Month: October 2015

Met. Joseph: Archpastoral Directive On So-Called Same-Sex Marriage

21 Comments

Deprecated: trim(): Passing null to parameter #1 ($string) of type string is deprecated in /home/aoiusa/public_html/wp-content/plugins/sexybookmarks/public.php on line 388

Deprecated: trim(): Passing null to parameter #1 ($string) of type string is deprecated in /home/aoiusa/public_html/wp-content/plugins/sexybookmarks/public.php on line 394

Deprecated: trim(): Passing null to parameter #1 ($string) of type string is deprecated in /home/aoiusa/public_html/wp-content/plugins/sexybookmarks/public.php on line 400

Source: Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese of America

Excerpt:

Based…upon natural creation, even as our Lord Jesus Christ did as reported in the holy Gospels…the Church recognizes the word, “marriage,” as designating only one datum: the fleshly union of one man and one woman, “just as Adam and Eve in the beginning of the world” (ancient betrothal, Service of Matrimony) in an exclusive way, allowing no others.

It is this exclusive union of love which alone is fertile and thus the nursery of the human race until the end of time. Any other so-called “marriage,” including socalled “same-sex marriage,” is a forgery and death-dealing, sterile and doomed to frustration and the ruin of body and soul of its participants.

Therefore, the Church cannot recognize or countenance any other definition of marriage by any human law, since any such “law” contrary to God’s own created ordinance cannot stand as law, but is and will be a dead letter. “There is a way which seemeth right to a man, but the end thereof is death.” This, then, is the Church’s word to our North American people.

Met. Joseph is the Archbishop of the Antiochian Orthodox Church of North America.

Download/Print the Archiepiscopal Directive

[gview file=”https://www.aoiusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Archepiscopal-Directive-on-Same-Sex-Marriage-10-29-15.pdf” width=”100%” height=”1100px”]

We Are Witnessing the Wholesale Uprooting of Christianity in the Land of its Birth

Leave a comment

On 19-20 October 2015, the largest conference on the situation of Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East took place in Athens. Metropolitan Hilarion of Volokolamsk delivered his presentation on the first day of the forum. Its text is given below.

Source: Pravmir

Speech given by Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeyev)

Your Holiness, Your Beatitudes, Your Eminences and Graces,

Esteemed participants of the conference,

Today in the Middle East we are witnessing the unprecedented wholesale destruction of Christianity. The endless executions and kidnappings, the destruction of ancient holy sites and the expulsion of Christians from their homelands cannot but alarm the Christian Churches.

‘Before our eyes there is unfolding a genuine tragedy, the actual genocide of the Christian population in the lands from which the Good News spread throughout the world. The scale of the catastrophe, passed over in silence by the majority of the world’s media, has yet to be realized’, is how His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Rus characterized the situation when speaking before the bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church in February of this year. The Moscow Patriarchate, which has traditionally enjoyed close spiritual and social links with the Middle East, places a priority on this aspect of its external relations.

Christians have endured many trials throughout out their two thousand year history, but the events of recent years are unprecedented. In the twenty first century, at a time of humanity’s turbulent development after a series of bloody world wars, we are witnessing, with the silent connivance of world powers, the wholesale uprooting of Christianity and Christian cultures in the place where they came into being.

We know that Muslims and other religious communities also suffer from the activities of extremists; however, it is Christians who are the most defenseless before the face of an enemy that has horrified the whole world. They have become the prime target of terrorists for kidnappings, extortion and murder. At the same time terrorists carry out their criminal activities under the guise of religion.

I will quote some figures that characterize the scale of the calamity. In Iraq, for example, the number of Christians over the past twelve years has decreased by more than ten times; those who remain find themselves today in a catastrophic position, deprived of all property and all hope of a peaceful and prosperous future. Over the past year alone more than a hundred thousand Christians have left Iraq. It is impossible to calculate the damage that has been caused to ancient Christian churches and other historical monuments.

Mass executions take place in Libya of absolutely innocent Christians, a once stable country has been turned into an arena of tribal wars, to be a Christian there is extremely dangerous. Of one hundred thousand Christians there only a few thousand remain, and the threat to their lives continues.

