All objective morality has to appeal to some standard. And then the question of "Why is that the standard?" shows that it likewise is in some sense relative. You can answer that question with some reasons, like God having authority to decide what is moral in his creation, but it never disproves other standards of morality which are justified by other reasons, such as the atheist's "Whatever leads to human flourishing is what is moral".
That's why such debates boil down to worldview comparison and transcendental argumentation - which worldview can justify the thing in question, in this case morality. The problem with the atheist position is that they can't justify their claims within their worldview. Why? Because atheists believe in a meaningless and purposeless deterministic universe of random chemical processes in constant flux. They can't give an account how the laws of logic, metaphysics, knowledge and ethics exist in such a universe. It's a self-refuting position. But even if we grant them the proposition "Whatever leads to human flourishing is what is moral", they can't answer why it is the case and how they know that without being ad hoc or circular. Even if the proposition is true, it's not a justified belief but an axiomatic/self-evident one. But nothing can be self-evident and everything needs to be justified.
And if we trust our consciences (and we all do) we need an explanation for why they are trustworthy. The obvious explanation is that they were meant to guide us, being given to us by the creator(s). And then it only makes sense that the creator would have a similar sense of morality to our consciences, and being the source of our consciences is a more reliable measure of what is moral - for we know our consciences do not always agree. And knowing this creator also made other people's consciences, as well as the whole of nature, it follows that we can get closer to the creator's morality by studying the consciences of others and the things of nature, which appear to be made for our benefit, given how so many of them are good for our health in contrast to artificial things.
Those are a lot of assumptions. Maybe the creator is the evil demiurg of the Gnostics? Maybe we're supposed to rebell against the evil demiurg and transcend the limitations of the nature he created by using artifice and becoming transhumanists? Maybe the creator didn't make all people the same and maybe some people don't even have a soul and are vessels for evil spirits (shout out to Scientology)? The point is without God's explicit revelation we can't know any of this just by looking around.
This is not to say that outside of Christianity people can't be moral - they can and they have been historically obviously (which is in line with the Christian teaching of God's law being written on our heart). What they can't do is justify objective morality.
Your question makes no sense. What has the post-schismatic Pope excomunicating the Patriarch Michael I has to do with EO being the true Church? The Melkites are uniates and went to Rome. What's confusing you there? We know what the true Church is because it keeps the apostolic faith unchanged in line with the dogmas of the ecumenical councils and the Church fathers. This is why Rome defected when they introduced the filioque and papal supremacy which contradicted the teaching and structure of the Church of the first millenium.
"Fear of death" says nothing about whether the Bible is true or not.
There is no "true Church" other than the personal ministry of Jesus Christ himself; no other path. All men are fallible and so all the works of men are corrupt.
No one believed this prior to Luther 15c. after Christ. Anyone who knows basic Church history can't be a Protestant.
If you read the bible as though God is a fallible human who makes mistakes (or even that exists within space and time), and try to judge Him, you will find Him wanting because he doesn't do and say what you would do and say. You implicitely place yourself above God, hence atheism.
Concentrate. The argument is that the Bible doesn't interpret itself - no text does. The question is what is the authority that holds the correct interpretation. The Pope, the Church - the group of "fallible men" that produced and compiled and kept unchanged the infallible Bible canon you appeal to - or individual faliable people (like you) who tend to disagree on what the text means because they come to it with their own theoretical baggage and assumptions. Only one of those will bring you to correct interpretation.
Back in the day when I red the Bible I became a convinced atheist. Almost as if a person needs to read Scripture through a correct paradigm to come to a correct interpretation. I wonder what that paradigm is? Could it perhaps be the institution established by the One that speaks through the text? Nah, that's a man-made tradition. Just read it in your closet and you'll definitely get everything right on your own. Your interpretation will most likely align with what at least one of the 10000 different sects teaches out there.
Assuming any of them is the true Church (spoiler alert: it is not because history) 10000 to 1 for being correct is not that bad I guess.
Judaism as a system does not have an official position on his messiahship. (The official position is that the Sanhedrin did offer him all rights during his trial, and that nobody has completed all the works of Messiah yet, but it says nothing about his power to complete them.)
