Posted on 09/08/2017 7:08:47 PM PDT by marshmallow
Great!...The NFL, and now this?
What the heck am I gonna do on Sundays?
(somewhat sarc)
“Rome will lose the Faith and become the seat of the Antichrist”-Our Lady of LaSalette
The Orthodox Church is international in scope and presence. It is a wonderful church comprised by a loose confederation of Patriarchal States.
The Russian Orthodox Church is not the entire Orthodox Church, not even close. Further, in history stemming from the Russian Revolution, there was a division of the Russia Orthodox Church to inside Russia and outside Russia.
The Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia (ROCOR) was the remnant of the Romanov Dynasty whose last Head of Church was Tsar Nicholas II, a devoted Christian.
The Russian Orthodox Church inside Russia became a tool of the KGB but has since strived to reform itself.
The cultural differences between the Russian Church outside and inside Russia are stark.
ROCOR is populated by persons of wisdom and great education who are well-aware of the dangers and risk of the WCC and of ecumenicism in general.
The Orthodox Church with Patriarch in Moscow is still viewed with some suspicion and is nevertheless not the ‘Pope’, not the leader of the Orthodox Church; Kurill is ‘a’ leader.
The Orthodox Church was founded by Emperor Constantine originating from Churches founded by Saint Paul, Saint Peter and others. Saints Paul and Peter were in Asia Minor before they were in Rome.
The Orthodox Church has an incredible history with many great Saints of awesome courage and faith.
For example, Elizabeth, the granddaughter of Queen Victoria, one of the most beautiful women in all of Europe and the British Empire, became an Orthodox Nun who sacrificed her life to save families escaping the Soviet Union. The Bolsheviks caught up with St. Elizabeth killing her by throwing her down a mine shaft.
The Orthodox Church is greatly admired by Christians who flee the Anglican, Episcopalian, and other Churches that are changing in their moral foundations. Such Christians flee to the Orthodox Church because its divine liturgy has not changed in nearly 2000 years. It does not change. It encourages wonderful communion with the Lord. And it is worldwide, offering refuge and safety for people everywhere.
September 2014
(excerpt from a long, detailed article)
First and foremost, in any review of the basics regarding Putin, the most outstanding fact is that he is a creature of the Soviet KGB, a truly diabolical organization nonpareil, which stood for murder, terror, and grand deception.
It was the Soviet Communist Party's tool for the brutal suppression of religion, including the persecution of Christians: denying them jobs and education; spying on and entrapping them; arresting and imprisoning them; torturing them in unspeakable ways; desecrating and demolishing their church buildings; infiltrating their agents into churches to subvert them. The KGB destroyed thousands of Christian churches, monasteries, convents, and schools, and slaughtered millions of Christians.
But it did not destroy the churches utterly. There remained an underground church, whose members were always at risk of discovery, arrest, torture, and martyrdom. Above ground, the KGB took control of the Russian Orthodox Church, which became a very useful organ of the Soviet atheist state.
In January 2009, Vladimir Mikhailovich Gundyaev, better known as Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, was elected, from a short list of three candidates, to be the 16th Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, the highest position of authority in the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). The election was called to fill the post that had been left vacant by the death of Patriarch Alexy II, who had headed the ROC since 1990. Documents from the KGB archives have confirmed what sensible observers had long ago deduced from his actions: that Patriarch Alexy II (also spelled Alexi or Alexei) was a long-serving KGB agent (code-named Drozdov, “Blackbird”), in other words, a traitor to his Christian brethren and the God he claimed to serve. Putin’s KGB/FSB was taking no chances with his replacement. All three candidates — Metropolitan Kliment of Kaluga and Borovsk (code-named Topaz), Metropolitan Filaret of Minsk and Slutsk (code-named Ostrovskii), and Metropolitan Kirill (code-named Mikhailov) — also have been reliably identified as agents of the KGB/FSB.
Russia expert David Satter, a former Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times (of London) and the Wall Street Journal, wrote of the election in 2009 for Forbes:
According to material from the Soviet archives, Kirill was a KGB agent (as was Alexei). This means he was more than just an informer, of whom there were millions in the Soviet Union. He was an active officer of the organization. Neither Kirill nor Alexei ever acknowledged or apologized for their ties with the security agencies.
