I owe you a response here. My apologies for not getting to it sooner. As I mentioned elsewhere, I have been out of the blogosphere for a while.

[Thanks for the compliment. Might I say that I like your posts also.]

I should like to take a moment to examine the reasons for our diverging concern. We both see a need to take care of the poor, but diverge when it comes to where we see the greatest need: you, overseas, and me, at home. Almsgiving is pouring water into a bottomless well no matter where it is done, here or there. The poor are always with us, and that includes those overseas.

I don’t want to degrade or belittle your overseas focus. I think your passion (?) for the poor is a noble thing, and comes of God, and if He has gifted you with a love for the starving in India, say, that is a good thing. Seeing the face of God in all His children is the goal for all Christians.

But I want to make it clear that my advocacy on behalf of the local poor is not because I do not care about the poor elsewhere, or because talking about the poor *here* is shorthand for “I will do nothing”.

I know a man, an Orthodox, who went hungry as he saw his fellow parishioners give generously to some sexy cause in the Old World, as they gave generously to the adornment of the Temple, but who ignored him when he spoke of his need. Instead he was told to borrow money. (They also sent away the hungry who came to the Temple begging alms, telling them to visit the Episcopalians or the Salvation Army instead.) His pain as he has spoken of this slap in the face, as he has spoken of his hunger and the hunger of his wife … his pain is my pain. And it is this to which I spoke earlier.

You say so much of value in your comment above, and you justly tear apart my Protestant hermeneutic.

But there was no false dichotomy (I think). My primary thrust was against those Orthodox who are “worse than infidels”. They give to causes (not people), which we know because they ignore their brother and sister. You are calling for the angelic way, but I am making the point that all too often I don’t even see Orthodox behaving like the pagans.

I hope that helps. Thanks for taking the time to reply to my earlier comment.

- V.

“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God. And every one that loves is born of God and knows God. He that loves not, knows not God, ***for God is love.*** By this was the love of God manifested towards us, because God has sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we may live through him. In this is love - not as though we have loved God, but because He has first loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God has so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God abides in us, and his love is perfected in us.”

Expresses the apophatic nicely (”no one has seen God at any time”), while also making the statement that God is love.

Thoughts?

- V.

- V.

I think that we are in a difficult place here. What is death? I haven’t yet figured out what I would do, because it is so difficult (although I lean towards the extraordinary measures side of the debate).

You excoriate those who pull the plug, as well as those who want to avoid “extraordinary measures”. The problem is that we have the ability to keep people’s organs functioning long after their brains have ceased to function (ie. where a person normally would have died), and so the fact of the technology results in a case where we must either refuse the technology (”extraordinary measures” beforehand or rely on someone else to decide when to pull the plug.

I have lost three grandparents. I am not sure about the third, but in the case of the first two someone decided to “pull the plug” after it was concluded that grandparent X was no longer with us.

I could not live with the burden of knowing that I decided that it was another person’s time to die, or that that person had already died. And I do not want to place that burden on another. So I pray for a simple death, where these kinds of situations do not come in. Failing that … as I said, I lean towards no extraordinary measures.

…

Of course, euthanasia where it is a matter of deciding that another is in too much pain, etc., I do not regard as a matter for debate. The Schiavo case was outrageous in its blatant evil. That kind of “pulling the plug” does not engage the conflict that I identify above - ie., what is death, and how do we know that a person is dead?

I think I rambled.

Thanks for the post.

- V.

“God is a jealous God.”
“…Lest he become angry…”
etc.

We do not understand these, however, in the sense that English adjectives convey to the heterodox mind. We consider them not attributes of a person, nor conditions of a person, but instead actions or, if you will, energies of a person. For us, as the Muslims say “God be merciful” we may say “Lord have mercy”. The energies of God are God uncreate, and we do not consider these to be analogous to our own condition: “My ways are not your ways.”

So there are a handful of ways that adjectives are used:
* One might say God is loving. But more correctly, God loves us. In a particular place and time, or for all eternity particular persons. But never in general.
* One might say God is a jealous God. And there we mean not an attribute of God, but an energy, if you will.
* We might say God be merciful to me a sinner, where we more often say “have mercy on me” - we are not asking God to change his quality but to change his activity toward us; this is an important distinction.
* When we say God is holy. Remember, we also say that none is holy except God. So we are definitely not making an analogy - how can we? Instead, we are stating that what God is, is incomparable, beyond being beyond comparison, unattainable by anything else, and still we remember that we refer to God’s energies, and not God’s essence, which is indescribable. To say that God is holy is like saying that God is the Lord. God is what we can never be, except by deification - by becoming God. And that is a union in the Energies of God, not the essence.

I’m willing to be corrected, of course, if I’ve erred, but I think I haven’t.

In either case, Rand’s introductory chapters are slow, because she’s setting up an entire millieu. She’s recasting the world in such a way that it takes the blinders off and she can give it back to you later. This is, frankly, necessary.

She also has excellent non-fiction - most of it is written for a popular audience and consists of columns she wrote for the NY Times, presented as chapters. She gets flack for being pop philosophy - but a) that’s what the nonfiction is supposed to be and b) she’s just successful at it, where most can’t be, because of the philosophy they’re selling. In her nonfiction vein are The Romantic Manifesto, The New Left, the Virtue of Selfishness, Philosophy Who Needs It, etc.

A lot of people have done Rand ultra-lite - they’ve read Anthem. Anthem is a good dystopian novella, but it doesn’t even give a clue to the magnitude of what she accomplishes in her philosophical fiction.

Frankly, I think the Fountainhead gives one of the best portrayals of evil in literature. Right up there with L’Engle’s Wind in the Door. Atlas Shrugged - what can I say - it’s one of my bibles.

The only warning would be against a tendency to blend, hybridize, or overlay Objectivism with Orthodoxy. One is a philosophy, and one is not. The moment an overlay is attempted, we’re not talking about Orthodoxy anymore. This is where the West went wrong, in making one the handmaiden of the other - twin sciences. In the East, we always treated philosophy and theology separately, and did not regard them as comparable, or touching the same things.

I also read you pray in a so called new calendar church which naturally, provides a hint about your background. Not surprisingly, you seem to have respect about the old calendar but not enough information or exposure to realize the necessary return (not just a wish). No need to start a correspondence now on this topic.

I wish you the best, and hopefully, this blog will not become a distraction to you from the Truth.