"Moral Jobs" that are "safe" for Orthodox?

[Not David]

As a young adult, I got to say it might be difficult, even in Politics when you have Republicans supporting a transgender person like Bruce Jenner. Working at Chick-Fill-A, maybe?

 

[SamanthaAnastasia]

You mean like how psychologists call whiteness a disease? How whites farmers were denied services just because they were whites? How "Nazi" and "Fascist" refers only to white people who do not agree with attacks toward their group?

If it were any other group, everyone else will be calling it out as a precursor to genocide, but since it is white people, then it is a terrible thing.

lol most people I’ve seen outside of the US (who aren’t mono ethnic states) don’t understand the US obsession with race.

Are you talking about the research paper On Having Whiteness by Dr. Donald Moss? It’s the one where it talks about whiteness being a disease. lol ironically he’s white. And he was a psychoanalyst. Which in the field of psychiatry, psychiatrist believe psychoanalysts (not the same as therapists or psychotherapists) are on the same level as witchdoctors and new age cultists lol

Even liberals and leftists think Dr. Donald Moss is insane.
https://www.reddit.com/r/moderatepo...urce=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf

https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/c...urce=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf

Quote from a redditor “I am pretty damn far left (one of the leftiest people I know) and this abstract makes me want to vomit”.

And they are. They say replace white with Jew and see what it sounds like.

Or do you mean Dr. Aruna Khilanani when she gave her lecture “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind,” at the Yale University’s School of Medicine?

Cause even liberal and leftist (liberals and leftists are two different groups lol) think she’s a psycho.

Quote from a Redditor, “Wow. And this is from Yale? I'm pretty liberal but this is disgusting. I'm shocked that fox news hasn't picked up on this and put this doctor on blast. She should never be allowed to teach again” (though she was a guest speaker)

https://www.reddit.com/r/Everything...urce=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf

And the USDA and the farming sector has more and larger issues than just race-based loans meant to help out minority farmers.
China is buying up US farmland, a Chinese company owns 146,000 acres of prime U.S. farmland (just from a 2013 sale alone). Other countries buy up US farmland, too.
Not to mention US companies. And a handful of families.
Less than a quarter of US farms are small and medium sized operations.
Farming in the US has become a monopoly.
Caring about race with this issue is missing the point.

oh and the whole calling people a “nazi” or a “fascist” if they disagree with you?

Okay. I’m a US citizen. My maternal grandmother is from Germany, she lived through WWII. Growing up, if my mom and I got into a fight: guess what I did?
If you guess that I called my mother a “nazi” because I was a horrible little goblin child who wanted to use the shortest, meanest word that was able to hurt my mother the fastest, than you get 100 points and a brand new car!

My dad is part Korean and part Japanese. Going up if my dad was being a misogynist (I don’t use that term lightly; he has paid for prostitutes giving the excuse that it was a different time for example), can you guess what I did? If you guess that I, as a bog-dwelling horrid hobgoblin told my father that he was a comfort women loving fascist then ding-ding! You win a vacation to Fiji!

I’m 33 now and feel awful about calling my parents those things when I was a teenager.
But just know this: if my mother was from a ex-Soviet country, I would have called them commies. If my dad was Vietnamese, I would have called him something else that you normally hear in Vietnam war movies. The list goes on.

The point is that people are going to use words that they know are going to hurt you.

It doesn’t matter. With these extremists, I pull the same thing I did when I met actual white racists in the back woods of NC when they tried to make actual ignorant remarks about so-and-so ethnic groups of Asians were.
“You know I’m not white, right?”.
Same thing in reverse.
Talking about how bad white is:
“You know I’m part white, right?”
Oh the looks on all their faces.

And for white Americans who don’t have direct ties to their ethnic European ancestry. Just call yourself American. “I’m not white; I’m a US citizen”. If they persist calling you white, I would say reply “If you say so” and let it be that.

The best advice I can give is ignore it.
Laugh back with that one vine’s lines, “Welcome to Bible study! We’re all children of Jesus! Kumbaya my Lord!” and strangely run away.

 

[SamanthaAnastasia]

lol most people I’ve seen outside of the US (who aren’t mono ethnic states) don’t understand the US obsession with race.

