Is there anything that God cannot do?

[Joshpantera]

1 hour ago, Myrkhoos said:

The Orthodox church considers the living church as an abode of the Holy Spirit with sole authority to interpret Scripture. In the eyes of the Orthodox church anyone reading the Scriptures outside the Church is misreading them. You have a veil of darkness preventing you from understanding like some Jews. The Scriptures are not just like a historical text, or novel, or a human creation, it is divinely inspired inside a community of believers. Do you understand now why for an Orthodox if you come and say - X dogma contradicts Scripture - they do not even need to consider your position? Only minds illuminated by the Holy Spirit, of which you are not, can say anything meaningful about the Scriptures. You are wrong from the getgo. You are wrong for even attempting to read Scripture without the guidance of the Church.  That is evidence you are proud and possibly, influenced by the devil.

 

And who determines what is or is not "The Holy Spirit?" 

 

This is some seriously convoluted circular reasoning. At least with traditions that agree on something like the written scripture there is something somewhat remotely objective and not 100% subjective in total. According this reasoning the EO church can make up just about anything, regardless of the gospel traditions preserved in writing, and determine of it's own circular logic that it is sanctioned by a "Holy Spirit." 

 

The hole gets deeper as you go along. And this is how we'd argue with EO. 

[Myrkhoos]

35 minutes ago, Joshpantera said:

 

I've quoted the plain words. It says over and over that what seems impossible to the minds of men is not impossible for god. So the Orthodox church is made up of men and the minds of men. They couldn't possibly make any declaration as to what is or is not possible for a god who according to the creeds is immanent and transcendent, and omni across the board. Do the eastern Orthodox ignore all of the creeds as well as what is written in plain text in the gospel tradition? 

I feel you keep missing the point. Ironically, it is exactly the same thing I felt trying to talk to protestants when I was Orthodox. 

    I am going to try again. All creeds and scriptures, and rituals are considered PART of the Church as a whole. The are produced by the Church FOR the Church. They are produced with divine inspiration, they are interpreted by divine inspiration and are used with divine inspiration. Interpreting the Scriptures outside the church is like doing the baptism ritual without being appointed as a priest. Void of content.

    Those words are not like any other words. The EO considers you reading Scripture like you performing a baptism. Void. Baptism is of course crucial in the Church , but only if it is properly performed. The same with church dogmas. 

[Myrkhoos]

1 hour ago, Joshpantera said:

 

And who determines what is or is not "The Holy Spirit?" 

 

This is some seriously convoluted circular reasoning. At least with traditions that agree on something like the written scripture there is something somewhat remotely objective and not 100% subjective in total. According this reasoning the EO church can make up just about anything, regardless of the gospel traditions preserved in writing, and determine of it's own circular logic that it is sanctioned by a "Holy Spirit." 

 

The hole gets deeper as you go along. And this is how we'd argue with EO. 

The Church is a theoanthropic institution. God and human, like Jesus. So it cannot argue on purely human reasoning. For them, the Holy Spirit is an objective reality, actually in the Hoky Spirit the object- subject separation collapses.

      You keep making the same "mistake" I keep corecting you. Again, from their position, they are the sole authority on interpretation of Scripture. What they say IS what scriptures say. You cannot understand Scripture. You cannot say "regardless" of what Scriptures say. You have no idea what it says.

    Does this seem like an appeal to mysticism? Because it is. There is a famous debate between 13 century Gregory Palamas and Barlaam of Calabria related to the topic of right knowledge of God.

    So, in general, while the Orthodox Church does have its philosophical tradition, it placed much more emphasis on its mystical tradition. Bishops started to be recruited exclusively from monks for example, even if it allows priests to marrry. Yes this does konyd of make rational debate kind of pointless from some point.

[Myrkhoos]

1 hour ago, TheRedneckProfessor said:

So we're back to god obviously can not just say what he means and has to have fallible humans interpret for him.  In this case, the Orthodox church.  Or, in other words, guys like this:

 

 

Is that Rasputin? Because he is kind of an oddball and not representative of the Orthodox tradition.

    However I totally agree with your point. This was one of the, if not THE reason I departed ways with the official Church. I did not find sufficient ustification for certainty. Rational or otherwise.

