Eastern Orthodox Christian Perspective on the “End Times”

Some time in 2007, I happened to be tuned in to a radio station and heard a discussion that struck me as highly relevant to this blog. Unfortunately, I wrote a draft but never got to the point of publishing it. So, 6 years later, here it is!

>> I was listening to the radio today and was amazed at how many of the apocalyptic points he hit on that overlapped with the site’s content. Although I’m not sure what to make of some of his theology, I do want to say that his knowledge of world affairs and evaluation of the direction the world is headed in is expansive and realistic, and stems from a strongly biblical perspective. Some major points he touches on are the compatibility of faith and reason, anthropologically-driven apocalypse, the unsustainability of modern civilization, and a few doctrinal issues.

Original link, now broken: http://www.wbez.org/Program_WV_Segment.aspx?segmentID=13012

Chicago Public Radio program description: Many in the United States are unfamiliar with the Eastern Orthodox Church. Many believe it’s just a Greek or Russian version of the Roman Catholic Church. Closer examination reveals that this ancient branch of Christianity differs from Roman Catholicism and also Protestantism in significant ways.

Energy Crunch Threatens South American Nations

By now the talk about global warming on this site amounts to beating a dead horse, as the granting of the Nobel prize to Al Gore should demonstrate. Clearly, because we fail to take necessary action now as well as in the immediate (as in, the next 3-5 years) future, we are headed towards some catastrophic changes in the way the ecosphere functions to support our main life support systems. There are irreversible changes occurring all around the planet due to the chain of events started by industrialization, the least of which are the opening up of the Northwest passage, the melting of the Siberian permafrost (releasing massive amounts of methane, a far more potent source of pollution than carbon dioxide), rapid melting of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, and increases in chaotic weather (and I’m putting it mildly – like the recent 40 degree drop in temperature from 90 to 50 in the past few days here in Chicago), to name a few.

Global Warming Is Being Seriously Underestimated

I know I haven’t been posting in awhile. The workload at school has become unexpectedly large, and it has unfortunately caused me to detract from writing anything of significance on this blog, which I think to both your and my detriment.

That said, there have been a number of things I wanted to comment on but haven’t gotten around to doing. I was (and am still) locked in conversation with my last thread-mate, sianamech, but our exchanges have gotten unmanagably longer, which I am trying (unsuccessfully) to parcel out time for (sorry sianimech).

If anything, though, the time I’ve spent in my return to school has been revealing in that it’s shown me how entrenched people really are to this idea of “sustainable growth,” and things essentially staying the same way they are. I think that’s farcical (click on some of the topics under “apocalypse” to see why), and this latest article just serves to underscore that in an unbelievably major way. May God’s people be a light in these dark times ahead.

Global Warming Is Being Seriously Underestimated
By John James

03 February, 2007
Countercurrents.org

“One of the hardest tasks we face in life is to be the bearer of seriously bad news … I now have to bring the worst of news … that civilisation is in grave danger.”

James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia.

A number of simply gigantic reserves of greenhouse gasses that nature has stored for our benefit are now beginning to flood back into the atmosphere, as described in http://www.planetextinction.com.

In addition to what nature gives back to us, our own greenhouse pollution has almost doubled since 2001. There are a number of major natural sources, besides our own. We are beginning to have some idea of the total on the planet, but the speed at which these ancient stores will be released is still completely uncertain.

A Defense of Absolute Truth

4/30/2013 note: If you are coming here from Google, here is the update to this post. I tried to make use of some editing skills to make it more readable.

Reposted from what seems like a now-defunct Garage Scholars blog (argh!). A very good recap of a Ravi Zacharias message, “A Defense of Absolute Truth”, which details why secularism fails to provide a coherent set of answers to the problems of the world (part 1 | part 2).

An interesting anecdotal defense of this point is in the second result of this Google search.

Here’s a gem: Secularization = no shame. Relativism = no reason. Privatization = no meaning. [All three have occurred to varying degrees in Westernized civilizations.]

Original post has been reposted below.