Are you talking about the research paper On Having Whiteness by Dr. Donald Moss? It’s the one where it talks about whiteness being a disease. lol ironically he’s white. And he was a psychoanalyst. Which in the field of psychiatry, psychiatrist believe psychoanalysts (not the same as therapists or psychotherapists) are on the same level as witchdoctors and new age cultists lol

Even liberals and leftists think Dr. Donald Moss is insane.
https://www.reddit.com/r/moderatepo...urce=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf

https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/c...urce=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf

Quote from a redditor “I am pretty damn far left (one of the leftiest people I know) and this abstract makes me want to vomit”.

And they are. They say replace white with Jew and see what it sounds like.

Or do you mean Dr. Aruna Khilanani when she gave her lecture “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind,” at the Yale University’s School of Medicine?

Cause even liberal and leftist (liberals and leftists are two different groups lol) think she’s a psycho.

Quote from a Redditor, “Wow. And this is from Yale? I'm pretty liberal but this is disgusting. I'm shocked that fox news hasn't picked up on this and put this doctor on blast. She should never be allowed to teach again” (though she was a guest speaker)

https://www.reddit.com/r/Everything...urce=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf

And the USDA and the farming sector has more and larger issues than just race-based loans meant to help out minority farmers.
China is buying up US farmland, a Chinese company owns 146,000 acres of prime U.S. farmland (just from a 2013 sale alone). Other countries buy up US farmland, too.
Not to mention US companies. And a handful of families.
Less than a quarter of US farms are small and medium sized operations.
Farming in the US has become a monopoly.
Caring about race with this issue is missing the point.

oh and the whole calling people a “nazi” or a “fascist” if they disagree with you?

Okay. I’m a US citizen. My maternal grandmother is from Germany, she lived through WWII. Growing up, if my mom and I got into a fight: guess what I did?
If you guess that I called my mother a “nazi” because I was a horrible little goblin child who wanted to use the shortest, meanest word that was able to hurt my mother the fastest, than you get 100 points and a brand new car!

My dad is part Korean and part Japanese. Going up if my dad was being a misogynist (I don’t use that term lightly; he has paid for prostitutes giving the excuse that it was a different time for example), can you guess what I did? If you guess that I, as a bog-dwelling horrid hobgoblin told my father that he was a comfort women loving fascist then ding-ding! You win a vacation to Fiji!

I’m 33 now and feel awful about calling my parents those things when I was a teenager.
But just know this: if my mother was from a ex-Soviet country, I would have called them commies. If my dad was Vietnamese, I would have called him something else that you normally hear in Vietnam war movies. The list goes on.

The point is that people are going to use words that they know are going to hurt you.

It doesn’t matter. With these extremists, I pull the same thing I did when I met actual white racists in the back woods of NC when they tried to make actual ignorant remarks about so-and-so ethnic groups of Asians were.
“You know I’m not white, right?”.
Same thing in reverse.
Talking about how bad white is:
“You know I’m part white, right?”
Oh the looks on all their faces.

And for white Americans who don’t have direct ties to their ethnic European ancestry. Just call yourself American. “I’m not white; I’m a US citizen”. If they persist calling you white, I would say reply “If you say so” and let it be that.

The best advice I can give is ignore it.
Laugh back with that one vine’s lines, “Welcome to Bible study! We’re all children of Jesus! Kumbaya my Lord!” and strangely run away.

Sorry to Gurney.
@Not David, we’ve digressed past the event horizon so if you wish to continue we should probably move this to the debate section as I don’t want to hijack the thread and I’m starting to feel bad lol
God bless!

 

[Fr. Appletree]

The whole “prescriptive/descriptive” paradigm is hogwash that is not philosophically thought out. The effect of insisting on description-only is to deny the importance of convention and etymology. Prescription-only would forbid legitimate language development. Of the two, the first is the clear and present danger of our time, and we are inundated with illegitimate language development. No one is “gay”. I’m jolly well going to prescribe that to you, as the usage is illegitimate, like their claim to the rainbow is illegitimate, and I can prove it. (So is “homosexual”, interestingly enough)

It is commonplace today to ignore Hume's Law and the descriptive/prescriptive barrier. These are two real categories with significance, to drop one category and assume it under the other is to lose the capacity to reach anything under the other category. If everything is descriptive, no imperatives can be ascribed to anything and nothing can have moral impetus - prescriptives are reinterpreted to internal descriptions about what amounts to feelings, unable to justify any action and making all thing permissable. You can't get to a prescriptive conclusion with only descriptive premises.

If everything is prescriptive, you've got a gnostic system which can say nothing about the world as it is.

Is and ought do not refer to the same categories. It's insanely reductive to interpret language so as to remove an entire essential category.

