Posted on 12/11/2014 5:20:43 PM PST by Greetings_Puny_Humans
The revival of the Orthodox faith is gradually reversing the damage but you cannot fix what was laid waste in only a generation.
With all the problems Russia has, its nothing short of a miracle its functioning at all after emerging from the Soviet collapse.
In Russia, small town girls go to the big city and get ruined, but thats what theyre trying to do. Really trying. They go to school for it.
Among that everything is PR used to promote cults.
These statements about Russia sound like they're talking about the US. We are a lot closer to a corrupt, crony-capitalist authoritarian state than some would like to believe.
The Russians make all perverts and all thieves and corrupt people everywhere else in the world look like pikers. There is no comparison.
The ROC reversing the damage? You’re joking. The current “patriarch” of the ROC is a “former” KGB agent who airbrushes 10 thousand dollar watches off his wrists in publicity photos. The ROC is a church filled with KGB-approved priests who sell alchohol and tobacco to a faithful already notoriously addicted to both. Furthermore, they’re killing people in the name of God and Joseph Stalin (see the reference to those bikers who, apparently, ride around with images of Mary and Joseph Stalin, that the link has)! Here is an article discussing protestants being targeted and slaughtered in East Ukraine (the Catholics are also being victimized as well, but this article doesn’t mention it):
EASTERN UKRAINE Ukraines evangelical Christians are bearing the brunt of the countrys conflict, often with deadly consequences.
Its a scene that has played in Elena Velichkos head over and over. Pro-Russian rebels took over her hometown in early April. Her husband Vladimir told her to take the kids and leave the city.
He took us to the train station and we said goodbye. He said, I love you. He kissed me and kissed the children and left, Elena said.
Several days later, her life and that of her eight children, ages 2 to 16, suddenly turned upside down.
Surreal Reality
It was June 8, Pentecost Sunday. The church was half empty. Thats because the city was under tremendous assault by both the pro-Russian separatists and the Ukrainian army.
Once the church service ended everybody made their way to the front of the church to go home.
But then the unimaginable happened.
The church called and said my husband, along with three other believers, had been taken by men who were waiting outside the church, Elena said.
Alexander Gayvoronski, a church deacon, was there that Sunday morning.
The men wore masks and had machine guns. They told the four Christian men to get into their cars, Gayvoronsi said.
The rebels took the pastors sons, Ruvim and Albert Pavenko, Victor Brodarsky, and Elenas husband, Vladimir.
Multiple sources told CBN News what then happened to the four Christian captives.
First rebels took them outside the city and tortured them. The next day the men were put in car and told to drive away.
Then, minutes later they were recaptured and shot multiple times. Elenas husband was burned in the car.
snip...
That same day rebels burned down the largest furniture factory that belonged to Ruvim and Albert Pavenkos father.
It had become clear rebels were targeting the citys evangelical community.
Snip...
Sergey Demidovich, a top evangelical leader in Slavyansk, said Christians face constant threat.
I never thought in the 21st century, in [a] free country as Ukraine, it was possible to experience this level of persecution, Demidovich said. The separatists saw Protestant Christians as enemies. They viewed us as cults.
But the persecution was just getting started.
All the Protestant churches in the city were either taken over by rebels or forced to close. We were forbidden to meet for services and the leadership forced to leave or be under risk of arrest, Demidovich said.
And the persecution is spreading far beyond just this city. Throughout the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, as rebels gain more territory, assaults against evangelicals are growing.
snip...
When I was in prison, a rebel soldier told me they have an order to kill all the Christian pastors who are not part of the Russian Orthodox Church, Anatoly, a pastor from Luhansk, said.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3234770/posts
Sorry, but Russia is a hell hole from top to bottom.
“What do we do about a gigantic, depraved, immoral, lunatic country armed with nuclear warheads? “
I read the article, but why did the writer drag us into it at the end?
Let me know the next time you see someone here selling somebody's daughter into the sex trade and then bribe a Texan judge and the police force to help him imprison one of their Mafioso rivals. When that happens, you can claim the article is talking about the United States.
Václav Havel: The Power of the Powerless (the social and spiritual consequences of socialism)
“The principle involved here is that the center of power is identical with the center of truth.” Havel warns that socialist regimes create and enforce their own truth to maintain power. As time goes on, this truth diverges from factual truth and it increasingly forces those who support and depend upon the power of the regime to corrupt themselves to sustain the artificial truth.
In the end, people not only lie to each other, but they start to lie to themselves.
see:
http://www.vaclavhavel.cz/showtrans.php?cat=clanky&val=72_aj_clanky.html&typ=HTML
Great link! Thanks!
Russian Fight Club?
All cultures are equal, right?
And why should be assume the State church is not or will not become an arm of the KBG, in addition to preaching much the same dead gospel and errors of Rome ?
No. A kind of private army for members of the Duma.
From the article....”In Russia, corrupt is not an adjective. Corrupt is a noun, a proper noun, the word for the name and nature of the place.”
Sounds like Ukraine and our country too....
Maybe you'd like us to believe there is a moral equivalence between the United States and Russia, primarily since it supports your rather notorious job here on FR to get people on this forum to either support Russia wholeheartedly or else be too confused to come to our own opinion (the two classic objectives of Soviet propaganda). But when it comes down to it, indeed, not every culture is equal. Russia is an example of a state that has been thoroughly deprived of God's grace, unfortunately. It is Romans 3, the whole list down, a living testimony of what happens to the human soul when it is abandoned by God.
The issues in the world are not black and white andymore than they are in the US or Russia.... Theres a great deal of complexity, and you accomplish nothing good by insulting people who are trying to make sense of that complexity.
"Kirill, who was the Metropolitan of Smolensk, succeeds Alexei II who died in December after 18 years as head of the Russian Church. 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.
As head of the churchs department of foreign church relations, Kirill gained the reputation of a relatively enlightened church leader. He met with Pope Benedict, and he has been attacked by church conservatives for ecumenism.
Snip...
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the church received official privileges including the right to import duty-free alcohol and tobacco. In 1995, the Nikolo-Ugreshky Monastery, which is directly subordinated to the patriarchate, earned $350 million from the sale of alcohol. The patriarchates 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. Kirills personal wealth was estimated by the Moscow News in 2006 to be $4 billion.
During this period, the church has been silent about genuine moral issues, such as Russias pervasive corruption and the indiscriminate killing of noncombatants in Chechnya. As Kirill begins his reign as patriarch, there is little reason to expect this to change."
http://www.forbes.com/2009/02/20/putin-solzhenitsyn-kirill-russia-opinions-contributors_orthodox_church.html
This is just the tip of the iceberg revealing the true face of this "church." See my other post that has a link on the targeting of Protestant pastors in East Ukraine by Russia's "Orthodox" thugs.
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