K
Khalid
Guest
The Roman Catholic Church does happen to view some Orthodox teachings as heretical - not all the ones I don’t like, such as Palamism, hesychism, mysticism, essence-energies, lack of filioque, etc., but the Orthodox Church does teach that the Holy Father is not the Holy Father, and is not infallible, and rejects the last 14 Ecumenical Councils, while having performed some ecumenical councils (called by a different name, like Constantinople 5/the Hesychast Councils) of their own. I believe this is heresy.
I don’t mean to judge Orthodoxy, but to speak the truth about it: it is ethnic, it has been crushed by Mahometans since the sack of Constantinople in 1453, they practise the self-hypnosis called hesychasm and call it prayer…
To clarify, as well, what I mean by “Byzantine theology is dead”, is that in the Orthodox churches at least - I don’t know if there’s a different tradition amongst Eastern Catholics - there is no place for logic, rationality, and proper philosophical (or Thomist) theology, as they are “corrupt Western imports and influences”, “destroy the therapeutic tradition of [happy go-lucky, don’t try to test it, Easter Bunny] belief in our religion”, “make the Catholic church too institutionalised compared to the beautiful organic-ness of the Orthodox church”, etc. (direct quotes out of memory from my previous church - which was Orthodox) and only the self-hypnotic “vision of God” is considered “correct theology”.
The only other religion that dislikes the West and everything that comes from it and hates any improvement or innovation more than Eastern Orthodoxy is Mahometanism, and in Mahometanism, you see a complete hatred of everything even slightly Western (even stuff that doesn’t have to do with religion, like computers, our automobiles, or the printing press, whereas Orthodoxy generally accepts these things), and a complete hatred (it carries the death penalty in most Mahometan countries) for any, even the slightest, improvement or change in religion - so Mahometanism on the whole seems to be stuck back in the bellicose, paedophilic 7th century tribal Arabian Peninsula.
Now, Orthodoxy isn’t nearly this bad (to borrow an expression, on a scale of 0 to 100, 0 being bad and 100 being good, if Islam is a 0, Orthodoxy is somewhere in the 60s or 70s) but it has a similar penchant for worshiping the past for the past’s own sake, and rejecting any and all outside influences as necessarily evil: I am trying to use this as an illustration, that when the past becomes the “glorious past” just because of nostalgia, and strict conservatism is held to for no reason other than to be conservative, and it begins to drive a separation or schism from the rest of the world, or the rest of religion, that accepts small amounts of change and doesn’t rest on it’s laurels, taken to an extreme as such, is not healthy, but is lethal to the tradition that maintains it.