 

[archer75]

Post removed by poster for poor quality.

 

[All4Christ]

Wow…I don’t even know what to say.

I for one am very thankful my parents encouraged me to pursue my dreams and encouraged me to go to college since that was required for the career path I chose (IT field). It wasn’t a “waste of time” and certainly was not a path of idleness. It was a lot of hard work.

It also is the place where I learned about Orthodoxy.

 

[archer75]

Point taken. Post deleted.

 

[rusmeister]

Wow…I don’t even know what to say.

I for one am very thankful my parents encouraged me to pursue my dreams and encouraged me to go to college since that was required for the career path I chose (IT field). It wasn’t a “waste of time” and certainly was not a path of idleness. It was a lot of hard work.

It also is the place where I learned about Orthodoxy.

There is something to consider in the idea that you find surprising, that college might no longer be a good option. You can learn about Orthodoxy in college, as you can learn about it talking to an acquaintance at a bar. This does not necessarily make the frequenting of either as good in themselves.

And yes, you can do a lot of hard work and learn a specialized profession. I don’t think anyone has said that’s not the case.

The complaint lies elsewhere. The trouble is, you cannot have an educational institution without a governing philosophy of education. That is, all of the rules, regulations, and requirements will assume a certain view of the world as true, even if it is one that says there is no truth. And the secular philosophy creates an atmosphere that is not openly discussed, but assumed and pretty much never discussed. The students, will they, nill they, come to assume this philosophy unawares. Policies, committees, etc, are all formed based on this philosophy. What is assumed to be good or evil is based on it. Whether a sexual encounter is a crime, “merely” a sin, or perfectly acceptable, harming no one, is based on it. And so on. The ultimate damage is in the effect on world view. Even a devout young man or woman is subject to its influence, and an influence one is unconscious of is the most dangerous of all. This is why we are seeing the developing insanity focusing on race, sex, “diversity” and all the rest. The graduates have been effectively indoctrinated, and the students are being indoctrinated, unawares.

The essence of that philosophy, (if it were spoken aloud) is this: “You can believe whatever you want, in the privacy of your own head. But what you believe doesn’t matter in the real world. (unless you happen to believe something opposed to traditional Christian faith - in that case, we will “celebrate” it, but really don’t care, as long as we get to be our own gods).”

In a Christian or Orthodox university, the problem is more subtle. It is one of the philosophy of the world being brought into the Church by its members, generally in rejecting some traditional teachings of the Church in favor of some the things promoted in the world, most visibly in, but not limited to, the issue of sexuality and marriage, only now the errors are mistaken to have the approval of the Church.

So one’s children are very unlikely to come out of a modern college unaffected by all this, and very likely to end up either effectively holding and teaching false ideas within the Church, or leaving the Church altogether.

 

[All4Christ]

There is something to consider in the idea that you find surprising, that college might no longer be a good option. You can learn about Orthodoxy in college, as you can learn about it talking to an acquaintance at a bar. This does not necessarily make the frequenting of either as good in themselves.

And yes, you can do a lot of hard work and learn a specialized profession. I don’t think anyone has said that’s not the case.

The complaint lies elsewhere. The trouble is, you cannot have an educational institution without a governing philosophy of education. That is, all of the rules, regulations, and requirements will assume a certain view of the world as true, even if it is one that says there is no truth. And the secular philosophy creates an atmosphere that is not openly discussed, but assumed and pretty much never discussed. The students, will they, nill they, come to assume this philosophy unawares. Policies, committees, etc, are all formed based on this philosophy. What is assumed to be good or evil is based on it. Whether a sexual encounter is a crime, “merely” a sin, or perfectly acceptable, harming no one, is based on it. And so on. The ultimate damage is in the effect on world view. Even a devout young man or woman is subject to its influence, and an influence one is unconscious of is the most dangerous of all. This is why we are seeing the developing insanity focusing on race, sex, “diversity” and all the rest. The graduates have been effectively indoctrinated, and the students are being indoctrinated, unawares.

The essence of that philosophy, (if it were spoken aloud) is this: “You can believe whatever you want, in the privacy of your own head. But what you believe doesn’t matter in the real world. (unless you happen to believe something opposed to traditional Christian faith - in that case, we will “celebrate” it, but really don’t care, as long as we get to be our own gods).”

In a Christian or Orthodox university, the problem is more subtle. It is one of the philosophy of the world being brought into the Church by its members, generally in rejecting some traditional teachings of the Church in favor of some the things promoted in the world, most visibly in, but not limited to, the issue of sexuality and marriage, only now the errors are mistaken to have the approval of the Church.

