The beauty of exceptions, in fact, is in how they underscore the rule, not as though they indicate the lack of a rule. It’s impious for us to utilize conventions in a manner that the Church does not, merely to refer to each other and the Saints and our clergy in a manner we find more convenient, and then justify such a practice based on exceptions that do not apply to the specific situations in which we are violating the rule. That’s the point – we don’t get to make these things up on the basis of personal whim, and neither has the Church, in her history. We are either operating with her piety or at variance with it. It is not for us to judge the Church’s piety by comparison to our own theoretical categories.

On the rest of your comments on the origins of my reactions, I think the word “extreme” is assumed and is more of a commentary on your own proclivities than on what I wrote. But you show me an Orthodox nation, and I will gladly live there for some time. The last one I know of was bombed into a basketball court, poisoned into a wasteland, its churches and monasteries destroyed, its priests and nuns tortured and killed, and its keys handed over to a muslim terrorist organization. And Russia and Greece – who are we kidding?

I think you had better argue with ideas rather than giving advice on where I ought to live, as though you know me, or as though I am seeking spiritual advice from you. That is not your role here. Even if the suggestion was rhetorical, it’s disingenuous as a first salvo. If you want to get to know someone and then make such statements, they’re less crass, even when misguided.

I’ve never heard that definition of it. I’ve heard [this one]. But when used to describe something as Judeo-Christian, it’s not being used to describe claims, it’s being used to assume a shared system, which is the thing that’s being disputed. I’m not saying there aren’t people who think we do, who claim we do. I’m just saying they’re incorrect with regard to Holy Orthodoxy, regardless of what they claim. At best they’re referring to their own minds. And lots of people have lots of things going on their own minds that have nothing to do with Holy Orthodoxy.

Incidentally, I view it a bit like calling my wife Asian. She’s not Asian, she’s Korean. She hates being lumped in with 3/4 of the world of indistinct people just because she’s slant-eyed and yellow-skinned and isn’t European or African. What has she got in common with the Chinese? What… rice? Yeah, maybe. But does that really make them bedfellows? The Japanese? Bitter enemies of her people for quite some time, and for pretty incontrovertable reasons. Malaysians? She’s never met a Malaysian. It’s a bit like calling a whole lot of people Aryan – just different.

It’s like people who try to refer to us as “people of the book” or “monotheists”. One thing Orthodox certainly are NOT is monotheist. That’s heresy, not to mention blasphemy. And we’re not people of the book, either. We’re not a text-based religion. We pre-dated books of our Faith. What were we then, just people?

Terms like Judeo-Christian are about other people’s wish to consolidate things into oversimplified, comprehensive, and comprehensible categories that involve doctrinal statements and lists of characteristics. Even when they’re correct, they aren’t correct – it’s the confusion of the map for the ground. This is Orthodoxy’s whole dispute with the rest of the world about God. We deny the confusion of God with attributes of God – we deny the lists of characteristics – we deny that God is just or loving or good in the sense that you and I can apply that concept to anything else, and we insist that the energies of God are uncreated and are God. In other words, we think descriptions of God that utilize comparisons with other things, when not purely poetry or metaphor, are heresy and aren’t referring to God at all – they’re referring to things happening in your own mind – the idol of one’s personal theology – the subjectivity of one’s own prelest. And we think attempts to categorize us as this or that kind of religion are like attempts to categorize God – whatever you want to say about them – blasphemous, impious, heretical, heterodox – they’re also just incorrect.

After all, I can think of some comparisons that would really creep people out but which, technically, I could justify with the same kinds of appeals – the same apparatus in kind. Women-chatel. Protestant-freemasons. Evangelical-islamists. Republican-neofascists. Muslim-Hindus. You get the point.

I believe ti was an invention of American secular sociologists in the 1930s, who wanted to describe what religion was “American”, and they came up with “Protestant-Catholic-Jew” but that was too much of a mouthfuol so they shortened it to “JudeoChristian”.

Recently, I have found myself pondering the same question – do friendship ends? Now I know that for some, friendship has a finite time.

While there may be some philosophical truth to the depersonalization exhibited by use of surnames in occidental culture, I do not think it is necessary to press this too far. Perhaps such an extreme emphasis is born from a reaction against one’s own culture, in which case I suggest you live in an Orthodox nation for some time to gain a more balanced perspective.

The mistake is thinking one must coddle people by answering their questions, ‘concerns’, or objections in whatever condition they’re in. I find that to be a Protestant-American approach, but not an essentially Christian one.

When dealing with relativists who can’t even distinguish subject from object, solipsists who don’t even know if anything else is real, and nihilists who don’t believe anything has meaning, there are deeper issues of epistemology to resolve before anything else. If there’s no truth, or truth has no value, or truth isn’t distinct from my whims, then we don’t go down other paths, because it just cheapens the truth, misleads with the truth, and indeed, adds confusion to their confusion.

If they’re not capable of distinguishing a fact from an opinion, an ad hominem from an argument, we either work on that, or we leave the conversation aside. This is one reason I cut a lot of conversations short. After all, would you debate the concept of meaning with someone who didn’t have an elementary education? They’d have to first grasp that a proposition is independent of a personality, etc.

I don’t dumb it down.

And the other thing is that, I’m neither a religious philosopher, nor a prophet. Whenever anyone asks me to elaborate, I really prefer not to. The implication is that I am offering something new that is not contained within our faith or tradition, or else that I am a luminary of that tradition. When I speak at all, it is a kind of personal confession, but if I take my own thoughts so seriously that I must expound upon them, soon I’m engaged in religious propaganda, a kind of religious version of politics, and then I’m both deceiving myself and anyone who listens to me. It is all I can do to repel those who continually invite me to the table of Protestantism where, presumably, through hashing out our own personal inclinations, apart from the fullness of the one true, right, correct, real, and holy tradition, we will somehow formulate our religious formulae, our “perspectives” – we will build our religion out of propositions as surely as heathens do out of wood and clay and fire. I will only stand my ground with them, and refuse to engage in apostasy. But to elaborate on orthodoxy, beyond what is needed for my soul, is like having enough bread, but walking out on a tightrope across a chasm in search of a crumb, because perhaps there’s more. The Faith is rich and has all the answers to the questions that have answers. It will provide all anyone needs. I am not needed. I’m just driftwood, meandering toward the fire, and praying for enough water to keep some cinder of me from utter destruction. The fathers will help you; they are all around us, after all.