Metropolitans Paul (Yazidji) of Aleppo and Gregory John (Ibrahim), kidnapped two and a half years ago

Up until 2011 an inter-religious balance was maintained in Syria. Yet the extremists who have intervened in the country have spread genuine bloody terror to Christians. We still know nothing of the fate of Metropolitans Paul (Yazidji) of Aleppo and Gregory John (Ibrahim), kidnapped two and a half years ago. Almost two hundred Assyrians are held in captivity by ISIL, kidnapped in February of this year in the valley of the River Kabur. Three of them were recently executed by terrorists. The Christian quarters of Damascus and Aleppo are subject to endless gunfire.

At present more than a quarter of Christians have left Syria. And this figure continues to grow. People are fleeing from terror, from the horrors of war, from a hopeless future for themselves and their children. There is a real danger that the Middle East – the cradle of Christianity – will belong wholly to extremists.

Tragically, few western politicians have listened to the voices of Christian leaders who have called for, and continue to call for, an end to supplying militants with arms.

Irreparable damage has been caused to the ancient cultural heritage of the Middle East. The religious and cultural balance that has come into being over centuries has been destroyed. I have spoken many times with the religious and political leaders of Syria and Iraq. They have spoken of how great efforts are needed for even a partial restoration of the infrastructure and a return to normal life.

The Russian Orthodox Church has always and everywhere endeavoured to draw attention to the plight of Christians. Church representatives have invariably put this issue on the agenda with the political, public and religious leaders of both east and west. In conducting dialogue with Muslims, the Russian Orthodox Church accentuates the need to defend Christians from extremists. We support our brothers and sisters morally and materially as best we can. Much effort has been put into informing the population in both Russia and beyond her borders of the truth concerning the catastrophe that has unfolded.

We hope that the world can draw a lesson from the most wide-scale humanitarian tragedy of recent years. We call upon politicians, who bear responsibility for what is happening, to make all efforts to defend Christians and guarantee the return to their homes and to the lands of which they are native inhabitants.

I would like to remind you once more that the loss of the Christian presence in the Middle East will have irrevocable consequences. If no Christians remain, then the barrier which holds back the spread of radicalism will also be removed.

To conclude my presentation I would like once more to assure the Christians of the Middle East of our solidarity with you. The entire Church is filled with concern and prayer for those who suffer for the name of Christ, for, as St. Paul says, ‘we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones’ (Eph. 5: 30). We feel your pain for the trials that have befallen you, and treat with profound respect your courageous and firm stance for Christ’s Truth.

I hope that this conference will allow all of us not only to express our solidarity in relation to regulating the situation in the Middle East, but will also become a calling sign for those in whose hands the fate of the much-suffering biblical lands rests.

Information Enigma — How Information, not Physical and Chemical Processes, Explain the Development of Life [VIDEO]

1 Comment

Information drives the development of life. But what is the source of that information? Could it have been produced by an unguided Darwinian process? Or did it require intelligent design?

The Information Enigma is a fascinating 21-minute documentary that probes the mystery of biological information, the challenge it poses to orthodox Darwinian theory, and the reason it points to intelligent design.

The video below features molecular biologist Douglas Axe and Stephen Meyer, author of the books Darwin’s Doubt and Signature in the Cell.

Stephen C. Meyer:

Whenever we find information, especially information in a digital or typographic form, and when we trace it back to its ultimate source, we always come to a mind, not a material process. So the discovery that information is running the show in life, the discovery that there are huge infusions in the flow of in the history of life such as the one that occurs in the Cambrian explosion suggests that a designing intelligence has played a role in the history of life.

And it also suggests to me that it is possible to formulate a scientific case for Intelligent Design based on the same scientific method of reasoning that Charles Darwin had used in the Origin of the Species. So if you want to say that Intelligent Design is not science, then you would have to say that the Darwinian argument in Origin of the Species is also no science but nobody wants to say that. Darwin is not using an unscientific method, he is just using a different method of scientific reasoning, a historical method of reasoning, and I use that exact same method in formulating the positive case for Intelligent Design in both Darwin’s Doubt and Signature in the Cell.