That's a contradiction. If they claim nobody has completed the works of the Messiah yet, this means that Jesus was not the Messiah - Him having the power or not is irrelevant to the question and an obvious red herring. I had my suspicion and gave you the benefit of the doubt but reading such pure sophistry makes me think you are not acting in good faith and run an agenda here (something other users have claimed).
My challenge to everyone stands: Find a congregational rabbi or rabbinical org that teaches that Judaism requires rejection of Jesus as Messiah.
Now now, you're getting smart with me. I said Jesus being God, not just Moshiach. Find me a rabbi who would agree with that and not call worshiping Jesus Christ as God idolatry, blasphemy and polytheism. Come on dude, you're insulting me at this point. I'm too knowledgeable on Church history, theology and philosophy for your word games to work. You're wasting taxpayer money on me.
"Oh, no! BTC is surely going down this time!"
No, it's your last chance to exchange your fiat notes for real money at such a low price. It's going to 200K+ next year.
The real conditioning device is the fake and gay central banking money printer inflationary usury credit system you're currently on, boomer. You will be the one ho will be transitioned to CBDC willingly or not. Meanwhile people who hold assets like BTC will prosper outside of the techno-gulag that you'll be ushered in by the centralized banking overlords. Your salary, taxes and bank account will become USDT or outright eDollar very soon.
Instead of shitting on BTC tell us where's your alternative to the current system?
Look, I appreciate your comment but we can argue about those points all day long and I really don't have the time to do that so I'll cut to the chase.
Here's the core of my argument: Jews within Judaism (excluding the secular jews) believe Christians are much worse than pagans/gentiles idolaters. They believe we worship the one true God as them, but that we have perverted the word of God and have spread our blasphemous heresy all over the world. Just put yourself in their shoes. If they truly love God above anything else, there's literally no bigger sin than being a Christian. No matter how hard you try to ease the dialectical tension between Judaism and Christianity and to appeal to communality in history, faith and rituals - if anything, this semblance enrages them even more because it's so much worse to pervert the truth and mix it with lies than to outright deny it and to prop up some obvious falsehood. You can't massage the glaring contradiction of Christ being God vs Christ being a false messiah away with words. This issue decides who is worships God and who's the worst heretic and blasphemer to ever exist.
This is the Judaism perspective. Keeping this in mind, it's absurd to claim Judaism and it's theological teaching isn't hostile towards Christianity. There's no point in arguing about minutia when the big picture tells you all you need to know.
Yes, Hume assumes a skeptical position and his problem is critique of naive empiricism (along with his problem of induction which is a classic defeater for empiricism). He demonstrates that observation of what is alone can't tell you what is good, preferable, desirable, etc. There is an epistemological gap between knowledge of how things are and how they should be. So everyone has to appeal to some other paradigm that informs morality. The problem is, atheists and materialists can't justify the existence of a moral standard because their paradigm only accepts empirical observation and sense data. Their position always reduces to moral relativism where nothing is inherently good or bad, but everything is a matter of personal preference.
So for moral realists, the question ultimately is what is the standard for morality and how do we have knowledge of it. I'd argue only the Orthodox Christian worldview can give a coherent, consistent and holistic worldview that can justify and answer those questions. In essence:
- metaphysics: God is the ultimate good and we're created in His image with free will that allows us to choose the good.
- epistemology: we know what's moral through divine revelation and through our communion with God in His Church (participation in the divine energies).
The reason why our intuition and reason alone is insufficient to have that knowledge is our fallen nature which inclines our free will away from God, thus being deceived into choosing evil/sin.
You can't be serious.
The point is we can't induce moral principles by observing nature. This is the naturalist fallacy aka the is/ought problem of Hume. I can look at nature through a darwinian will to power worldview or a Christian worldview and arrive at completely different conclusions.
The creator has also given us a conscience, rationality and intuitive common sense by which to discern what is right.
All of those are subject to interpretation though. Yes, we have the moral law on our hearts but we're also fallen, weak minded, sinful, susceptible to delusion and deception, etc. We can only discern what's right with God's help and by following His commandments.
Great! But you think that Jew, a proper noun, should be lowercase, even though lowercasing is registered in dictionaries as offensive? And would lowercase Judaism not be just grammatically improper? (It's literally a proper noun.) And would you use other racial terms judged offensive? Obviously it's common on this forum, but I bring it up since I'm talking about stumbling blocks.
