James Mattis’s Final Protest Against the President

[☦Marius☦]

the Christians in Syria

You mean the Christians under Assad who is allied with Russia?

 

[SoldierOfTheKing]

If so, it's hard to understand how Iraq ordered the U.S. to adhere to the Bush commitment to leave, even though Obama knew it was important to stay.

Because Obama campaigned on opposition to the war in Iraq, which public opinion had turned against. That's why he won the election and not McCain. Even if your suggestion that he secretly supported staying were accurate, it would have been political suicide to do so. The government of Iraq was place in power by US troops, that's a historical fact, no "if so" about it.

Not if you're Putin or ISIS.

Not if you're an American who's tired of endless intervention in the Middle East, tired of seeing the troops used for anything and everything except defending our borders, which judging by the results of the last three presidential elections is most Americans. People like Mattis are the reason why it's taking so long for US policy to catch up with public opinion. Catching up it is though. People can only put up with so many garbage excuses as to why we need to wait till tomorrow to pull out, when tomorrow never comes. For an intervention never even authorized by Congress, at that.

 

[The Barbarian]

I know what hypocrisy means, You want to call out Orthodoxy on all kinds of false pretenses,

Nonsense. As one of the true apostolic churches, Orthodoxy is within the Body of Christ. It has been no more corrupt than the Catholic Church has been. And while the Russian Orthodox Church was heavily infiltrated by Soviet agents, the Church really had little choice in the matter. Likely they had no idea how many Soviet agents were there, and how many of Putin's people are now there.

even though the things you are accusing the OC of are things the RCC is even more guilty of. That is hypocrisy.

I pointed out that the Church was very corrupt in Medieval centuries. You seem to have ignored that. I was as quick to criticize my denomination as I was to criticize yours. But you weren't.

Since I hadn't gone on the offensive (until the last few posts), and not making any accusatory statements, I was therefore not being hypocritical.

See above. If you were as willing to accept the truth about your denomination as I am about mine, no one could call you hypocritical.

Caps do not equal screaming by the way.

“All-capitals provide visibility—maximum size within a given area,” said Luna. And that works online, too. “All-caps in an email looks like shouting because when someone is shouting, you’re aware of the shout, and not the nuance,” Luna told me over email. “ALL-CAPS FILL THE SPACE, so there’s an element of feeling that the message is crowding out everything else.”

If typing in all caps is a lazy way of yelling—a crutch for the angry and inarticulate—then the keyboard is complicit: The “caps lock” key makes it unreasonably easy for us to be rude (even, sometimes, inadvertently).
How Capital Letters Became Internet Code for Yelling

Government in religion does not always corrupt religion, unless your religion is weak.

Sorry, that's just wrong. It always corrupts religion. The many corruptions of Byzantine politics against the Church include the hertical iconoclastic policies of Leo III.

 

[The Barbarian]

You mean the Christians under Assad who is allied with Russia?

The Christians in Syria whom Assad is attacking.

Last week, during a markup of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Congressman Dana Rohrabacher asserted that the Assad regime was “the protector of the Christians” in Syria.

As Syrian Christians who grew up in Syria, we would beg to differ. Hundreds of innocent Christians seeking freedom have been tortured to death in Assad’s jails or shot to death by his brutal thugs – including the activist Bassel Shehadeh, who was killed at a protest, then killed in spirit because Assad forces prevented his friends from going to church to pray for his soul. Human rights lawyer Khalil Maatouk has been detained in Assad’s jails in Damascus for over four years for the “crime” of defending detainees in Assad’s jails.

These anecdotes are not new and are not isolated incidents. Christians never had true freedom of religion under the Assad regime; for decades, it used a mixture of incentives and threats to tightly control Christian clergy and ensure that they were not free to speak their mind. Christians were much more free before Assad took power, when Protestant Christian Fares al-Khouri was elected prime minister of Syria in democratic elections in 1954. But under Assad, Rohrbacher might be surprised to know, Christians are legally banned from becoming the head of state.
...
Many Christians have been killed by Assad’s indiscriminate barrel bombs and aerial attacks in the past six years most notably many who were bombed to death by Assad warplanes and attacked by Hezbollah in Yabroud, a mixed Christian-Muslim town along the Lebanese border that was a bright spot for interfaith relations among Syrians after it was liberated from Assad in 2012.
...
Privately, many Christian leaders who have defended Assad’s regime and Hezbollah in trips to Western countries have met with us and sent us messages for the past few years explaining to us how they’d been coerced to do so by the regime.
Don't be fooled: Assad is no friend of Syria's Christian minorities

 

[☦Marius☦]

Sorry, that's just wrong. It always corrupts religion. The many corruptions of Byzantine politics against the Church include the hertical iconoclastic policies of Leo III.

The iconoclast policies were defeated by the legitimate Church in an ecumenical council thus proving my point that no secular leader can corrupt Orthodoxy. It is the rock. Now that does not mean there are not corrupt people in the Church. Just as Christ was human and divine so is the church. But those corrupt people cannot change the church and therefore cannot corrupt it.

 

[☦Marius☦]

 

[☦Marius☦]

 

[The Barbarian]

The iconoclast policies were defeated by the legitimate Church in an ecumenical council thus proving my point that no secular leader can corrupt Orthodoxy.

But he did.

Now that does not mean there are not corrupt people in the Church. Just as Christ was human and divine so is the church. But those corrupt people cannot change the church and therefore cannot corrupt it.

But they did. That it later recovered is no doubt a matter of divine providence. But the fact remains.

 

[☦Marius☦]

But he did.



But they did. That it later recovered is no doubt a matter of divine providence. But the fact remains.

No they didn't. Installing a heretical patriarch and excommunicating everyone who opposed is creating a new Church. That patriarch had no authority. The Church went into hiding temporarily until an Orthodox Emperor was back in power. There was no recovery necessary because the True Orthodox Church still existed in various regions outside the Emperors grasp.

You cannot have a change like that without an Ecumenical council.