Russia Fights for Christianity in Syria, the US Fights Against It

16 Comments

Source: Russia Insider

This article originally appeared at Frontpage Magazine

By Raymond Ibrahim

The Orthodox Christian Church, which is reclaiming its traditional role in post-Soviet Russia, has just described its government’s fight against the Islamic State and other jihadi groups in Syria as a “holy war.”

According to Vsevolod Chaplin, head of the Church’s Public Affairs Department,

The fight with terrorism is a holy battle and today our country is perhaps the most active force in the world fighting it. The Russian Federation has made a responsible decision on the use of armed forces to defend the People of Syria from the sorrows caused by the arbitrariness of terrorists. Christians are suffering in the region with the kidnapping of clerics and the destruction of churches. Muslims are suffering no less.

This is not a pretext to justify intervention in Syria. For years, Russia’s Orthodox leaders have been voicing their concern for persecuted Christians. Back in February 2012, the Russian church described to Vladimir Putin the horrific treatment Christians are experiencing around the world, especially under Islam:

The head of External Church Relations, Metropolitan Illarion, said that every five minutes one Christian was dying for his or her faith in some part of the world, specifying that he was talking about such countries as Iraq, Egypt, Pakistan and India. The cleric asked Putin to make the protection of Christians one of the foreign policy directions in future.

“This is how it will be, have no doubt,” Putin answered.

Compare and contrast Putin’s terse response with U.S. President Obama, who denies the connection between Islamic teachings and violence; whose policies habitually empower Christian-persecuting Islamists; who prevents Christian representatives from testifying against their tormentors; and who even throws escaped Christian refugees back to the lions, while accepting tens of thousands of Muslim migrants.

Russian Patriarch Kirill once even wrote an impassioned letter to Obama, imploring him to stop empowering the murderers of Christians. That the patriarch said “I am deeply convinced that the countries which belong to the Christian civilization bear a special responsibility for the fate of Christians in the Middle East” must have only ensured that the letter ended up in the Oval Office’s trash can. After all, didn’t Obama make clear that America is “no longer a Christian nation“?

Of course, Russian concerns for Christian minorities will be cynically dismissed by the insufferable talking heads on both sides. While such dismissals once resonated with Americans, they are becoming less persuasive to those paying attention, as explained in “Putin’s Crusade—Is Russia the Last Defender of the Christian Faith?”

For those of us who grew up in America being told that the godless communist atheists in Russia were our enemies, the idea that America might give up on God and Christianity while Russia embraces religion might once have been difficult to accept. But by 2015, the everyday signs in America show a growing contempt for Christianity, under the first president whose very claims of being a Christian are questionable. The exact opposite trend is happening for Russia and its leaders—a return to Christian roots.

Indeed, growing numbers of Americans who have no special love for Russia or Orthodoxy—from billionaire capitalist Donald Trump to evangelical Christians—are being won over by Putin’s frank talk and actions.

How can they not? After one of his speeches praising the West’s Christian heritage—a thing few American politicians dare do—Putin concluded with something that must surely resonate with millions of traditional Americans: “We must protect Russia from that which has destroyed American society”—a reference to the anti-Christian liberalism and licentiousness that has run amok in the West.

Even the Rev. Franklin Graham’s response to Russia’s military intervention in Syria seems uncharacteristically positive, coming as it is from the head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, which for decades spoke against the godless Soviets: “What Russia is doing may save the lives of Christians in the Middle East…. You understand that the Syrian government … have protected Christians, they have protected minorities from the Islamists.”

Should U.S supported jihadis (“rebels”) succeed in toppling the government of Syria, Graham correctly predicts that there will be “a bloodbath of Christians”:

There would be tens of thousands of Christians murdered and slaughtered and on top of that, you would have hundreds of thousands of more refugees pouring into Europe. So Russia right now, I see their presence as helping to save the lives of Christians.

Incidentally, it’s an established fact that the “good rebels”—or “moderates”—are persecuting Christians no less than the Islamic State.

When asked why the Obama administration is so callous towards the plight of persecuted Christians, Graham, somewhat echoing Putin, said the American president was more invested in promoting the homosexual agenda than he is in protecting Christians:

I’m not here to bash the gays and lesbians and they certainly have rights and I understand all of that, but this administration has been more focused on that agenda than anything else. As a result, the Middle East is burning and you have more refugees moving today since World War II. It could have been prevented.

