxy And Heterodoxy” by Father Andrew Stephen Damick, and “Rock And Sand” by Father Josiah Trenham. You will never see the various factions of Christianity the same way again (and Father Josiah is the kind of guy that every red pill Christian man wants to be: he has a wonderful wife, ten kids, is a successful author and podcaster and speaker, etc.)
You then wrote:
“On the other hand, there are aspects of the bible which sound like they came from the mind of a group of genocidal psychopaths. Anyone who has read the bible should be able to recognize the difference in tone between the books that were written by an aggressive group led by priests who practiced human sacrifice, and the books which were written by enlightened Greeks. I think that a lot of problems Christianity has experienced over its history stem from attempting to rationalize, reconcile, and sometimes glorify its oldest books.
The messages simply don't fit together. To say this as a Christian leads other Christians to brand you as a heretic, or at the very least, a subversive who is trying to divide the flock. “
I understand what you mean, because I went through this phase on my way to Orthodoxy. In fact, I even considered myself a Cathar for a while (a medieval form of gnostic dualism that denied the same authorship of both the Old and New Testaments). In fact, people have been saying this as early as we have records of Christianity’s interaction with the world: a guy named Marcion put together his own canon, back in the second century, in which he did the whole “Old Testament God is bad, New Testament God is good” thing and tried to reconcile one set of Scriptures that he thought made more sense than what he was taught.
There is a number of problems with that approach, though. The primary one, of course, is that Christ and the Apostles very clearly and explicitly said that Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of the Old Testament God’s covenant with the people of Israel. Over and over in the New Testament you see the authors and speakers talking about this in its various aspects; so to believe that the Old and New Testament God are somehow different is to essentially deny the very teachings of both.
The other major issue is a lack of proper interpretation. While the Church does interpret the Old Testament literally, that is only one of four layers of interpretation that we’ve historically used. Most of the time, we see all the “fighting and killing enemies” stuff as a prefiguration of the Christian’s war with his or her demons and passions. I’m not sure what you mean by priests practicing human sacrifice or the later parts of the Bible being written by “enlightened Greeks;” the same group of people wrote both, with the exception of St. Luke whose ethnic origins I’m not sure about. St. Paul and St. John were both clearly familiar with Greek philosophy of course, using terms straight out of Aristotle and Plato throughout the New Testament, but they were both Jewish men enlightened not by philosophy, but by the Holy Spirit. The philosophy they espoused was just a means to an end of spreading the Gospel and strengthening the flock in Christ.
You then wrote:
“From the beginning, certain books were included or rejected. Others were labeled heretical. Aspects of the religion were mixed with an ancient trinitarian religion, Zoroastrianism, Mithraism, among others.”
There were lots of documents circulating around in the first century, and yes - it took a long time for the Church to decide what was Biblical canon and what was not. There were impostors, frauds, and gnostics all writing things from the very beginning in order to try and draw the faithful astray. They didn’t have WiFi back then, so some of these things could travel far and wide before the Church caught wind of it. It took just under 400 years of debates for the current set of Biblical books to be canonized, and even the Book of Revelation wasn’t particularly loved by a lot of ancient Christian bishops and thinkers. Things take a while to work out sometimes, and it’s even harder to do when your religion is illegal to practice until 313 A.D. So keep that in mind as well - when people talk about “how much the Church changed in the 4th century,” there was that whole “suddenly they could talk about it in public without being thrown to lions” thing to consider. So a lot of what was planted in seed form was unable to fully sprout and grow until it was made legal by St. Constantine’s Edict of Milan.
As to the comment about “ancient trinitarian religion, Zoroastrianism, Mithraism” etc, none of this actually plays out when you dig deeply enough into their belief systems. There was nothing like a “one God in three Persons” belief system in any of the ancient pagan religions, though there were other forms of “triads” that edgy YouTubers like to mistakenly equate with the Christian Trinity. I believed what you wrote whole-heartedly for a while, especially when I was deeply involved in Freemasonry - where that kind of thinking is extremely common (and to a certain extent, all but explicitly taught in the various degrees of the Scottish Rite in particular).
The ancient Church fully acknowledged and appreciated the truth to be found in other religions, and St. Justin Martyr referred to this phenomenon as “spermatikos Logos” - the seeds of the Word. Jay Dyer and I talked about this at length on the interview I did with him last October, which you will find on YouTube if you put both our names in the search bar.
However, those old beliefs were never equated with being “just as true” as Christianity; they were pieces and shadows of what would only be fulfilled in Christ. St. Justin wrote in the mid second century, so it’s not like these are new ideas that no Christian has ever thought about or considered before - it’s all been hashed out, a long time ago, and the deceptions just keep popping up because very few people take the time to read through Church history and apologetics.
Finally, you wrote:
“On a metaphysical level, I believe rules should be self-evident, or easily understood with an explanation. If the rule cannot be explained other than it is heresy to not follow it, where does that leave us? It creates an environment where men blindly follow others without knowing what they're doing or why they do it. They become easy to mislead, and soon find themselves lost in the dark, without a memory of how to get back.”
Again - I do not believe in, and never have believed in, blind obedience to anyone or anything just because they tell me I “have to” or am “supposed to” believe in it. I occasionally get into arguments with other Orthodox Christians about this, because I do what I mentioned earlier - I subject each aspect of what I’m being told to total destruction, to the best of my ability.
And you know what the weirdest thing is? It keeps proving itself to be true. If you engage with these issues honestly, openly, and with the attitude that you will humbly change your mind if your argument ends up holding no water, then I genuinely believe that you will see Orthodoxy is the purest available form of Christian teaching and is not just some refigured form of paganism as I once believed. Our metaphysics are the “ne plus ultra” of the field: there is nothing beyond it. St. Maximos the Confessor, and St. Dionysius the Areopagite whose work he heavily relied on , have explained the Universe in a God-centered way that accounts for all things and leaves nothing untouched or unaccounted for in any way.
I have spent over a decade studying religion and philosophy and have never seen anything close to it. Everything else has holes in it - except for this. In my opinion, it’s the umbrella under which everything else makes sense and fits into place.
I know this was a long post - hopefully the forum will let me put it all up in one piece - but I wanted to give you the best explanation I could of why I’ve said what I’ve said, as well as giving some helpful resources if you choose to explore these topics further. Cheers and happy Thursday