Church: Similar signals, similar noise.

I listened to this week's podcast from Orthoanalytika. Fr. Anthony Perkins and Fr. John Peck are Orthodox priests who talk about a lot of things, but the interesting thing is that they sound like people who are listening to God, but still aren't ready to give up on the Republicans.

Here's why I say that. Fr. Perkins ended up describing Orthodoxy as a system that is different from the state. I don't know if he meant it that way- more likely he meant it that way in an extremely limited fashion.

Fr. Peck has noticed that people don't respond well to a knowledge based catechism. He's still drinking some right wing kool-aid, so he thinks making obedience the centerpiece of everything will make things easier for the millennials. I doubt it. I am not a millennial myself, but I am pretty sure they are getting the same lesson I got- ALL OF OUR AUTHORITY FIGURES ARE TERRIBLE! All of them. You know those leadership programs? The progressives are teaching people how to be completely and utterly inept. This is coming from the eldest of six, who was pretty much all set to be defender of the order that the baby boomers destroyed. I was all ready to be a good little Roman Catholic, Republican, and father, etc...

The right balance here is to explain the goal and then explain the process. There is a similarity between adherence and obedience; sometimes you do have to stress obedience if the person is too stupid and keeps touching the stove even after he gets burned.

To make an example- the person who says they think it isn't fair that gays can't marry in the church. FAIR is not the goal, is it? God is the goal; perfection is the goal, and the only version of fair we can play is being open to helping all towards perfection. People understand this- a lot of folks still go to the gym or hire a personal trainer, and they don't cry about what is and isn't fair, because they aren't focusing on fair; they are focusing on looking good naked, or running a marathon, or pulling 300lbs off the floor.

Later in the podcast, they talk about Christianity being banned, mainly coming out of this gay marriage stuff. I don't know if that is going to happen or not; Christians are like frogs in a pot slowly rising in temperature. They see the gay marriage thing, but they don't look back and say, hey, we just sort of sat around and compromised, had our nice cushy little lives, while the state radically changed the meaning of marriage way before this came up.

If any Christianity is different from the state, then it should have stopped forcing people to get a marriage license long ago, when the divorce laws where loosened up, when the court system became perverted against men, when adultery stopped being a crime, etc- plenty of reasons for the clergy to get wise and go their own way. Instead of being made illegal, they should give serious thought to being illegal, especially in cases where said illegality might help, save, or actually create a Christian society.

Right now, since there are few obvious destructive attacks against me from the secular world, the most problematic and insidious come from weak willed Christians who are more conformed to this world than they are to God. A new society might mean these people could actually be healed, or at least have the incentive to behave themselves, and perhaps we could start being productive.

If God is saying anything, He's saying things that make most Christians uncomfortable. This podcast was interesting because it sounded like they hear what I think I hear, and modulate what they hear in a way similar to what I did- or was encouraged to do. It seems to me too easy for progressives to take over Christianity rather than make it illegal. The vast majority of Christians are already locked in a model of evangelization/charity that precludes developing the necessary assets, man power, and intelligence necessary to create civilization. We are being degraded and destroyed, most often by our own people.