In reality, it’s not Russian claims of waging a holy war to save Christians from the sword of jihad that deserves to be cynically dismissed, but rather every claim the Obama administration makes to justify its support for the opposition in Syria (most of which is not even Syrian).

There are no “moderate rebels,” only committed jihadis eager to install Islamic law, which is the antithesis of everything the West once held precious. If the “evil dictator” Assad kills people in the context of war, the “rebels” torture, maim, enslave, rape, behead, and crucify people solely because they are Christian.

How does that make them preferable to Assad?

Moreover, based on established precedent—look to Iraq and Libya, the other countries U.S. leadership helped “liberate”—the outcome of ousting the secular strongman of Syria will be more atrocities, more Christian persecution, more rapes and enslavement, and more bombed churches and destroyed antiquities, despite John Kerry’s absurd assurances of a “pluralistic” Syria once Assad is gone. It will also mean more terrorism for the West.

Once again, then, the U.S. finds itself on the side of Islamic terrorists, who always reserve their best for America. The Saudis—the head of the Jihadi Snake which U.S. presidents are wont to kiss and bow to—are already screaming bloody murder and calling for an increased jihad in Syria in response to Russia’s holy war.

Will Obama and the MSM comply, including through an increased propaganda campaign? Top Islamic clerics like Yusuf al-Qaradawi—who once slipped on live television by calling on the Obama administration to wage “jihad for Allah” against Assad—seem to think so. Already the U.S. “welcomes” the new cruel joke that Saudi Arabia, one of the absolute worst human rights violators, will head a U.N. human rights panel.

At day’s end and all Realpolitik aside, there is no denying reality: what the United States and its Western allies have wrought in the Middle East—culminating with the rise of a bloodthirsty caliphate and the worst atrocities of the 21st century—is as unholy as Russia’s resolve to fight it is holy.

Why Our Medical Elite Support Planned Parenthood

1 Comment

Source: Ancient Faith Radio

By Wesley J. Smith

It’s not only fetuses and babies that are viewed broadly in bioethics as “killable” and perhaps even “harvestable.” There is increasing advocacy, although it is important to emphasize that this is not yet happening, for killing those with profound cognitive impairments for their organs. I could adduce many samples of this advocacy, but space only permits one typical example, published not irrelevantly in The New England Journal of Medicine.

If you think it is respectable to consider babies, whether born or unborn, to be an inferior stage of human life, you can easily come to think that they have few rights that fully developed persons are bound to respect.

Listen here:

Transcript

The New England Journal of Medicine recently published a scathing editorial about Planned Parenthood’s harvesting of fetal tissues. No, the editorial didn’t criticize the organization for discrediting scientific research by killing fetuses in a “less crunchy” manner, as one executive put it, to obtain intact organs. Rather, using the highly emotive language of ideological pro-abortion activism, it attacked the messenger as “radical anti-choice” for supposedly engaging in a “campaign of misinformation” for vividly revealing the cruel practices and attitudes of top Planned Parenthood abortionists.

The New England Journal of Medicine is supposed to be an evidence-based journal, but the editorialist didn’t even try to grapple with the actual contents of the video’s release by the Center for Medical Progress, and indeed forgot to mention in their charge that the tapes “twist the truth” that the unedited originals were all released concomitantly with the edited versions, allowing for full scrutiny. Instead, the editorialists resort to the usual bromide that fetal-tissue research could lead to cures as they simply assert that Planned Parenthood follows proper ethical guidelines—all without offering any truth to rebut the contrary evidence on the tapes. They conclude:

We thank the women who made the choice to help improve the human condition through their tissue donation. We applaud the people who make this work possible and those who use these materials to advance human health. We are outraged by those who debase these women, this work, and Planned Parenthood by distorting the facts for political ends.

Technical point: The tissue in question isn’t that of the woman. It is—was—the fetus’s. Whatever one thinks of fetal-tissue research, obtaining the specimens isn’t the same as creating a cell line from an excised tumor. Moreover, utility does not justify all things. Good ethics and respect for the intrinsic value of human life are integral to a science sector supported widely by the public.