[Joshpantera]

15 minutes ago, Myrkhoos said:

Again, from their position, they are the sole authority on interpretation of Scripture. What they say IS what scriptures say. You cannot understand Scripture. You cannot say "regardless" of what Scriptures say. You have no idea what it says.

 

The rank stupidity involved in both Catholism and Eastern Orthodox is mind blowing! But that's why Protestants eventually emerged. To challenge the sort of stupidity you've outlined above. The stupidity of Protestants here in the west is why agnosticism and atheism eventually emerged. To challenge the entire bulk of this stupidity.

 

Things grow increasingly stupid and convoluted as you march back through these traditions historically. It's just egoic bullshit and assorted narcissism playing out through religious traditions....

[Myrkhoos]

1 minute ago, Joshpantera said:

 

The rank stupidity involved in both Catholism and Eastern Orthodox is mind blowing! But that's why Protestants eventually emerged. The stupidity of Protestants here in the west is why agnosticism and atheism eventually emerged. Things grow increasingly stupid and convoluted as you march back through these traditions historically. 

I do not think it is "stupidity." Nor do I think stupidity is what caused the emergence of protestantism. I do not think protestants are better than the Orthodox or the other way around. Protestantism gained populatity more because of growing ethnic tensions and the printing press. You can notice that it succedeed far more in Germanic countries than latin ones. A lot of coincidence as well, of course like all major events,but still.

    Their starting assumptions about the world are just radically different.

[Myrkhoos]

I mean, take what I said about the EO coupled with its clear political involvement through the ages. It is a great advantage for a ruler to say - God say I am the king and you the servants. Not saying it is ONLY about that, but my hunch it is a lot about that, or twisted to say that if I am being charitable it is the kind of doctrine a king would adopt as a state religion.

   I wouldn't call that stupid. Cynical, maybe. But briliant policy if you want to control swaths of people.

    Protestant theology offered German princes a way to get not only autonomy, but full on absolute power as the state became the sole source of authority. No more reporting to Rome and all that.

[TABA]

I do appreciate @Myrkhoos explaining to us the thinking behind Eastern Orthodox Christianity, which is valuable especially to those who have only known Protestant and especially American Protestant Christianity.  He’s not promoting or even justifying it, he’s explaining it, and as he has pointed out, he is most certainly a card-carrying Ex-Christian now. 
 

As an aside @Myrkhoos, I am impressed by your command of English, given that (as I understand) your native language is Romanian.  And this is not just conversational English (“Excuse me, which way to the train station?”) by any means.  You communicate quite advanced concepts with ease.  How and when did you learn to master English?  I’m intrigued. 

[Joshpantera]

What happened @Myrkhoos is that the catholic church has these traditions. They weren't scripture, they were church traditions according to what you've outlined. As people were able to go and look at the bibles for themselves, they determined that a lot of stuff done under the guise of traditions was bullshit, and essentially satanic. Especially were the adoption of paganism through these so-called traditions is concerned. Printing press and scriptural access to everyone brought this on. There's only internal logic where these older traditions are concerned. And yes, they are monarchial in scope. 

 

This business of trying to check traditions against the scriptures ran wild into the 19th century.

 

That's when my several times great uncle William Miller (preacher) - Wikipedia came along. After his 3 second coming predictions failed, the final being called The Great Disappointment of 1844, the SDA church arose in its wake under the direction of Ellen G. White. The whole premise was to convert heathens like the Catholics or even Eastern Orthodox back to 'real christianity.' They determined that the devil had tricked you people into pagan sun worship along the way of your time-honored church traditions. Because there isn't aything in the scriptures about changing the sacred day of worship from the jewish sabbath to the pagan day of sun-god worship. They thought that they had figured out the devil's greatest trick and were on the heels of the second coming in their lifetimes. 

 

They were wrong for many reasons. But that's how they came to those conclusions about Catholics and tradition versus the scriptures. 

 

The idea is that if there is a god than the god must have left human beings some way of knowing about him and something other than the 'dictates of mere mortals in church groups' to determine what is true or false. It comes down to the christian scriptural cannon. They have to make their assumptions based on the idea that god didn't leave them hanging. And that the scriptures are the key to understanding between true and false christianity and religion in the world. 