Because Patriarch Kirill is of central importance to the myth of Putin as the Saul-to-Paul, Christian persecutor-to-Christian champion, it behooves us to more closely examine the man. He has publicly presided over, and provided official benedictions and exhortations for, Putin’s cynical and Stalinesque exploitation of Russian nationalism and Russian Orthodoxy. Josef Stalin, who had very nearly consummated the annihilation of the Russian Orthodox Church begun by Vladimir Lenin, reversed course in 1941. The reason? His erstwhile partner in crime, Adolf Hitler, had turned on him and had invaded Russia. Stalin, needing all the help he could get, cut a deal with ROC Metropolitans Sergius, Nikolay, and Alexy. In exchange for their support in rallying the Russian people, he would cease (temporarily) the persecution and allow the reopening of churches and theological schools. In fact, Stalin’s Soviet government paid for the rebuilding of many of the churches. The ROC was thus placed even more firmly under the control of the NKVD, which was later to be reorganized and renamed as the KGB.
Metropolitan Sergius had shown his true colors as far back as 1927, with his illegal proclamation that the church would be absolutely loyal to the communist government of the Soviet Union. Stalin rewarded Sergius by having him enthroned as Patriarch of Moscow in 1943.
Ever since, the Russian Orthodox Church has been the handmaiden and enabler of Soviet and post-Soviet regimes that rule the Kremlin. Following Sergius’ example, his successors likewise flourished by pacifying dissent at home and providing propaganda to the outside world to discredit reports exposing the true nature of the religious persecution and subversion going on in the Soviet Union. However, the cooperation of the church hierarchy notwithstanding, persecution of true believers returned with a new vengeance under the successive reigns of Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Chernenko, and Andropov.
Kirill, though, did not have to worry about feeling the sting of persecution; he was in tight with the persecutors and on the fast track to privilege and power! In 1969, at the age of 22, he was tonsured by Metropolitan Nikodim, one of the ROC’s most notorious KGB agents (code-named Adamant). The following year Nikodim appointed Kirill as his personal secretary and began boosting him through the ROC ranks: archimandrite, bishop, archbishop, metropolitan. One of Kirill’s most important services to the ROC/KGB was to provide a public face for the Soviet Union at the conferences of the World Council of Churches. Kirill, in fact, became a top official in the WCC, being elected to the central and executive committees of the WCC in 1975.
Such service has its earthly rewards; while the Christian brothers and sisters he betrayed were tortured and killed, or rotted away in the infamous Gulag Archipelago and psychiatric prisons, Kirill (a.k.a. Agent Mikhailov) enjoyed the high life of the Communist Party’s elite “nomenklatura.” David Satter writes:
In 1995, the Nikolo-Ugreshky Monastery, which is directly subordinated to the patriarchate, earned $350 million from the sale of alcohol. The patriarchate’s department of foreign church relations, which Kirill ran, earned $75 million from the sale of tobacco. But the patriarchate reported an annual budget in 1995-1996 of only $2 million. Kirill’s personal wealth was estimated by the Moscow News in 2006 to be $4 billion.
Such is the moral pedigree of “Patriarch” Kirill, the man who serves as Putin’s “spiritual advisor” and public photo-op prop. And we have barely touched on the full extent of Agent Mikhailov’s ill-famed record. Is this the man who will spiritually guide the new champion of a Christian world order? Many naïve Christians and conservatives apparently think so.
In his current ruse as Defender of the Faith, Putin is not only channeling Stalin, but also Lenin, that original Bolshevik persecutor of the church. Lenin was the supreme pragmatist, happily willing to use “whatever works,” and constantly at odds with rigid communist “purists” who failed to grasp the necessity of operational flexibility in the pursuit of the final objective. Thus, he was willing (temporarily), in the early 1920s to abandon “war communism” and adopt a faux market capitalism (his New Economic Policy) to attract foreign capital and stimulate the Soviet economy. Likewise, prior to taking control in Russia, he instructed fellow revolutionaries to conceal their atheist fervor, in order to win the Christian support necessary for their communist venture.
In his 1905 work, Socialism and Religion, Lenin wrote:
It would be stupid to think that, in a society based on the endless oppression and coarsening of the worker masses, religious prejudices could be dispelled by purely propaganda methods.... That is the reason why we do not and should not set forth our atheism in our Programme; that is why we do not and should not prohibit proletarians who still retain vestiges of their old prejudices from associating themselves with our Party.