So one’s children are very unlikely to come out of a modern college unaffected by all this, and very likely to end up either effectively holding and teaching false ideas within the Church, or leaving the Church altogether.

[My remark about hard work and specialized knowledge was specific to a post that was changed.]

I wasn’t trying to imply that I only would learn about Orthodoxy in college, though I seriously doubt I would learn about Orthodoxy at a bar to the extent I experienced with my Orthodox professor.

How can one become a doctor without college? My current position in IT would not be available just via trade school. I would be limited to a subset of IT jobs without a degree. Many areas of specialized knowledge require college…and today, you are limiting yourself to a few select careers if you do not get a degree.

Perhaps encouraging an online specialized degree would be a good option if the desired career requires that. An Orthodox college, while not free from dangers, also would have less of it than many others.

Personally, I went to a “Christian” school, and much of what I was taught needed to be evaluated carefully instead of accepting it blindly, particularly in social science, humanities, theology and philosophical classes. My practical knowledge classes (math, linguistics, computer science, etc), did not have that same problem though.

Young adults also can have a mind that evaluates the information that they encounter and determine if it does or does not fit into the teachings of the Church in conjunction with a close relationship with their Church, priest, etc. They aren’t bound to become liberal or bring in the influences of the world any more than those in the modern workplace. We do have minds and are not all blindly following others. There absolutely are dangers, but that doesn’t mean one is bound to follow down that path.

It is a key time for Orthodox churches to reach out to the college students and actively work with them. For example, my priest holds vespers services as alternate chapels in the local Christian college, and several professors are Orthodox. We have a regular group of college students come, many who are new to Orthodoxy and join the Church. Many of them learned about Orthodoxy through intentional work of the Church in the local college.

Despite what I say here, I am deeply concerned about the state of education today. Stating that going to college is wrong though is throwing out the baby with the bath water, so to speak. Encourage youth to follow their dreams but also prepare and train them to deal with the world (yes, it is the world, not just education, that has these problems). Don’t make college the only valid option…but if a child wants to learn more or wants a career that requires it, it will only alienate them more to prevent them from pursuing their goals. Perhaps discouraging students from just getting a generic 4 year humanity degree just so they have a degree would be a consideration though. Closely evaluating colleges together also is critical.

(For what it is worth, my biggest objection to posts in this thread are from the posters who seem to be very demeaning towards women.)

 

[rusmeister]

Show me who’s being demeaning toward women, and I’ll pop them one for you.
Seriously, I might have missed something, or you might have misunderstood something. Dunno. I would only object to the idea that a person needs college to be successful in general. In something narrow, perhaps. But there is something of a bait-and-switch in an institution or system that pretends to offer a fully-educated person in the traditional understanding of the term, and then actually turn out narrow specialists who have been indoctrinated unknowingly in a false world view that undermines whatever their parents might have tried to give them. It is this that I think the chief legitimate objection to college.

I think you are not getting what I am saying about a world view that is NOT discussed, that is essentially forbidden to discuss, and somehow expect people to think clearly and thoroughly about what those assumptions are. I think that if a person doesn’t know the history of public education, they really don’t understand it and therefore can’t offer successful solutions, any more than they could in talking about a nation or a person whose history they know next to nothing of. I don’t think being a teacher is even enough without that, and I say that as a career teacher who earned state certification (and learned the process by which the teachers are produced), and taught East Coast, West Coast, and Russia, public and private schools, and having learned the history of public education. You cannot defend yourself against ideas that are not openly discussed and challenged if you can’t even state clearly what they are. Mature adults can’t do it, let alone young adults with little experience and knowledge.

 

[Fr. Appletree]

A good education can be obtained from Faithlife Logos, which for the price of half a college class can get you almost all the english translations of Church Fathers that exist on your phone and at your fingertips.

 

[All4Christ]

Rus - I certainly don’t think that you need college to be successful. My husband is not a college graduate and he is a successful business owner. He isn’t, however, in a career that needs that specific knowledge and training that is only available in a university education. He has been educated in many other relevant ways outside of college. On the other hand, my job requires a college degree. It doesn’t make me more successful than him, nor does his ability to own a business without a degree make him more successful than me.

I think I do get what you are saying, but I still don’t agree with saying college is the wrong choice in all circumstances. It also (as said before) is required for some careers - some of which are the ‘moral’ careers mentioned earlier. It’s ok if we disagree as well.

