Posted by shaberon
(here)
Posted by Bruce G Charlton
(here)
My understanding of Russia is that the nation's distinctive (perhaps unique) spiritual destiny includes a restoration of the Orthodox Church in a new version of the Tsar system.
How about
: the actual spiritual restoration of Orthodoxy, oblivious to borders?
Reviewing, we found that in the late 1700s--time of Catherine the Great--there was definitely a plan to make New Byzantium by driving out the Ottomans. I don't think it ever came to blows, nothing really happened.
Then the nineteenth century was all about Greek independence, it had worldwide support, in the sense that most Europeans and Americans thought the Greeks were Christians, and that the Ottomans were Muslims, so everybody knows what side they are on.
This "worked", except it did not include Constantinople, and turned in to an international collectivist "Bavarian Greece".
No one quite realized that the Greeks are Christian and others are "whatever", but, at the same time, it makes obvious a "Greek diaspora" which must be far more influential than expected.
Russia has no choice, it is already multi-cultural, especially with regards to Buddhism and Islam. There is nothing in or of an Orthodox Tsar that would say "I must forcibly convert everyone like the French and English do", but there is something to say "we need to know if you are a Buddhist, Muslim, or...", and then if you can't come up with a suggestion, you are like an atheist, susceptible to Nihilism.
There is not really such a thing as an Orthodox Crusade, although they were the target of the Fourth.
The Russian "nation", based on language and culture, is heavily Greek.
The Russian "state", based on laws governing an area, comes from Kievan Rus, which was an invitation to foreign authorities to settle the ongoing problem of feuds based on property disputes and lawlessness.
China and India ran purges against what they were told was Christianity, which was nothing Orthodox, but coming from the likes of Jesuits and Moravians and so forth, which in many cases did have a corruptive influence. So far I have mostly seen that Orthodoxy rolls out missions to the limited extent that it can, and they seem to be only interested in increasing conversions.
It does share a doctrinal difficulty with other churches, in the sense that Jews are seen as deniers or refusers of redemption, and so how one deals with that, I am not sure.
At street level, from what I have found to be the real face of Orthodoxy, Islam, and Buddhism, is that we tolerate and help anyone regardless of ethnicity. There is hardly any difference in our "system of values" in the moral sense. If we apply any of our actual teachings, there is no compulsion to whitewash a country. This is also the view of Guru Nanak, i. e. the founder of Sikhism, who found himself caught between Hindu and Muslim extremists, and said basically the same thing, just read your books seriously and you would stop all this nonsense.
Sikhism is the last "religion".
I have seen recently in the Orthodox diaspora, that one of its minor members, I think Coptic, met with one of the eastern branches over a centuries-old dispute that had knocked them out of communion. Several meetings have been held and so far the result is that it is iconoclasm, a slightly different choice of words trying to express the same thing, something where you can't tell what the actual difference is supposed to be.
It is not physically possible to do that with non-Orthodoxy.
The point being raised perhaps more strongly applies to India. They indeed have a type of nationalism which would entail "Greater India" encompassing the expanded borders of any historically Indian rulership, along with, a type of mono-Hinduism and social engineering. Although called a "religion", "Hinduism" is an umbrella term for different kinds of doctrines and beliefs with their own history of clashes and compromises.
I would admire Russia for showing that followers of Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed, are "united" rather than "at each other's throats", because they are following their own teachings. There is nothing wrong with it being "majority Orthodox", or, even it having a Tsar crowned in that name, but if so, what they are really handling is the religion of Jerusalem.
Not really the Byzantine Empire.
I would say this is a thing much like Wade Frazier's point of "paradigm shift", or, i. e. if a person can even begin to think and understand in terms of an energy system that is not dirty and exploitive. The cultural story of the religion of Jerusalem is something that does not seem to be understood in the west. Although now, it mainly resides in Russia, this was hardly the case for some 1600 years of it.
Re: WW3? Ukraine/US vs. Donbass/Russia
Reply With Quote
)
Bookmarks