[note: in case you missed it, this is a recap which has taken on a kind of bullet-point form. I’ve reformatted parts of it for readability. If you don’t get parts of it, feel free to comment.

note #2: thread available at Newsvine. I’m thinking about manually importing it.]

On Saturday, March 12, the Garage Scholars, named that day by Robert Grange, held their second meeting and listened to a talk by Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias. This talk was given the day before Ravi’s talk at the Mormon Tabernacle.

Ravi Zacharias
A Defense of Absolute Truth
11/13/05
The University of Utah

Sexuality, marriage, stem-cell research, genetics—“these things are getting very, very complex.” It’s hard to know “how to address this tangled subject with meaning and coherence.”

Junaman thread – Empiricism vs. Rationalism – Pt 5

The formatting always gets lost in translation… even with html. Bleh.

The tags are a good indicator of what this thread’s about (maybe will work on a summary later).

A: It’s fine, I suppose. But the longer it takes, the more disingenuous your pursuit of “exposing incompetence”, as it were, will look (recent post(s) nonwithstanding).

J: You put a bit much weight on a tagline…

That’s not just a tagline… it’s also the title of your blog.

…How is this conversation exposing incompetence.

Well, that one should be obvious. The incompetence comes in the form of dogmaticism regarding the “ultimate truth” of science, which is implied from your For Christians page.

The real incompetence is not whether you believe in a god [or not], but what you use that belief for, what objective you try to achieve with that belief.

I can agree if you’re referring to “amoralism”, e.g. in the case of Hitler and Bush. I don’t think proselytising necessarily bring you to the same conclusion.

Junaman thread – Empiricism vs. Rationalism – Pt 4

A continuation of part 3 (reposted for readability, loading time, and the fact I knew it would be intially filtered by akismet). Topics include the probability of mass hallucination (ref: 1st century Christianity | apologetics), Junaman’ s atheistic generalization of rationalism, the scientific method, the fallacy of “rational knowledge”, and reasons why “objectivism” is a fallacy (with brief mention of why the Nobel Prize exists).

Sorry for taking so long to reply…

It’s fine, I suppose. But the longer it takes, the more disingenuous your pursuit of “exposing incompetence”, as it were, will look (recent post(s) nonwithstanding).

First of all, not all religious people claim they have “seen” or “experienced” god,

This is true, but…

secondly the ones who have can all claim they saw different things,

…this is a generalization, which leads you to inaccurately conclude…

no one’s belief is truly identical to another’s, hence is it really a “mass hallucination”, or just different people hallucinating different things.

The God Delusion (criticism of atheist Dawkins) [VIDEO]

Update [3/1/07]: also check out UK apologist and Oxford Professor Alister McGrath’s book The Dawkins Delusion for a scientifically-inclined rebuttal to Dawkin’s arguments negating God.

—————

Excellent post from Alternet‘s Evan Derkacz discussing the merit (and lack thereof) of Dawkins. Of course, it probably just wouldn’t be right not to link it to my atheistic humanist acquaintance Brett Keller’s blog, where he undoubtedly supports some of his main points of contention.

I’d respond to Dawkins’ assertions myself if I had more time. In all likelihood, though, I probably already have, albeit indirectly.

Sorry, haven’t had much time to post due to increasingly busy schedule. Of course, there have been plenty of blogworthy world events (will do a quick post maybe later).

Oh, and note that I tagged “the Antichrist” not necessarily because I believe Dawkins is the Antichrist… one of them, maybe – but far from “uniting an army” against God as it were. I’d leave it up to the politicians to do that.

via Alternet (video also available at link).
tagline: ‘Darwin’s Rottweiler’ Richard Dawkins disses faith, Bush base

In a BBC interview on Friday, Evolutionary Biologist and sharp religion critic, Richard Dawkins, talks about his new book, The God Delusion (I”m just ecstatic that he referenced the Flying Spaghetti Monster).

