Thieves Hijacking the Language of the Moral Tradition

[Achronos]

Though this was a great article to share by Fr. Hans Jacobse:

The answer lies in the slow drift of Western culture away from God. It used to be that when people spoke about morality, God was automatically part of the mix. When we had to decide what was wrong and what was right, we appealed to higher laws - laws that almost everyone understood came from God - in our sacred texts, teachings, and tradition. When we had to decide the proper way to treat our neighbor, we looked into what those texts, teachings, and tradition said. We don't do that anymore.

But the drift comes with a cost. "When men quit believing in God," the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, "they believe in anything." No man can live without God. If he tries to live without God, then he will end up making himself a god. This is as true as the sky is blue. It will never change.

This is true is because man was created to live with and in God. Man cannot live without God just as a child cannot be born without a parent. Out of all the religious texts in the world, only the Christian Scriptures defines this coherently: Man is created out of the dust of the ground (man comes from created matter), but unlike the rest of creation he also has the capacity to partake of God Himself ("And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.").

God is the proper object of the deep longing in the soul of man for communion and connection to something higher, to a wellspring that gives life. The longing is a thirst that man himself cannot slake.

More at this article link: http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/view/jacobse-thieves-hijacking-the-language-of-the-moral-tradition

[TryingtoConvert]

Might want to look at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secularity

The views in that article or so sick and perverse it's difficult to comprehend how any rational person can hold them to be true. In statements like "we still live in a civilization that was nurtured and shaped by Christianity" and "The moral language of Western civilization is uniquely Christian", the author is using historical euphemisms. Saying Western civilization was "nurtured and shaped" by Christianity fails to acknowledge that Christianity raped and pillaged the cultures of others. Declaring that the "moral language of Western civilization is uniquely Christian" doesn't acknowledge that "Christians" co-opted the rituals and stories of other religions (both Christmas and Easter were pagan holidays), and worked to wipe-out the cultures and traditions of native peoples around the world - from kidnapping children of aborigines in Australia to be raised in Christian homes, to torturing Native peoples of Central America for practicing their own religious traditions. THAT is the legacy of Christianity. All societies around the world had develop standards for how one should treat their neighbor and how a community "should organize and govern itself". They didn't need for Christianity to be IMPOSED on them.

It's outrageous that people try to continue to blame "godlessness" for all the ills of society yet fail to acknowledge the evils done in the name of God and Christianity. This is especially true for those living in the United States. To this day we live in occupied lands taken from conquered native peoples and founded in large part through the enslavement of men, women and children stolen from foreign lands. So THIS is a "Christian" nation? This is a nation "of God"?

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