Harry, yes, Bp. Gerasimos made the mistake of drawing a false distinction between “secular” and Christian morality in an early interview, but to his credit he co-authored a statement with other Orthodox Bishops affirming heterosexual marriage during the California Proposition 8 wars a year back or so.
The mistake may have been due to unfamiliarity with dealing with the press.
]]>George, the corruption of education in America began long before 1960. The importation of the Prussian System in the 1850’s by Horace Mann, et.al. along with its philosphy that the children’s minds belonged to the state, the regimentation and particularization of learning had a lot to do with it. Mr. Mann especially wanted to erase any influence that Christianity had over schools thanks to his experience of the iconoclastic everything-is-evil brand of so-called Christianity in his native Massachusettes. Public education has always been about thought control. The only reason it hasn’t been more sucessful is because of the many fine teachers who actually teach not only their subject but a love of learning and how to think. However, caught in a system that degrades thought, they are doomed to ultimate failure.
Many years ago I was shown the graduation exam required of all 8th grade students in Salina Kansas in the 1870’s. I could not have passed it.
]]>We see in countries with ‘one size fits all’ ‘government ordered’ care that there is no ability to appreciate the sometimes huge value from seemingly small differences which are too small to make it into ‘the regulations’ — or if they did make it into ‘the regulations’ there are so many regulations that no actual human being making decisions around the point of ‘one size fits all’ care can know them and operate from them. Catch a cancer one month early and the patient returns to normal life at little cost. One month late and it’s huge expense and a lifetime of treatment. Two months late and it’s a cost effective hospice — effective if you are the single-payer that is…
The result is only those fit and able enough to ‘fight the system’ will locate the obscure helpful regulation and complain ‘up the chain’ of decision makers until ‘it is recognized’ what was to have been done ‘from day 1’ and then order the remedy which calls for a ‘requisition process’ that takes another ‘fiscal cycle’ while all claim to being ‘very sorry’ at every level as if that was the same thing as ‘making changes and acting as if being very sorry meant something good happens now’.
I marvel at the truth many politicians betray unknowingling when their party controls ‘the system’ and yet they campaign on ‘fighting (the system) for you’. Plainly they know in their hearts that ‘the system’ they grow and maintain is for itself first in your name.
The one thing we need is for local decision makers to have latitude and discretion and the one thing political systems in one-size-fits-all care can’t have is to give unelected decision makers latitude and discretion. Various local groups arranged as hospitals and doctors alliances and whatnot all compete within their economic means to fill the cracks and make allowances to serve as best they might.
Plainly we see risks that some over-reach and cheat and steal and so forth but one hopes the unprofitable long term nature of that will weed such out.
Still and all– it remains that the business model values sustained relationships with customers while the best and highest medical model should aim at an un-economical one-time fix over against a lifetime of being ‘on’ this or that drug. Real health care reform ought to create big rewards for one-time fixes to what now are long term problems. Cells that are injected once to produce insulin. Drugs that applied once reduce stomach acid overproduction. Drugs that down-regulate appetite permanentl to healthy levels not ‘daily diet aids’, etc.
]]>1) I am expert in “social programs,” previously as a paraprofessional, and currently as a “dependent,” ** and they _never_ tell “dependents” which party initiated them or protected them when threatened. Such politicking by a government employee would get him or her disciplined if not fired. “Social program” workers are keenly aware that Republicans sometimes have “bad luck” too!
(**–specifically, a multiply-disabled person currently prevented from working by my disabilities)
2) Given the choice between “dependency” (even dealing with the “programs'” inanities, and not infrequent incompetence among their administrators) and death, I have enthusiastically chosen the former.
2a) I would be open to true alternatives.
Sincerely,
Leo Peter
The “Orthodox Condition” that I have grown up with is alive and well. However, the situation with FOCUS is something that I was not aware of. Perhaps our needy-poor aren’t qualified for the indigenous – Orthodox alms?
We continue to step over Lazarus while we enter our marble Cathedrals and allow our youth to be put in the furnace before they even swallow their first breath. Lord have mercy, I definitely bear some responsibility!
On another thread, I read about a certain priest (who never stepped over Lazarus) to speak to another unfortunate orthodox condition that has just recently developed; he emplores that we all need to “press the reset button” i.e. repentent, and how the Orthodox Church provides the best possible environment for this, that is when we remember our Precepts.
Rumore has it that this priest was defrocked for this, so peharps some have forgotten to “press reset”?
Regardless, I think that’s an ingenius market piece that the Church could use. Chalk that up for TWO Youth ministry T-shirt ideas: “Press the Reset Button” and “Break the Equivocation” 😉
]]>Fr. Hans– reading that NPR bit you quoted above brought to mind now Met. Gerasimos of the GOA’s western multi-state ‘metropolis’. Remember when he said, when about to be the bishop of the Orthodox church, ‘gays have a right to civil marriage though the church would never sanctify it.’
Here a bishop endorses a thing to happen outside his church walls that he can’t endorse within them.
It is a fact known in all reasoning and logical circles that once a direct contradiction is accepted as being as ‘so’ among whatever else in the basket of tenets and affirmations and findings– it becomes an easy matter for a practiced person ‘to prove’ any result desired.
Reminds me of the canonists who when consulted by the bishop with a question begin by asking how the bishop prefers the result.
—
There’s a famous demonstration of it in the mathematical world that ends with proving two different numbers equal one another. It silently makes use of a very well hidden division by 0. Look here:
a = b
a2 = ab
a2 – b2 = ab-b2
(a-b)(a+b) = b(a-b)
a+b = b
b+b = b
2b = b
2 = 1
Chris, I got an even better question for Bishop Savas: since he has such a compassionate resolution towards helping the poor, then why doesn’t he tell the GOA hierarchy to support FOCUS? Or at least stop harrassing them?
]]>The entire piece reveals sloppy moral reasoning.
It’s true that people can disagree on how the law should respond to the question of abortion. Pro-lifers argue about this all the time. It is not true that the fact these arguments exist requires us to redefine the moral tradition in relativistic terms in order to assure pro-choicers that the Orthodox teaching is not part of the “fundamentalist right.”
The pro-abortion crowd will never accept the pro-lifer. There is no middle ground. To accept that the unborn have inherent life delegitimizes the entire pro-abortion project and thus cannot be tolerated.
The reasoning reads like it was written by an American seeking to appease the pro-abortion left — from the borrowed cliches, to the implicit affirmation that religious leaders have no express authority in family matters, to the veiled appeal for acceptance that the affirmation hopes to engender.
You can almost hear the voice of an NPR or MSNBC reporter in the background: “You should listen to the Orthodox. They sure are open-minded for a religious sect.”
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