 

Now granted, these are all false assumptions in my view and probably yours too.

 

I'm just explaining how they came to those type of assumptions. And why they didn't trust Catholics or Eastern Orthodox at all. Obviously, there's tons of problems with Protestantism and SDAism too. They introduce false assumptions as well. A lot of which are just plain stupid when closely analyzed. All the way around stupid, from EO, to Catholic, to Protestant.

 

No one bothered to ask the right questions until very recent times...  

[Joshpantera]

On 1/12/2022 at 5:24 PM, TheTruthWillSetYouFree said:

To understand this question, first you have to understand the basics about God. 

It's very simple: God can do anything that's not impossible, which, of course, is a reasonable conclusion for an infinite Being such as Him. So, we know there are things that God can't do.

 

Let's look at this again. 

 

How do we know there are things that god can not do? We don't see a god. We can't examine a god. We can't test for ourselves what a god can or can not do. There's a bible to look at in order to try and find an answer: 

 

On 1/13/2022 at 7:49 AM, Joshpantera said:

For with God nothing shall be impossible.

Luke 1:37

 

And he said, The things which are impossible with men are possible with God.

Luke 18:27

 

But Jesus beheld them, and said unto them, With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible.

Matthew 19:26

 

And Jesus looking upon them saith, With men it is impossible, but not with God: for with God all things are possible.

Mark 10:27

 

But it only says that 'nothing is impossible for god', not even that which seems impossible in the minds of men according to the logic of men. It says that all things are possible with god.

 

To then decide that when the bible interferes with your own sensibility no one else is reading or interpreting it correctly, it leads down a path to this: 

 

8 hours ago, TheRedneckProfessor said:

So we're back to god obviously can not just say what he means and has to have fallible humans interpret for him.  In this case, the Orthodox church.  Or, in other words, guys like this:

 

 

 

And this is a problem. 

 

TRP had the whole thing buttoned up as of page 1. The path of subjective, mystical, tradition within a small group, and determine everything through internal logic, leads directly to the above.

 

I think that's why it's been so much less popular in the western world. Even with religion, people want something more objective than that. Something that they can use to investigate peoples claims against. And it's not surprising that the focus turned towards scripture and arguing based on what is written. But of course, even that is extremely flawed. Leading to some 30,000 christian denominations. 

 

If our apologist is still reading, he needs to consider the problem.   

[TheRedneckProfessor]

On a more serious note, though, one question I've always wondered about is: Can god kiss his own ass?  If so, why does he need us to do it for him?

[Myrkhoos]

On 1/15/2022 at 6:48 PM, TABA said:

I do appreciate @Myrkhoos explaining to us the thinking behind Eastern Orthodox Christianity, which is valuable especially to those who have only known Protestant and especially American Protestant Christianity.  He’s not promoting or even justifying it, he’s explaining it, and as he has pointed out, he is most certainly a card-carrying Ex-Christian now. 
 

I mean that is a severly simplified and simplistic version. EO theology has literal thousands of pages written. I'm by no means a scholar, however I did try to present a short version of what I understood from various teachers and books and experiences.

On 1/15/2022 at 6:48 PM, TABA said:

As an aside @Myrkhoos, I am impressed by your command of English, given that (as I understand) your native language is Romanian.  And this is not just conversational English (“Excuse me, which way to the train station?”) by any means.  You communicate quite advanced concepts with ease.  How and when did you learn to master English?  I’m intrigued. 

The gift of tongues, of course!:))

Thank you for your compliment. Yes I am native Romanian, I am 31 years old, have lived most of that in Romania surrounded by mostly ethnic Romanians and some gypsies but who spoke Romanian ( gypsies are a kind of minority with huge social problems so they have no special language rights like ethnic Hungarians in my country)

l    learned English through a combination of formal teaching from kindergarten to university, video games, movies, forum and social media posting and reading. English is also the language of lots of cinema terminology, plus you can find subtitles for English for many obscure foreign films. This and, I have been told, a level of natural ability for foreign languages. I also kind of like English as a language. Very expressive in its own way.