Granted it's not grammatically correct, but the rest is tone policing. It's not meant to be offensive. I'm not a native speaker and my language doesn't capitalize nouns. That's how I've always written jews, arabs, indians and other ethnic groups. I'm writing informally here and I consider this pedantry.
The first "they" could have antecedent as "Rabbinical [J]udaism". The second "they" cannot, so it must be either "the Pharisees and the Sadducees" or a generic reference, but you imply it's not a generic. And it's wasn't "the Pharisees" or "the Sadducees" as a collective who did it, but some of them, seeing as many Pharisees became Christians or were sympathetic (Hillel, Gamaliel, Nicodemus, Joseph, Paul, Acts 21:20). When the Bible uses a collective like this it's clear in context that it means some, but in English a collective like "the Pharisees crucified Messiah" is easily mistaken as being a delegated group activity attributable to all members rather than an activity of individuals. So, since you affirm you don't want to say it was all Jews, I suggest continuing sensitivity to whether your words might be mistaken that way.
I said "they" refers to the pharisees and their tradition which brought about what we now call Judaism. Again you're being pedantic and I have to qualify everything I say - yes, not all pharisees went after Jesus. I'm obviously talking about those who did and formed their sect in opposition to Christ. Again, I'm not writing an academic paper here and even if my exposition is not without fault, I believe it manages to get what I mean across when understood within context.
"False Jews" is not the text. Perhaps you've fallen into a trap laid for some by intending to mean Jesus's words "which say they are Jews, and are not, but do lie". Since Jesus says they're not Jews, they're not Jews. That leads to people objecting that many Rabbinical Jews are not Jews at all. In their own self-authoritative opinion.
Yes, I meant that passage. It still means the same so whatever. You're arguing over semantics.
But Jesus always upheld the right of the Jewish nation to decide who was a Jew, and in general people-groups have the right to self-identify and to determine who is and who isn't a member (to say otherwise would be to say Americans can't enforce their border). So we don't get the right to "other" the Ashkenazi Jews, for instance, and say they're not Jews.
Is this why Israel requires proof of jewish ancestry and DNA testing to get a citizenship? Go try to self-identify and see how it goes. The whole point of being jewish is "othering" non-jews aka gentiles. This is a constant theme in the OT.
Today's Ashkenazi have both Semitic and external (probably Khazarian) lineage, and the Jewish polity at large accepts this, and we don't get to say they made an error 1,000 years ago because that would be one nation (us) warring against another.
Sure, they decide the legal notion because it's their state. But it doesn't change the fact that many of them are probably not descendent from the tribes of Jacob and are not jews/Isrealites in the sense used in the Bible.
All non-Christians are generic heretics for not having come to Christ, and all non-Christians "crucified Christ" in the same sense I did; but that is not what people mean when they make Rabbinical Jews a special case. They mean that Judaism is itself as a system opposed to Jesus Christ, and the facts I've observed on the ground is that Judaism as a system tries very hard to take no position for or against Jesus Christ and to avoid taking such a position at great lengths. Even the separate allusion to Jews not wanting to mark with an "X" out of conscience is an avoidance of a position out of developed conscience and not an opposition. So, it's true the Rabbinical Jews are "heretics" in the same sense that all men are without Christ, but the fact that their Scriptures describe the true God in great detail indicates that we shouldn't preclude the idea that they might find the true God who is in Jesus by following the same Scriptures we use.
Yeah right. They never expressed anti-Christian sentiments - it was the evil Christians historically that prosecuted them for no reason at all. Or maybe the reason you don't find explicit evidence that they hate Christ and blaspheme Him is because they are wary of being caught in the act? They are careful about doing it in public but many jews who converted admit blaspheming Christ is a usual occurrence in their gatherings (they admit much more too). They're known to spit at the sound of our Lord's name. The reason they don't want to draw a cross or an X is because the sign of the cross repulses them and they know it has power. Satan and the demons squeal before the cross. Antichristian attitudes among the jews are well documented by the Church and by laypeople throughout history. The entertainment industry which is ran by jews mostly is full of antichristian sentiments and propaganda. Have you seen the Paris Olympics ceremony? Let's be real here.
