Drawing a Picture on the Shreds of American Greenbacks
It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained; . . . the individual who has not staked his or her life may, no doubt, be recognized as a Person; but he or she has not attained the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness.
— Georg Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (New York, 1967), p. 233
In relation to our previously published piece about Governor Andrew Cuomo signing abortion into the New York State Constitution, we noted that at the time of the article’s writing, no entities within the Orthodox Church in any jurisdiction issued any kind of statement condemning this law.
The preachers and lecturers deal with men of straw, as they are men of straw themselves. Why, a free-spoken man, of sound lungs, cannot draw a long breath without causing your rotten institutions to come toppling down by the vacuum he makes. Your church is a baby-house made of blocks, and so of the state.
…The church, the state, the school, the magazine, think they are liberal and free! It is the freedom of a prison-yard.
ISIS represents the single most prominent national or pseudo national entity that makes the persecution of Christians a central part of its activity. The would-be Islamic Caliphate is widely understood to be on its last legs, having been destroyed or driven out of most of the Syrian territory and Iraq, which it had gained in surprisingly swift conquests during the administration of US President Barack Obama. However, ISIS is not the only persecutor of followers of Jesus Christ.
A companion article noted that Christian believers in the US are seeking to help stand for those Christians in far off lands who are being martyred and persecuted for their faith at the hands of ISIS and other cruel religious and secular forces. But we also noted that this problem is extremely fierce in the Western “Christian” world, but the attacks try to bring Christian life to irrelevance and “shame it out of existence.”
An example of this in action came from Yahoo.com, carrying a news piece from AFP. Here is that piece; we have added emphases to focus on our point:
In an interview with the Serbian newspapers Politika and Vecernje Novosti ahead of his visit to Serbia, Russian President Vladimir Putin noted the creation of the “Orthodox Church of Ukraine”, a schismatic agglomeration headed by Ukrainian ultra-nationalists was “dangerous politicking.” He further noted that:
On January 6th, 2019 a large crowd was gathered, presumably near a site of the newly established “Ukrainian Orthodox Church”, a hodgepodge assembly of Ukrainian hyper-nationalists, neo-Nazis and probably a lot of Orthodox Christians who do not understand, or wish to understand what is being done against their faith. The crowd, represented by at least two priests, accosted a young man who was evidently part of this new glorious community and asked him one or two simple questions: “Do you know the Lord’s Prayer?”, “Do you know the Creed?”
The young man did not know.
We dare not even call this an Orthodox Church. It is a thinly-veiled masquerade. But it looks like an Orthodox Church, and the services sound like Orthodox Services. But, wait. They wish to be (not like Christ, but) like Europe, and become “open” to LGBT -Qrstuvwyz12345… people? So says the false First Hierarch, “Metropolitan Epiphany” when he was called by prank callers. He didn’t know that the callers were pranksters but it didn’t stop him from letting the world know the big plans for Ukraine.