The journal’s editorialist is just one small example of how highly ideological our medical intelligentsia have become and how increasingly accepting of morally objectionable practices. To understand why this might be, why venerable medical and bioethics journals are generally supportive of controversial policy agendas such as assisted suicide and medical rationing, we have to explore the ideas that now animate the field of bioethics.

Most bioethicists, at least those without a modifier like “conservative” in front of the term, are reluctant to clearly define the boundaries that designate when human life becomes morally relevant. That leaves some of the most extreme voices in the public advocacy driver’s seat. Thus a predominant view in bioethics endorses an invidiously discriminatory approach to valuing life based on each individual’s measurable cognitive capacities.

In this view, those who are demonstrably, say, self-aware over time or able to value their own lives are deemed “persons.” Those insufficiently mature—embryos, fetuses, infants—or those who have lost those capacities, due to illnesses or injuries such as Terry Schiavo or Alzheimer’s patients, are denigrated as “non-persons.” Making matters worse, so-called human non-persons are held to have lesser worth than the rest of us.

Not only that, but under this philosophical construct, non-persons don’t have the right to life. Thus, the right to abortion is not only about protecting a woman’s right to do as she pleases with her own body; rather, abortion is also acceptable because the fetus is not deemed a person. And, indeed, for many in the field, this means that infanticide should also be allowed, and for the same reasons as abortion.

Here’s just one example. A few years ago, an article published in the Journal of Medical Ethics caused a public furor when it advocated for the propriety of what it called “after-birth abortion.” The authors inflate the scope of personal autonomy that protects what is often blandly called the “woman’s right to choose”—choose what usually goes unsaid—to a putative right not to be personally inconvenienced by an infant or the child she will later become. Thus, since an abortion can be obtained for convenience purposes and since newborns are no more persons than are fetuses, babies should also be killable, and one presumes harvestable, just as the unborn are abortable.

Here is how the authors describe their argument:

Abortion is largely accepted, even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus’s health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual status as persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant, and (3) adoption is not always in the best interests of actual people, the authors argue that what we call “after-birth abortion” (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled.

Since a baby isn’t a person, the authors opined, not only personal aims, but also well-developed plans of parents, sibling, and—get this—society “should represent the prevailing consideration in a decision about abortion and after-birth abortion.”

It’s not only fetuses and babies that are viewed broadly in bioethics as “killable” and perhaps even “harvestable.” There is increasing advocacy, although it is important to emphasize that this is not yet happening, for killing those with profound cognitive impairments for their organs. I could adduce many samples of this advocacy, but space only permits one typical example, published not irrelevantly in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Many will object to transplantation surgeons cannot legally or ethically remove vital organs from patients before death since doing so will cause their death. Whether death actually occurs as the result of ventilator withdrawal or organ procurement, the ethically relevant precondition is valid consent by the patient or surrogate. With such consent, there is no harm or wrong done in retrieving vital organs before death, provided that anesthesia is administered.

So now we can see why those who presume to possess the greatest ethical expertise in the biomedical field are not leading the charge against Planned Parenthood’s crass attitudes towards and dismemberment of fetuses to obtain salable parts.

If you are interested in exploring these themes from an explicitly Orthodox perspective, I highly recommend the writing of Fr. John Breck. My Twitter address is @forcedexit. I also invite you to check out the Center for Human Exceptionalism at the Discovery Institute, of which I am the co-director. We can be found at www.discovery.org, where I can also be contacted.

Wesley J. Smith

Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism. A revised and updated version of his award winning Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America will be released by Encounter Books next year.

Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function nuthemes_content_nav() in /home/aoiusa/public_html/wp-content/themes/prose/archive.php:58 Stack trace: #0 /home/aoiusa/public_html/wp-includes/template-loader.php(106): include() #1 /home/aoiusa/public_html/wp-blog-header.php(19): require_once('/home/aoiusa/pu...') #2 /home/aoiusa/public_html/index.php(17): require('/home/aoiusa/pu...') #3 {main} thrown in /home/aoiusa/public_html/wp-content/themes/prose/archive.php on line 58