So we don't get to diss the modern Jews when we remember how many OT Jews are saints in heaven watching us right now; instead we wait to point out our criticisms until we have established entree to speak where we will be heard and understood. That is done by demonstrating our ability to respect all Jewish history and treat the Jewish nation considerately: in fact, tongue in cheek, to treat them as considerately as any other goy (nation, Gen. 25:23).
You sound like an ADL lawyer dude. Come on. Don't conflate the Abrahamic hebrew tradition (which is Christianity) with the sect of Judaism. No Christian has a duty to respect judaizers who misinterpret Scripture and twist the truth. The Church Fathers didn't mince words too and would be considered "anti-semitic" by today's standards. Jews are not like the pagan nations because they know the one true God and His Son incarnated as a jew. They apostatized and rejected their own Messiah (I'm talking about the ones that did aka rabbinical Judaism) - this is what makes them distinct and why their judgment is different.
Now, I see the side issue is also interesting to you. I don't see the Torah laws "transformed" from legalism to liberty.
You're putting words in my mouth. I never said anything about liberty. The transformation that occurs is the result of the fulfillment of the OT rituals and symbols in the real body of Christ. All the symbols - circumcision, baptism, Temple worship, sacrifice, mana, Israel of God, etc were actualized in the God-Man. Worship is obedience and God requires to be worshipped as He has instructed us. Temple worship was appropriate until the Church was established.
Therefore he didn't "transform" it (but many people were so steeped in idolatry that restoration of their original did look like transformation). To the faithful Jews, of which up to a million accepted his message within the generation, he made it safe to keep the original Torah again.
If He didn't transform Mosaic law, then why don't we observe it as the jews do but worship in a different manner? It was impossible to observe the original Torah after the Temple was destroyed. The faithful became the Church and worshipped according to the NT, not the Torah.
As a Christian who teaches the Hebrew roots I know Messianics who argue it is proper for Christians to slaughter and eat a lamb for Passover at home (not at the church altar because that is not the law), and, while it would be an affront for someone not in the body of Christ to do so, I can't tell them they're sinning when they in good conscience eat lamb for Passover in exactly the same way Jesus himself did.)
I'm from Eastern Europe and slaughtering and eating lamb is an well known Pascha tradition. I don't see what the problem would be - it's a feast and we celebrate that way. It's not a sacrificial lamb of course and it has nothing to do with worship.
This leads to the objection: Something changed at the cross, so certain things "good" before are "bad" after. I don't see that being the change. The things that were bad after the cross were bad for not being from the heart, in the same way they were bad before the cross. The change was that the body of Christ was wide-open to Gentiles, and at the first Orthodox Council (Acts 15) it was recognized that Gentiles had the laws of Noah and not of Moses. Both legal systems point to the same God via the same requirement of trusting in the Anointed as God reveals him; they just apply to different nations. The Messianic Jews continued, as I showed, to keep the Torah as perfectly as it could be kept, and the Gentiles continued to honor the generic statement of the Ten Words (given to all nations) that the Council stated, which is one formulation of the Laws of Noah. So when the church's demographic became largely Gentile the operative demonstration of righteousness among them was (as always) the Laws of Noah, or effectively the Ten Words; but in our day the question of operative demonstration of righteousness, via changed heart, is being shifted back to recognizing that Jews are free to keep the Laws of Moses unto Jesus, just as Moses that great saint did.
It's not good vs bad - all of God's law is good and just. It is about what is appropriate for the time and the place. What was appropriate for Adam wasn't appropriate for Noah. What was appropriate for Noah wasn't appropriate for Moses, etc. Once God became flesh and was resurrected, the world was made anew so everything changed. Christ was the second Adam and He restored the pre-fallen human nature, defeating death and opening our path to eternal life in God. The jews of Acts 15 were part of the Church and they were allowed to continue OT worship but that was provisional and circumstantial and only applied to the very early days of the Church. Paul says there are no jews or gentiles but everyone is one in Christ. We all share the same faith, rituals and sacraments.
Like circumcision, the physical does not necessarily deny the spiritual, while if there is no circumcision of the heart then both are denied.
Never said that. I said the physical was fulfilled and transcended in Christ and the spiritual was left.
