Discord Spillover Was "The Place of Blessed Augustine in the Orthodox Church"

[Unseen.Warfare]

Indeed, there's no reason for you to listen to some random guy on the Internet. Although, perhaps when multiple people are pointing out the same thing, you should consider the possibility of there being at least an element of truth in the claims.

As for Esphigmenou, I have close friends that have been there and personally witnessed their excessive zeal and delusion, and so them expelling a bishop for possessing a credit card is not at all difficult for me to believe. I'm not denying that there were additional reasons for ceasing commemoration.

Holding off on getting baptised was a practice that was never endorsed by the Church, despite it happening. Let's not start with deceptive argumentation.

Deceptive argumentation? I didn’t just pull this information out of the air. That was the practice. The early church waited until the end of their lives. I got that information from clergy. Don’t accuse me of something if you just aren’t aware of it.

The story I heard from a biased source is that they broke communion with the GOC-k because one of the bishops visited with a credit card. Now, sure that might sound excessive to a secular person. But, it’s undeniable that most of these banks and corporations are controlled by satanic organizations. I just posted about that on my bohemian grove post. Now that probably would seem paranoid to most people. But, we are talking about monks here who understand the art of unseen warfare and have died to the world. I can’t say either way if they are right or wrong. It’s definitely not something I would be so sure of that I would think that I could make a definitive judgement on. What’s the possibility that what you think is foolishness and paranoia is god given discernment. Because we know the wisdom of this world is foolishness to God.

[AaronC]

Thats not my point.....
I know the practise occurred, but it was not approved of by the Church. It wasn't common either as far as I'm aware. Happy to be corrected.

You're being deceptive because the argument is irrelevant. Anyway, I digress. It seems a number of people have told you the same thing but you'd rather trust yourself and believe that everyone is out to get you. Maybe focus on your spiritual life instead of whining and calling people narcissists on the Internet.

[Unseen.Warfare]

Thats not my point.....
I know the practise occurred, but it was not approved of by the Church. It wasn't common either as far as I'm aware. Happy to be corrected.

You're being deceptive because the argument is irrelevant. Anyway, I digress. It seems a number of people have told you the same thing but you'd rather trust yourself and believe that everyone is out to get you. Maybe focus on your spiritual life instead of whining and calling people narcissists on the Internet.

The argument isn’t irrelevant and it was practiced by the church. It’s only irrelevant because it proves your view is stupid. A number of people that are parroting each other that are all apart of the same group of people. “Everyone isn’t out to get you”. Next thing you do is throw an insult over the internet yourself. You dudes love to dish it out.
Crying right. Seems like you’re crying you got put in your place and are likely lying anyways about your “friend”. Next

Instead of telling me to worry about my spiritual life. Why aren’t you worrying about yours? Right. Very similar attitude to your boy you’ve come to defend. “I hope he repents”. Get off me.

If you knew it was practiced you wouldn’t have made the comment in the first place. Do you know why it was practiced? Because people looked at it like a life time of sin would have been erased at the baptism so they waited. I am not the one.

“In early Christianity, some people delayed baptism until later in life because they believed that baptism only cleansed sin once. They thought that committing any meaningful sins after baptism could jeopardize their salvation. For example, Constantine delayed his baptism until his deathbed in the fourth century. St. Augustine also delayed his baptism after falling seriously ill.”

[Bruder Klaus]

@moderator

While there is a disagreement here, I have always erred on the side of caution when it comes to moderation. I am not privy to (a) what happened on the Discord (I'm not on any servers myself and plan to keep it that way) (b) anything else that precipitated a conflict. I'm not going to get into the Platina vs HTM thing; that's been beaten to death in the past, and most of the living involved have since made peace, but none would deny that there was a real conflict that occurred.

However, neither side in this case has done anything to merit discipline. No one's cursing at each other or hurling invective that has been on this site for 20 years now. I would expect any thread with "Blessed Augustine" in the title over the past two decades to produce similar results here. My only advice for both sides is to work it out over private message. But I'm not going to discipline Unseen or Theodore. The truth comes out, one way or another.

In Christ
Fr Joseph
a humble mod

Could you please close the thread? Thank you!

[Suaidan]

[Could you please close the thread? Thank you!

As you can see, the argument thread is now a new topic and the book topic is on its own. Why? Because this was no longer about the topic in the thread. You guys want to continue to argue about Discord etc? Feel free right here.

[Niles_The_New]

Esphigmenou is no longer part of the GOC-K? What happened, and how did a credit card get involved?

[ByzantophileTheodore]

Thats not my point.....
I know the practise occurred, but it was not approved of by the Church. It wasn't common either as far as I'm aware. Happy to be corrected.

You're being deceptive because the argument is irrelevant. Anyway, I digress. It seems a number of people have told you the same thing but you'd rather trust yourself and believe that everyone is out to get you. Maybe focus on your spiritual life instead of whining and calling people narcissists on the Internet.

Very true.

There’s a certain type of guy today who has never been baptized but who considers himself an expert apologist of Orthodoxy from reading a lot of books or listening to podcasts. This is only intellectual knowledge and not wisdom or experience. They have very little self-awareness about how this comes off and how little good it does. In fact, it does considerable harm. These guys jump into polemics with both feet and talk a big game on the internet, but it’s all theory which is the easy part of Orthodoxy. When others don’t give them the validation they want, they lash out. Many of them end up in apostasy because they had no guidance to begin with. I’ve seen it again and again with good friends who eventually left TO or WO or just never got baptized to begin with. This is a huge problem in both TO and WO circles. Many people don’t give our faith the time of day partially because of their bad experiences with this type of person. If we tolerate this and don’t call it out, we are consequently teaching and condoning it.

This type talks a lot of trash and has little respect. The keyboard warrior stuff is on display here. I’m not going to rise to the bait and reciprocate in kind as this stuff is a frankly an embarrassment to our Church. God and His Church will not be mocked. I will say this:

It’s not masculine to slander someone as “feminine” or having “boyfriends” over a computer screen. I invite Unseen to come visit me in [redacted] and say these slanders to my face. It’s a small town and easy to find me.

That’s simply a wake-up call to Unseen or anyone else who is doing similar things: this is not what Orthodox Christianity is about. I’m no teacher of the faith but I know that much for sure.

None of us are perfect or super-pious. I often make mistakes and have had to apologize to many people along my journey. I’m very glad they called me out and held my feet to the fire, and I hope they always will. Unseen may hate me now for giving him brutal honesty, but I hope he takes it to heart one day.