Freedom to Sin: The Invisible Shackle

Nihilma said:
^
Repentance isn't just a formulla, you could say the Lord's prayer 6000 times on a 300 knot prayer rope every day and in your heart still be unrepentant, while also repenting truly by just weeping in your heart, without words.
That's the thing : God looks at the heart, not the wordy confessions of men.

If a guy kills and rapes and then repents outs of fear before his death moments later, is he truly repentant ?
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TSMT
 
Nihilma said:
I gotchu, I know the feeling but I can't help wonder : what do you mean by "going to church, praying, reading the bible" ?
I feel like this is a trap that I fell into myself, to say that certain actions in faith inevitably should lead to a specific consequence, aka praying should lead to God at least giving me a feeling of his presence, as if God was merely a scientific law but in the spiritual realm.

It isn't really the case.
If you tried praying once or twice, went to church a few times and prayed from time to time when things went bad, were you really close enough to God to feel his presence ?
I know this sounds a bit pedantic if not fallacious, because you could ask stuff like "well what's close enough then ?".
It's true that no one will ever reach the perfection of Christ to begin with, so at what point are you close enough to God to feel him or see him in any way ?

I don't believe there is a "point". That's where I appreciate the Eastern Orthodox perspective of theosis, becoming close to God is a process, not a switch. There is no "point" where you suddenly become close to God, it's a continuous fight against yourself, a denial of yourself to reach closer to God.
At times, I myself feel very close to God and really do feel Him in a way that I cannot feel anything else. But during other times, when I'm in a cycle of sin and laziness when it comes to faith and interacting with God, I don't feel Him at all and it feels pretty bad.

So my question to you would be both what do you mean by doing this stuff, and also what should God do, if he did exist, in your mind ?
Should he show himself automatically when someone asks Him any sign, should he send a divine feeling everytime someone prays to Him ? What are your thoughts ?
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All I can say is when I was a kid it felt like I was in a state of comfort and closeness to god. Once I got older that sense of being in the light faded away and I got depressed thinking I failed God and I needed to try harder.
 
Weebhunter3000 said:
All I can say is when I was a kid it felt like I was in a state of comfort and closeness to god. Once I got older that sense of being in the light faded away and I got depressed thinking I failed God and I needed to try harder.
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Same it did fade away during teeenagehood, and on a very personnal note my life got worse at the time.
I regained that closeness as of right now imo.
But yeah gotchu
 
baqqrih said:
The more you write of Protestantism, the more I find myself nodding my head. I've been looking into Orthodox Christianity over the past two-to-three weeks, and it's looked far more appealing to me than anything that my own local churches have provided in terms of teaching, worship, and faith. There is no Orthodox church near me (and if there ever was, it would probably be polluted with the heresies of America), but the more I look at it, the more it seems like the proper path, and the way you describe Protestantism here certainly helps me see it that way as I think of my own faith in Christ, and if I'm truly connected to Him. I should read more on it.
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If you ever decide to go to an Orthodox church, go to a ROCOR (Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia) church. They are the ones who preserve our faith in the best way possible within America. There are other good Orthodox churches too but they are not as good as ROCOR churches. Another thing I will recommend you to do is to read Fr. Seraphim Rose's books, certainly all saints of the church and their writings have value but Rose's works are especially important as he deals with modernity and how the Orthodox worldview must respond to it. He is venerated as a saint on a local level, iirc the Georgians recognize him as such and he is very popular in Russia. So yeah, my advice is this.
baqqrih said:
Thanks, man. I think I've seen that Spyridon guy on YouTube before. I'll check out his videos. And, yeah, I was referring to the political leanings, I've specifically seen census statistics before that showed Orthodox Christians in America having the highest support out of all other groups of Christians for leftist causes like the legalization of abortion or support for homosexual rights, so that was my concern. In addition, there's stuff like the pictures I've attached that added to that concern.
View attachment 18529
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Same guy as above picture, BTW:
I'm sure you can understand the issues of such satanic ideologies simply being let into a place of God by corrupted priests, which is what I'm afraid of when it comes to a lot of the churches here in America. Anyway, I'll just have to see where Christ guides me as I continue to learn. Thanks again.
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This guy is from GOARCH, Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. They are notoriously lukewarm in their faith and they are subverted. They are in schism with Moscow as you already know. All you have to do is avoiding the Greek Churches.
 