Once he had consolidated sufficient power, Lenin set loose the Cheka (later to become the NKVD, then renamed as the KGB, then the FSB) to smite the religious allies who had unwittingly helped the closet atheists to take control. Putin, a lifelong Marxist-Leninist, as well as a professional Chekist, is merely recycling the lessons learned from the playbooks of Lenin and Stalin. None of Putin’s “reforms” is irreversible and his Potempkin Christianity is just that, a façade, a velvet glove that hides the iron fist of his KGB/FSB gangster state that rules the Kremlin.
By Their Fruits
Our space limitations here will not allow even a partial cataloging of Putin’s many criminal actions that eclipse his much-publicized Christian statements and moral posturing. Here are just a few items that seem to have slipped down the memory hole for those who now see him as some kind of new global moral leader:
• Assuming and exercising dictatorial powers throughout Russia, unprecedented since Stalin’s time.
• Appointing more KGB/FSB agents to government positions than at any previous time in Soviet or Russian Federation history. As reported by the BBC and other news agencies, studies show that 80 percent or more of Putin’s political appointees and administrators come from the security/intelligence agencies.
• Murdering Russian citizens through a number of FSB-run “Chechen terrorist attacks” in order to whip up public support for invading Chechnya. These crimes have been well documented in, for instance, Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State by David Satter, former Russian correspondent for the Financial Times of London and now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University; Blowing Up Russia: The Secret Plot to Bring Back KGB Terror by FSB defector Alexander Litvinenko; The Assassination of Russia, a documentary film by Jean-Charles Deniau; The Litvinenko File by BBC reporter Martin Sixsmith; Disbelief, a documentary film by Andrei Nekrasov; and The Moscow Bombings of September 1999: Examinations of Russian Terrorist Attacks at the Onset of Vladimir Putin’s Rule by Hoover Institution Senior Fellow John Dunlop.
• Invading, bombing, and occupying Chechnya, including destroying much of the country and wantonly killing many civilians, including women and children. Independent estimates of the number of civilian casualties in Chechnya range from 25,000 to 200,000.
• Restoring a bust of Lenin’s first Cheka chief, Felix Dzerzhinsky (who proclaimed, “We stand for organized terror”) to a place of honor at the notorious KGB Lubyanka headquarters, and attempting to restore a giant statue of Dzerzhinsky to its former place of honor in Moscow’s Lubyanka Square.
• Murdering Russian journalists, whistleblowers, and dissidents who are brave enough to challenge his corrupt dictatorship. Famous investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya is the most well-known example, but Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists cite dozens of additional cases and have named Putin one of the world’s top “predators” of journalists. The 2006 poison murder of FSB defector Alexander Litvinenko in Britain is well known, but less known are the cases of General Trofimov, Movladi Baysarov, opposition Duma Deputy Galina Starovoitova, co-chairman of the Liberal Russia political party Sergei Yushenkov, Kovalev Commission member Yuri Shchekochikhin, human rights attorney Stanslav Markelov, human rights activist Natalia Estemirova — and many others.
• Expanding the “soft persecution” of Christian churches and organizations that are outside of the rigid state control exercised within the Russian Orthodox Church.
Concerning the last point above, organizations such as the Keston Institute of Oxford, England; International Christian Concern; and others have documented that Russia’s Ministry of Justice has been using the pretext of “looking for religious extremism” to carry out illegal inspections, harassment, and suppression of Baptist, Roman Catholic, Pentecostal, Adventist, Latter Day Saints, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and independent churches and Christian organizations. Churches other than the ROC find it difficult to get visas for priests and ministers to come to Russia, or to get permission to have meetings for Bible studies, prayer groups, and worship services.
While Putin was hailed by pro-life forces in the West for signing a law restricting advertising for abortion, Russia maintains the highest abortion rate (37.4 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15-44) of any country reported in United Nations data. What’s more, the government still provides free abortion service. The official number of abortions in Russia hovers around one million annually, but pro-life critics say the actual number may be several times that. The Putin government, however, does appear to be somewhat in earnest on this issue, but for practical, not moral reasons. With a falling birthrate and facing demographic implosion, Russia needs to dramatically ramp up its fertility rate to sustain any hope of futurity.
Vladimir Putin’s condemnations of the depravity of modern, anti-Christian culture have won rave reviews from Western Christians, which might lead many to think that Putin’s Russia is some exemplary redoubt of wholesome virtue. However, Russia today is every bit as degenerate (if not more so) as the fleshpots of the West. Pornography, child pornography, prostitution, child prostitution, sex trafficking of women and children, drug trafficking, drug addiction, alcoholism, suicide, homicide, and other social pathologies are rampant throughout Russia and cannot simply be blamed on the “decadent West.”