Actually, in Acts 3-4 the very Jews who called for Jesus's death became hundreds out of the first 5,000 members of your Orthodox Church. I've posted the exegetical proof but I trust you see it on plain reading (I don't think Tradition would interpret it differently than plainly).
I never said all jews crucified and rejected Him. Obviously the great majority of the first Christians were jewish and many of those probably went against Christ at first (like Paul did). By "them" I'm referring to the pharisees and the sadducees who later consolidated the hebrew sect that we now call Judaism. As far as the Church goes, those people are heretics and don't worship the same God as Christians do.
However, many nations have various national covenants for good or ill in the Bible, and the Jewish people have some of the best and the worst of the covenantal promises, and their preservation is pretty good evidence that they have a national promise from God to remain a people forever just like Egypt has the same national promise from God to remain forever.
Yes, it seems that jews will be there until the end. But most of today's jews are what Scripture calls false jews. The ashkenazi are not even semitic and have nothing to do with the jews of the Bible. This delves into a very complex question of what makes one a jew and how is this proven. In the OT we see that jews had to present written geneology. Even by the time of Jesus jews have already lost their records and the genealogies of Matthew and Luke serve as proof that He was the Messiah.
Side point, circumcision doesn't disregard Romans unless it is used as a work for independent merit. The good works we do, whether they look like Jewish law (e.g. baptism) or not, can only be done in gratitude for what we have received by grace and Christ's merit. There's a lot tied to that but it's tangential to your point.
The problem is not that circumcision is jewish in origin - all Christian sacraments are because the tradition itself is jewish. The problem is that physical circumcision, just like baptism, was transformed in the NT. Same goes for laws pertaining to cleanliness and dietary laws. Continuing the jewish tradition is ignoring the fulfilling and transformation of the law and traditions brought by Christ. It's not putting things in their right place and order. An extreme case of this is observing the Sabbath as the holyday when Christ was resurrected in the first day of the week. After the Church was established at Pentecost, circumcising your children is denying the circumcision of the Spirit basically. This could even be red as blaspheming the Spirit... Imagine sacrificing a lamb at the Church altar in accordance with OT law? Would that be appropriate after Christ gave us the ultimate sacrifice? This is what circumcision is in essence.
u/guywholikesDjtof2024 you may want to read
Sure, as long as you understand what's being said.
Judaism is premised on Christ not being the messiah, you know that right? Rabbinical judaism is the tradition of the Pharisees and the Sadducees developed after the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD and codified in the Oral Torah (the Mishnah and later the Babylonian Talmud). Do you know why they pray at the Western Wall? For the rebuilding of the Temple and the coming of the Messiah who will rule over Israel and the world.
There are two small problem with this plan if you're a Christian:
First, as we mentioned the Messiah already came and they rejected Him and crucified Him. I think every Christian not completely brainwashed by zionist dispensationalist propaganda is aware of that.
Second, the Kingdom of Israel, the Heavenly Jerusalem, is in fact the Church of Christ and not a political entity or an ethnostate. You see that dual covenant theory contradicts the teaching of the Church. Why? Because God's covenant with the jews was fulfilled with the coming of the Messiah.
The whole point of the OT and "the chosen people" was to bring about the Messiah. After that we the Church became the chosen people of God. This is why Christ is called not only the second Adam, but the second Jacob, because His 12 apostles gave rise to the new spiritual "tribes" around the world - not based on biological or ethnic inheritance, but as spiritual adopted children of God. This is why in Romans Paul says our circumcision is of the heart by the Spirit and not of the flesh. And still Protestants circumcise their children according to the jewish law disregarding Romans, as if God hasn't adopted us as His spiritual children. Paul made another allegory in Romans about this - jews are the olive branch that has been cut off and the Church of believers is the wild branch that was grafted and inherits eternal life in the Kingdom, previously promised to the jews.
Does God have a plan for the jews? Some Church Fathers speak of jews converting before the second advent. But there's no "separate dispensation" for the jews - they will either repent and come to the Church or they will be condemned to hell (the same choice stands before any jew or gentile at all times).
Yes, it's fake abstracted liberal Christianity used for political purposes and has nothing to do with the real Christian tradition. It's been propped up for a reason. I've been over how and why they did it here and the books that reveal their agenda. Rockefeller is very instrumental to this movement (I know, what a shocker).