baqqrih said:
https://www.reddit.com/r/exchristian/comments/11q9dxs
Redditors are often terrible folk, yet, somehow, some manage to outdo this status to a degree difficult to describe with words by use of their sheer foolishness. As it is written in Simon Peter's Second Epistle (2 Peter 2:17-22):
>These are waterless springs and mists driven by a storm. For them the gloom of utter darkness has been reserved. For, speaking loud boasts of folly, they entice by sensual passions of the flesh those who are barely escaping from those who live in error. They promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption. For whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved. For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overcome, the last state has become worse for them than the first. For it would have been better for them never to have known the way of righteousness than after knowing it to turn back from the holy commandment delivered to them. What the true proverb says has happened to them: “The dog returns to its own vomit, and the sow, after washing herself, returns to wallow in the mire.”
God's word, as it forever will be, holds true. Sin has eternally attempted to chain the vulnerable with a false lie of freedom since the time of the first man, yet this material freedom in itself leads to a spiritual slavery, for it both sways us from God's will and yanks us to a path of defiance in relation to it. The force of the chain's pull will only get heavier unless one unshackles themself from it with the key of belief in Christ's sacrifice, lest that chain pull its victim down the cliff of absolute desolation and into punishing hellfire for rejecting God's amnesty to man's sin.
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I heard somewhere that one is either a slave to Christ or a slave to sin.
 
JC Denton said:
Nationalism isn't just protecting your country. It's puttung your country's wellbeing before other countries'. History has shown nationalism is harmful. There are hundreds of examples from ww1 to the yugoslav wars.
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What you're describing-- a political philosophy where a nation is selfish-- sounds like Ultranationalism, which differs from regular Nationalism-- the belief that the nation should be congruent with the state. For example, Saudi Arabia is a nation of devout Muslims. The Saudi state is a reflection of this, for Islam at the centre of the state, to the point that the Qur'an serves as the Saudi constitution. In this way, Saudi Arabia is a nationalistic country. If Saudi Arabia was Ultra-nationalistic, however, the Saudi state would be colonizing weaker, non-Muslim nations and exploiting the country. I won't comment on whether the National Socialists were Ultranationalistic or merely regularly Nationalistic.
 
Chairman said:
What you're describing-- a political philosophy where a nation is selfish-- sounds like Ultranationalism, which differs from regular Nationalism-- the belief that the nation should be congruent with the state. For example, Saudi Arabia is a nation of devout Muslims. The Saudi state is a reflection of this, for Islam at the centre of the state, to the point that the Qur'an serves as the Saudi constitution. In this way, Saudi Arabia is a nationalistic country. If Saudi Arabia was Ultra-nationalistic, however, the Saudi state would be colonizing weaker, non-Muslim nations and exploiting the country. I won't comment on whether the National Socialists were Ultranationalistic or merely regularly Nationalistic.
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Definitions from Oxford Languages · Learn more


noun
  1. identification with one's own nation and support for its interests, especially to the exclusion or  detriment of the interests of other nations.
    "their nationalism is tempered by a desire to join the European Union"


 
JC Denton said:
Definitions from Oxford Languages · Learn more


noun
  1. identification with one's own nation and support for its interests, especially to the exclusion or  detriment of the interests of other nations.
    "their nationalism is tempered by a desire to join the European Union"

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It reads "especially", meaning that this is how the word is commonly used, not how it's always used. More importantly, I find that having a distinction between "identification with one's own nation and support for its interests" (regular Nationalism) and "identification with one's own nation and support for its interests to the exclusion or  detriment of the interests of other nations" (Ultranationalism) has some merit. Because calling present-day Saudi Arabia and-- for instance-- the European empires of the past both "Nationalistic", while technically correct, can be misleading.
 
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