The Great Deception
Soviet KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn has proven to be one of the most accurate and prescient predictors of the great deception that we are now witnessing in Russia. In his famous book New Lies for Old, published in 1984, Golitsyn exposed the striking emphasis that the Kremlin strategists placed on conferences and coalitions aimed at using Christians to further the objective of one-world socialism. Golitsyn wrote:
The Christian Peace Conference, composed of East European church leaders, dates from the period of the formulation of the long-range policy [1958]. It has played an active part in influencing Western churches in the interests of that policy.
The Second All Christian Congress in Defense of Peace, held in Prague in June-July 1964, attracted one thousand delegates, including representatives of Buddhism and Islam as well as the Orthodox, Catholic, and the Anglican and other Protestant churches. The introductory speech was made by Gromadka of [Communist] Czechoslovakia, the president of the Christian Peace Conference.
Golitsyn further noted:
The Great Soviet Encyclopaedia recorded that by 1972 the World Council of Churches had been converted from a “pro-Western” to a “progressive” orientation in its policies on peace, disarmament, and related matters.
Patriarch Kirill and his ROC/KGB subordinates continue to effectively use the World Council of Churches as a tool for Kremlin policy. However, in recent years many new fronts have been established to further the same subversive agenda. One of the most important new organizations may be the Congress of World and Traditional Religions, headquartered in Astana, Kazakhstan, and founded by Nursultan Nazarbayev, the brutal communist dictator of Kazakhstan.
The 74-year-old Nazarbayev joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1962, and rose to become first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic and chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the SSR. Since 1991, he has ruled as “president” of Kazakhstan, one of the most repressive of the “former” Soviet states. Like Putin, he has been magically transformed into a spiritual man. But since Kazakhstan is a Muslim country, Nazarbayev discovered that he was a Muslim, of course. This also has proved helpful in placing Kazakhstan’s communist agents inside the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, “the collective voice of the Muslim world.”
It wasn't from wikipedia, it was from here:
_________________________________________
The wiki link was to this piece about Putin...
"For 16 years Putin was an officer in the KGB, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel before he retired to enter politics in his native Saint Petersburg in 1991.
He moved to Moscow in 1996 and joined President Boris Yeltsin's administration where he rose quickly, becoming Acting President on 31 December 1999 when Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned. Putin won the subsequent 2000 presidential election, despite widespread accusations of vote-rigging,[3] and was reelected in 2004."
"On 25 July 1998, Yeltsin appointed Vladimir Putin head of the FSB (one of the successor agencies to the KGB), the position Putin occupied until August 1999. He became a permanent member of the Security Council of the Russian Federation on 1 October 1998 and its Secretary on 29 March 1999."
For the last 4 years I’ve been posting that Francis supported civil unions since before his election. Suddenly this fact is news for some.
The Pope might recognized and accept faggots marrying but God does not.
Just like the good ol days when the eunuchs and their royal parasite "intercessors" ruled the empire, ehh?
Akhenaten - Pharaoh of Eqypt, circa (1348-1338 BCE)
http://www.usu.edu/markdamen/1320hist&civ/chapters/10AKHEN.htm#n105
FU. NO SALE!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peOj0DmS9YA
"...who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world, and through all time;...that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil government, for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order; and finally, that truth is great and will prevail if left to herself, that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them. ""I HAVE SWORN UPON THE ALTAR OF GOD ETERNAL HOSTILITY TO EVERY FORM OF TYRANNY OVER THE MIND OF MAN"--The Virginia Act For Establishing Religious Freedom
--Thomas Jefferson, 1786https://www.google.com/webhp?#q=truth%20is%20great%20and%20will%20prevail%20if%20left%20to%20herself
Birds of a feather.
You think the theocratic frauds are talking about which verses Khadija's Hebrew Gospel quoting cousin wrote?
"Islam did not rise except through Ali's sword and Khadijah's wealth,"
Haven’t read comments, yet, but I totally agree faggots don’t have the right to use the word matrimony. The majority of the population seems to believe faggots deserve marriage tax breaks, and this is a way to give it to them. I think faggots resisted having their “union” called civil unions, because their real desire is to defame G-d.
The Pope only supports it for homosexualized persons.
Isn’t that why he supports homosexual civil unions?
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