Remember what Jesus said: If you love me you will keep my commandments. Most of today's fake Christians are at war with Christ, promote and excuse sin and degeneracy, blaspheme and outright hate Him.
Did I reply to you? I was referring to the link posted by SwampRangers.
Agreed but appeal to nature is a fallacy. Why don't you show pictures of animals eating their progeny? Most of the time nature is vicious and cruel, not cuddly.
We're not beasts after all. But yes, that lady on the picture is an obvious psycho. You can see the demon peeking through her peepers.
True Christianity is the way. Obviously, anything can be subverted. If you can't discern between co-opted Christian zionism and the apostolic Church established by Christ Himself, the problem is on you.
Is it enough to call yourself a Christian in order to be a Christian? Can I call myself ma'am and become a woman all of a sudden?
It makes sense. I've not red into it, but knowing the true faith makes it easy to discern how demonic such a cult is.
It's a pagan symbol related to Sun worship and it's obviously satanic. This is apparent from the last few paragraphs that claim that ultimate reality is physical and impersonal. As Christians we believe God created everything, including the laws of physics and His providence is all-encompassing. God's divine energies are also called the uncreated light. Darkness is the absence of light - it has no ontological (real) existence. It is caused by a shadow, closing one's eyes and moving away from the light by your own will. Saying darkness precedes the divine light makes no sense because nothing precedes God.
The Black Sun is ultimately a death cult, worshipping the created universe and death that is bound to be destroyed in the apocalypse, and worship of nothingness (hence the black hole and space talk). But we already know that if you don't follow Christ who is the life and the way, you're choosing death. Everyone outside of Christ's Church ultimately worships death. This is what Satan wants.
Tl;Dr it's new age esoteric neopagan nihilist bs (which explains the Nietzsche quote).
What's that? Do you go engage in apology of the Talmud and judaism as if they don't teach JC is a false prophet born of a whore?
Correct, there's a reason why Jubilees is considered apocryphal and not part of the Bible cannon.
That's a lot of words to answer a simple question and in the end you didn't answer but went on a tangent and weaseled out. Do you follow Jesus's commandment and eat His flesh and drink His blood or do you ignore that, forfeiting eternal life and condemning yourself to death instead? Is this a hard saying for you too? Does it offend you?
I can give you a hundred more examples like this and expose how inconsistent, reductionist and arbitrary your exegesis is.
It seems you pick and choose the parts of it you like and go with them. Almost as if you're doing your own free interpretation that aligns with extra-biblical assumptions you hold (the protestant exegesis tradition and your own biases) and you're not truly following the text...
Most commandments are self evident, there are few which need interpretation. Is "thou shalt not steal" a head-scratcher?
Thanks for proving my point once more. Yes, even this commandment is not self-evident and absolute. In cases of true necessity for survival, taking what is needed is not “theft” in the moral sense, because life is more fundamental than property.
Same goes for other such commandments. You realize the same God that commanded Thou shall not kill in Ex. 20:13, also said in Ex. 21:12, “He who strikes a man so that he dies shall surely be put to death.” The Holy Spirit authored both these statements and they are not in conflict. Rather, these texts teach that the sin/crime of murder is wrong, and that a lawful magistrate killing a murderer is, in fact, virtuous. So yes, even this straightforward command is interpreted contextually. Even if you reject the death penalty which God institutionalized, it is obvious to anyone that killing can be justified if it's in self-defense or when protecting the ones you love.
Do you see now how much deeper everything in Scripture is and how your literal, legalist and limited understanding of it is leading you in the wrong direction away from what God intended? This is where pride and putting your faith in your own reason as the ultimate authority and ability to discern leads you.
Let's go one by one if you wish. I already did Rome. The Protestant sects don't even have apostolic succession and are ahistorical (where was the Church before Luther came)?
Did you read my reply at all? Rome's falling away has nothing to do with what happened in 1066. The schism was 12 years before that and the reasons for it go back centuries before that.
Because the Church's foremost mission is to keep the true faith intact. The Body of Christ can't tolerate falsehoods and contradictions.
Ecumenical councils were called for a good reason, namely to resolve pressing issues dealing with Church dogma and doctrines. If such an issue presents itself such a council can be called.