He claims to want to speak to the middle ground; to people who haven’t really thought too much about faith and God in order to challenge their belief. An uphill battle, to be sure. He employs all the usual suspects: “people need to believe in fairy tales” “just look at organized religion” but fails to see where every method for assessing reality is hopelessly mired in its own methodology. Or: the scientific method may be positively divine for assessing the physical world, it has built-in limitations w/r/t [FC ed. note: with respect to] the spiritual one.

Important distinctions between Y2K and Peak Oil

This post is actually a repost (without permission) of a thread I was reading on the Peak Oil discussion group, ROE2 (Running on Empty 2). Just another example of the great minds that are gathering to do something (hopefully) to have a positive impact for the future (of which I was again reminded by the weather abruptly turning cold here, and freezing as the result of trying to stay warm with only a small space heater and some winter clothes). Re: Y2K,was Re: Alternate Energies Posted by: “J libby” jlibby331

Thu Oct 19, 2006 4:35 pm (PST)

Y2K would never have been a civilization ending disaster. I suppose worse case scenario, it migh have caused a major recession, but we would have recovered qucikly. As mentioned here some time ago, I worked on banking software in the late 80s and we were making changes to software than. At that time, many programs couldn’t handle 30 year loans because of the 2 digit dates. But it certainly didn’t bring the mortgage loan business to a halt. Things that didn’t get fixed quick enough caused billing problems, but it all got worked out without causing major problems. The same would have been true of Y2K, if things weren’t fixed quick enough, there would be problems. But much effort and money were put into the problem by government and business to fix the problems. But they were known problems and people knew how to fix them. The media is what created the hype on Y2K. You don’t see that on PO.

Anti-Muslim video sparks new outrage against Denmark

I love this ridiculous secular notion of “equal mockery” for all religions. It’s pretty clear that these cartoons are meant to “ease” the underlying tensions perceived within the Danes’ own society as well as from the proximity of Denmark to the Middle East.

It’s farcical. Some reasons why include:

• gross cultural insensivity. By extension of the Quran, Muslim identity lies directly in Muhammad. “There is one God, Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet.” Putting his head on a stick, or a camel for that matter, is NOT going to be funny to them – not to say that they lack self-deprecation, but it comes out in arguably far less intellectual ways and arguably far more emotional ones.
• “equal mockery” is essentially a thinly-veiled pretense for mocking religions “of the Book”. Eastern religions are subject to close to nonexistant gainsay simply because a lot of people in the west don’t understand how their own senses of identity within one might relate.
• it tends to spawn more xenophobia.

In short, it’s a double standard that reveals some of the baser elements of secular humor – that of both narcissicm and self-preservation. In fact, FindLaw’s Julie Hilden has a good article articulating these points and more. Read it here.

So if you’re going to mock religions, do it on equal terms. Then maybe you’ll find out that, in fact, your underlying basis for why you find cultural insensitivity to be humorous will be changed.
via the Independent.

By Stephen Castle, Europe Correspondent

Published: 10 October 2006

Danes have been warned against travelling to a number of Muslim countries after the release of a video showing young members of an anti-immigrant party mocking the Prophet Mohamed.

Images drawn by members of the youth wing of the Danish People’s Party, and shown on television and the internet, were condemned by Islamic leaders in Egypt and Indonesia, threatening to reawaken the furore over cartoons published last year in Denmark.

Fury as Berlin Opera Cancels Performance

Europeans no doubt have it much harder on themselves given the bulk of immigration from Arab states tends to be going towards them instead of the US. This article in Spiegel demonstrates just how seriously Islam is perceived as a threat to civil liberties and other traditionally democratic ideas such as the freedom of speech.

If there are any Muslim readers out there, I’d be happy to dialogue on how it indeed is or isn’t. Does the Quran permit freedom of speech? Did Muhammad? Do you see it as being a good thing or bad?

Also to the Buddhists – what do you think about the artistic statement of Budda being beheaded?

Berlin’s Deutsche Oper opera house is under fire for cancelling a controversial production of a Mozart opera which shows the severed heads of the Prophet Muhammad, Jesus and Buddha. Politicians have condemned the cancellation as self-censorship and cowardice.