TIDBIT: RUSSIA, ORTHODOXY, AND THE MIDDLE EAST
October 15, 2015 / /
For some time now, I've been warning people not to misunderstand Russia, and Russia's post-post modern state and thinking. Well, this article is a little food for thought along those lines:
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I’m rather taken aback by the overall knee-jerk negative reaction to this article, condemning religion whole cloth as if it were the plague. Well, in the case of Russia, which had no organized religion at all for a century, the resurgence of the Orthodox Church goes hand-in-hand with that nation’s renaissance under Putin’s leadership.
I for one don’t see this as a bad thing; while the West wallows in appalling decadence, Russia has rebuilt and restored over 24,000 churches since Putin came to power.
You can argue the tired old saw that religion is the opiate of the masses and so on, but that is a 19th-century idea in a 21st century context, and organized religion has not played any serious role in Western society for over three generations.
Now that consumerism and all things selfie define contemporary culture, that Russia cultivates Christian Orthodoxy as a pillar of its society is actually encouraging and heartening, if it is viewed from the perspective of a morally bankrupt and decadent Western world — a world which has been so intentionally and profoundly perverted so that nothing is left that can offer anyone any moral compass in life, thereby permitting — just as planned — the abusers free reign in their pillage and plunder. The Fabians and all the rest are smug in their assurance that their societal engineering operates flawlessly.
So scoff at the supposed backwardness; I don’t.
Maybe americans should not react like a bull in front of a red rag when the term “holy” hits. America goes from one war to the next because of their “holy dollar” since that is your praised religion. Millions lives killed/destroyed because of that hobby.
It does not matter in what/whose name you do the killing it is rarely just. Maybe you should not laugh if poor slobs do it to go to heaven full of virgin promises because the “free other people justification/preemptive strike” is the western version of the same nonsense.
There are so many religions these days and many have nothing to do with God.
It does not matter which song the pipe piper plays on the flute so long cannon fodder enlists the problem exists!
I couldn’t agree more.
Bother! The alarm clock is ringing. I had been asleep and dreaming that Russia was the last great place in the world free from pesky elites driving it down a self-destructive path. This article made me wake up and realize that, of course, it is not and we are watching another pointless (for everyone but the parasite class) war being fomented before our very noses.
This “holy war” that Russia is now fighting is not, as I see it, a war against all Muslims. After all, they have just completed a very large mosque in Moscow.
https://www.rt.com/news/316327-moscow-mosque-largest-europe/
And Putin was at the opening celebrations.
And I’m not sure that I see Orthodox Christianity in the same way that I see western Christianity. As Joseph keeps reminding us, Christians would just about have to relearn what their faith is all about if they studied Russian Orthodoxy.
Should we go into the new age with no faith? Is this the best we can do?
I understand that most Russians do not attend Church, but the fact that it is there and not being pushed out as is happening in the west, sounds just fine to me. In the west, as the church influence disappears, I think we have lost of lot of what sustained our western countries. Christian values are not too bad a thing for a country to live by. And no, I don’t attend church and have real problems with it.
Perhaps I am just not “getting” our need to be warned on this issue.
These observations by Daphne are very opportune, and I noticed that the website links “news items” which are either not well substantiated or outright inventions.
Anyway, if Russia is transiting to a country where Orthodoxy is given its just position, we can recall that official policy of Nicholas II was to at least attempt to ensure religious rights to all. Including Moslems. And the Buddhists (in this regard there is the interesting figure of Prince Esper Ukhtomski).
As for Islamic “extremism”, while reams have been written about this, I think that for purposes of analyzing “Western” intervention in the Islamic world – without necessarily going into more specialized field of the history of the various sects, divisions and subdivisions all having their own particular textual and doctrinal interpretations changing over time, just as in other religions – the most relevant trail to follow really does start with the “Kaiser’s Jihad”, later inherited and developed by Hitler, the British and the Americans.
Great, now Russia goes for the heaven guarantee brass ring. Making this a holy war will spell the defeat of Russia as a modern nation and reduce it to the moronic level of the crusades of the dark ages. These criminal organizations that rape and pillage in the name of god have to be destroyed in the name of the law,international law, not the laws of Christianity or Islam or Buddism or anyone else that has decreed moral leadership in the past and blamed God for its origin. A modern world has the duty of uniting in spirit at least against obvious opportunists that hide behind belief systems to justify crimes against humanity for material gain. Lets hope this is more of a political pacification of the church’s concerns(legitimate though they may be) than actual policy behind Russia’s bombing of the worlds enemy.
Organized religion, regardless of its brand, has nothing to do with ones beliefs or entry into Heaven and everything to do with control of the unwashed masses. It is the oldest and most effective form of mind control.
Hear, hear, WalkingDead!
One wonders who is in control of the West for the last millennium. They have been doing a self destruct job on themselves around the World making enemies of everyone they meet and kowtowing before their very destroyers their only friends are fellow barbarians like themselves.