Ultimately, we as a church need to properly catechize not just new converts, but also cradle Orthodox of all ages. We need to reach out to all in vulnerable positions, to all youth, grade school and college. We all need to understand what is true and right, or we will easily be misled.

You are right that we cannot defend ourself against something if we don’t know what is right or what we believe. That’s where our part comes in as parents, godparents, church family, clergy, etc.

[The poster who was demeaning to women is not one of the long time regulars - and I don’t know want to fuel it on. If the poster posts about it like that again, then I will definitely point it out to you. ]

 

[rusmeister]

Rus - I certainly don’t think that you need college to be successful. My husband is not a college graduate and he is a successful business owner. He isn’t, however, in a career that needs that specific knowledge and training that is only available in a university education. He has been educated in many other relevant ways outside of college. On the other hand, my job requires a college degree. It doesn’t make me more successful than him, nor does his ability to own a business without a degree make him more successful than me.

I think I do get what you are saying, but I still don’t agree with saying college is the wrong choice in all circumstances. It also (as said before) is required for some careers - some of which are the ‘moral’ careers mentioned earlier. It’s ok if we disagree as well.

Ultimately, we as a church need to properly catechize not just new converts, but also cradle Orthodox of all ages. We need to reach out to all in vulnerable positions, to all youth, grade school and college. We all need to understand what is true and right, or we will easily be misled.

You are right that we cannot defend ourself against something if we don’t know what is right or what we believe. That’s where our part comes in as parents, godparents, church family, clergy, etc.

[The poster who was demeaning to women is not one of the long time regulars - and I don’t know want to fuel it on. If the poster posts about it like that again, then I will definitely point it out to you. ]

Hi!
I am still left thinking you don’t quite get my meaning; what you repeat back to me of your understanding of what I said doesn’t really match what I said or meant.
I don’t doubt that your job requires a college degree. And I do assume that you mean specialized knowledge that you learned in college. I have granted that from the beginning. Yes, colleges do teach specialists in narrow fields. That need not be repeated, as we both agree it is given.
We also agree on catechism. That is granted, and is perhaps one of the greatest tragedies in the Church in my experience, vast numbers of people who come not the Church thinking their own ideas ARE the teaching of the Church, rather than finding out and submitting to what has always been taught.

But this: “You are right that we cannot defend ourself against something if we don’t know what is right or what we believe.” is neither what I said nor what I meant, though I agree with you on that. I am saying that an atmosphere has been created in public life that is heavily reinforced in the education system and the media that contradicts what we believe by assumption. One cannot defend oneself against assumptions if one is not consciously aware of them. One may be taught one thing at home and at church, and then be inundated with unexamined assumptions that contradict that teaching all week long, and after months and years of this, the worldview behind the assumptions is bound to predominate in practice, and the things consciously taught at home and the church, for most, will eventually be overwhelmed by the never-ending droning and repetition of the bad ideas about truth, human nature, etc that are being unconsciously fed into them 24/7. A very few may survive this, but 99% won’t. I have seen it happen to my own children, despite fighting desperately against it. I see it happening to most of the children in my church. I saw my wife’s adult friends change their views over the decades from what I remember they were 20 and 30 years ago to remain in lockstep with the times.

 

[Fr. Appletree]

Hi!
I am still left thinking you don’t quite get my meaning; what you repeat back to me of your understanding of what I said doesn’t really match what I said or meant.
I don’t doubt that your job requires a college degree. And I do assume that you mean specialized knowledge that you learned in college. I have granted that from the beginning. Yes, colleges do teach specialists in narrow fields. That need not be repeated, as we both agree it is given.
We also agree on catechism. That is granted, and is perhaps one of the greatest tragedies in the Church in my experience, vast numbers of people who come not the Church thinking their own ideas ARE the teaching of the Church, rather than finding out and submitting to what has always been taught.

But this: “You are right that we cannot defend ourself against something if we don’t know what is right or what we believe.” is neither what I said nor what I meant, though I agree with you on that. I am saying that an atmosphere has been created in public life that is heavily reinforced in the education system and the media that contradicts what we believe by assumption. One cannot defend oneself against assumptions if one is not consciously aware of them. One may be taught one thing at home and at church, and then be inundated with unexamined assumptions that contradict that teaching all week long, and after months and years of this, the worldview behind the assumptions is bound to predominate in practice, and the things consciously taught at home and the church, for most, will eventually be overwhelmed by the never-ending droning and repetition of the bad ideas about truth, human nature, etc that are being unconsciously fed into them 24/7. A very few may survive this, but 99% won’t. I have seen it happen to my own children, despite fighting desperately against it. I see it happening to most of the children in my church. I saw my wife’s adult friends change their views over the decades from what I remember they were 20 and 30 years ago to remain in lockstep with the times.

