Fidel Castro, Ecumenical Cracker

Should the Orthodox church be in dialogue with the Roman Catholic one? Yes. Will we reunite? It would take a miracle.

By Fr. Patrick Reardon

For example, it should be obvious that the Roman papacy is the major obstacle to our reunion. Make no mistake–we Orthodox do not miss the papacy, not in the least, because we never had it. Not for a minute did the pope of Rome ever exercise over the church of the East the level of centralized authority he has grown, over the past thousand years, to exercise over the Roman Catholic Church.

Read the whole article: H E R E

Somehow this seems too easy … But it does give one pause.

No one wants to read an article entitled “The Sovietization of America” … But everyone should. I’ve placed excerpts at the bottom of this post.

According to Agence France Presse, Prince Charles is on the Holy Mountain again. Then again, so is Fidel Castro.
THX: NeePeople

As for the newly-wed Prince …

The heir to the throne has been a frequent pilgrim at the Mount over recent years and arrived at the rocky 35-mile-long peninsula in northern Greece by yacht on Thursday [last week], having travelled to the country by air.

The prince’s spouse Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, whom he married on April 9, has been in the area since Monday.

He joined her on board the Paris, a luxury yacht belonging to Greek shipping magnate Spyros Latsis, for the journey to Mount Athos, state television channel NET reported.

The yacht moored at the small harbour of the 10th-century Vatopedi monastery, where the prince has been making regular pilgrimages at this time of year since the late nineties.

His wife remained on board the Paris for a cruise in the northern Aegean Sea, NET reported.

Charles is a leading member of the Friends of Mount Athos group, which helps open and maintain the celebrated tracks and pathways that link the Byzantine monasteries there.
Agence France Presse / Thx: Fr Victor Potapov

How embarrasing. I realized the other day that my Side Margin has, for months now, listed a Blog as “Cracker Mirror” instead of Cracked Mirror. With a moniker like “Orthodixie”, and a popular article entitled “The ‘N’ Word”, visitors were probably sure to click on the “Cracker Mirror” site to see what was up. So sorry. If there is a site named “Cracker Mirror”, you’d probably find out H E R E.

And … if you’re going to the Southeast Blogfest, be sure and take along a couple bags of Kudzu. You never know when you might need it.
Thx: Thunderstruck

I‘m not quite sure what to make of this “honour“.

Here’s those excerpts from “The Sovietization of America“:

“The humanistic way of thinking, which had proclaimed itself as our guide, did not admit the existence of evil in man, nor did it see any task higher than the attainment of happiness on earth. It started modern western civilization on the dangerous trend of worshipping man and his material needs . . . . gaps were left open for evil, and its drafts blow freely today.” -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Harvard Commencement Address, 1978

Many Americans are puzzled and alarmed by the drastic changes taking place in America. Two recurring questions I hear are, “What’s going on?’ and “How come it feels as though our world is turning upside-down?” The short answer is this: Our nation is in a state of purposely induced tumultuous transition. America is straddling two fundamentally opposed worldviews. One of them is her founding worldview based in Christian-Judao moral ethics and principles wherein our Creator is sovereign and human life sacred since man is created in the image of his Maker.

The other is godless humanism/socialism according to which ‘elite’ man is sovereign and arbitrary maker of all rules and human life has no particular value or worth because ‘elite man’ has reduced human beings to mere chance-met protoplasm . So essentially, what is deemed to be truth in one worldview is a lie in the other. In one, human life has intrinsic value and is endowed with a natural right to life and liberty. In the other, human protoplasm has no more worth than dung beetle protoplasm and is therefore not deemed worthy of liberty, let alone life.

The slow transformation of America from her Judeo-Christian culture of life and individual freedom to godless atheism, culture of death, and collectivized and mind-conditioned protoplasma-genderfree beings began many years ago …

Our Founders wrote that if obedience to God were removed from America, a wave of crime would be unleashed that would eventually bankrupt the nation’s treasuries in our frantic efforts at containing it. More than just crime has been unleashed. America is reeling under the combined destructive forces of the disunifying effects of multiculturalism, the near collapse of traditional marriage, sexual debauchery, sex crimes, perversion. plagues of STDs costing billions of dollars every year, broken homes, violent gangs, lawless jurists, legislators, and mayors; kids killing and raping other kids, adults rutting upon children, children being locked in closets and cages and starved and beaten, the elderly and disabled being coldbloodedly euthanized, and the killng of the unborn, which continues unabated.

“Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” -Benjamin Franklin

America is quickly degenerating into a tribalized land of lawlessness and casually practiced barbarism where once she was a unified, law-abiding nation of families, children, safe neighborhoods, great civility and humanity.

The architects of this primal chaos knew these things would happen before they ever began to apply their social change-making schemes to America. How did they know? The Soviet Union and its people provided them with their first ‘laboratory.” Remember that these odious tricksters are the ideological seed of madmen like Lenin, Marx, and Nietzsche, and in their morally insane minds, they believe they are applying science-based revolutionary theories to America in a cause of the highest humanitarian considerations. Sheer madness and self-delusion is more like it. These lunatic ‘pseudo-scientists’ view human beings as though they are nothing but dumb animals upon which they can test their maleficient theories.

Edmund Burke observed that man’s attempts at building secularized states was irrational. He said, “We know . . .that man is by his constitution a religious animal; that atheism is against not only our reason, but our instincts and that it cannot prevail long.”

Atheism is against our reason and instincts. And then Solzhenitsyn: “They do not believe in evil.”

Atheism has put them on the ‘looking glass’ side of reason and instinct, hence it makes a bizarre kind of sense that these foolish ones, made blind by their self-pride, believe that evil is but a social construct. As a result, they become the ‘useful fools’ of and the conduits for the malevolent forces they profess not to believe in, which is why atheists have exterminated in excess of 100,000,000 human beings.

Read the whole thing H E R E.
Thx: Fr Victor Potapov