When the implicit assumptions of diverging worldviews take root together, one must swallow the other. Diverging moral/religious systems cannot coexist, one must collapse under the other.

It is natural that the implicit assumptions most promulgated will become dominant. Ultimately the implicit assumptions will birth the worldview they originated from.

 

[truefiction1]

We didn't lose so many of our kids to the world after they went off to college. We never really had them to begin with.

 

[Melily]

Respiratory Therapist seems morally safe. We just help people breathe. The most controversial things I’ve done is remove someone from a ventilator who had no brain activity but the family and doctors made the decision and I just followed the order. That only happened once in over 20 years in the field. Income wise it’s similar to nursing.

 

[Melily]

Respiratory Therapist seems morally safe. We just help people breathe. The most controversial things I’ve done is remove someone from a ventilator who had no brain activity but the family and doctors made the decision and I just followed the order. Some

 

[Melily]

I’m not sure why that double posted!

 

[E.C.]

Hey Everybody,

I haven't posted a thread here in a while.....

As my kids are now ages 15, 14, and 13, I'm starting to really really look at careers and majors and colleges with more introspection, and I've been thinking a lot about how unsafe jobs have become. If you're a psychologist/psychiatrist, you are duty-bound to approve of LGBT stuff, shacking up, "transitioning" sexes, abortion, etc. If you are a baker, you better bake gay cakes or face nationwide humiliation and losing your business or being sued. If you are a teacher, the critical race theory fascism and the LGBT brainwashing is imminent and in some places already mandatory 100%.

A good example of the immorality one would never consider is a couple of girls in my parish. Both were RN's but they went back to university to become anesthesiology nurses. Very lucrative career. Anyway, one of the girls was very traumatized because she was brought in to assist in an operation. The operation was a sex change. She had to witness a man made in God's own image be butchered and altered and perverted and she felt sick to her stomach to be involved. I can only imagine it's still plaguing her. Who would think a nurse or anesthesiology nurse would be involved in evil outside of abortion, right?

Education has gone to Hades in a hand basket K-12 and at college level, medicine is becoming questionable, so many sick factors in society.

What do y'all think about this? What types of jobs would you advise your kids to go into and do you think there are many bulletproof jobs left where the sodomy crew and the Marxists and the atheists haven't corrupted and melted them to shreds?

I think finding a career that is safe morally for an Orthodox Christian is about as tough as finding a spouse who is Orthodox and moral in 2021.

If your kids are going to be in any sort of occupation that's service/hospitality related or deals with the public, than no such job safe from debauchery exists. The best we can do is keep a solid head on our shoulders.



On that note, and this isn't an attack to you Gurney, I think that we Orthodox need to do less running from immorality and more dealing with it. Christ Himself dined with prostitutes, tax collectors, liars, thieves, adulterers, etc. Perhaps it is the ex-Roman Catholic in me, but I think we Orthodox would be more productive in dealing with people who don't live the Christian life instead of avoiding them. Fr Seraphim Rose, for example, was at one point an active homosexual. Abbot Tryphon of "The Morning Offering" podcast fame, was a pot smoking hippie in the 1960s and at one point had a job as a bouncer. St Moses the Ethiopian was the leader of a gang of thieves that killed people too. St Mary of Egypt whored her way to the Holy Land and we celebrate her life every Lent. The list goes on.

I'm reminded of a story of a famous story related to Metropolitan Anthony of Sorouzh. Roughly paraphrased, he once stepped out of the Royal Doors to give a homily. Instead, he told the congregation, "Yesterday a woman came here with a child and somebody told her to leave because she did not have a head covering. Whoever that was, pray for this woman. Because of you she may never enter a church again and her salvation is now on your soul". He then went back into the altar and continued with the Divine Liturgy.

We can't avoid immorality and evil forever. The best we can do is keep a good head on our shoulders, a consistent prayer life (guilty as charged not always keep that up), actually ACT like Orthodox Christians, and, pray for everyone. Maybe if we lived a halfway decent Orthodox life such people would enter the Church by our example and find some semblance of salvation.

 

[ArmyMatt]

I’m not sure why that double posted!

it happens, haha, welcome to the club