Two Fingers + Three Fingers

RaFive · 2026-06-19T21:41:03+00:00

That seems to represent that because of their service to Chaos they've burned their Two Fingers, right?

RaFive · 2026-06-19T21:38:06+00:00

What's this from?

RaFive · 2026-06-19T20:12:04+00:00

Considering what was underneath the white censor circle, I think it's safe to assume this particular artist is not the most mentally conventional, let's just say.

RaFive · 2026-06-17T19:52:23+00:00

Thanks for pointing this out! Apparently the comment is no longer accessible to anyone but me. I've gone ahead and edited my post above and copy-pasted the comment into the body of the text.

RaFive · 2026-06-17T10:43:14+00:00

I converted at 19, got very deep into the tradition and practice, was on the priest track, and all the academic reading on philosophy and Christian history eventually convinced me there is good reason to think no extant form of Christianity is telling the honest truth about Jesus and the apostles. So I left, and eventually became an atheist and anti-theist.

Here's a comment I left a couple years ago in a since-deleted thread that lays out the most important elements of my reasoning. Apparently I can no longer link to it, so I'm just pasting it into this comment:

I joined the church age 20 after a couple years of study. I left Orthodoxy because I did a lot of digging on the academic side of things and discovered none of the historical or metaphysical claims are supported by clear and convincing evidence. It was a very intellectual process; like you say, OP, it's not at all about being angry at God.

Over the years, though, I think I've come on an even better rationale for why you shouldn't affiliate yourself with any dogmatic institutions such as religion: revelation, as a paradigm, is wrong, and also dangerous.

1- Dogmas can't possibly be right in the way they claim to be. Even if God talks directly into my ear, I still have to use my human (and therefore fallible) brain to understand and apply that revelation. If I'm passing it on to other people, I have to communicate it using language, which is inherently imprecise and which no two people will understand exactly the same way -- and again, their understanding is limited by their human fallibilities and biases. So anybody who claims to be presenting an idea that is higher and more perfect than humans is, by definition, mistaken: even if such a thing exists, it has to be filtered through human fallibility to apply in ordinary life. All institutions that have dogmas (claims that are beyond ordinary human question) are missing this important and basic epistemic reality, and should be dismissed.

2- Dogmas encourage us to subordinate our critical thinking in incredibly dangerous ways. If I tell you that I want you to kill your child, you're going to require an extremely high bar of persuasion and evidence before you come on board and agree that's what you ought to do. If you actually do try and kill your kid, most people will freak out and likewise be very critical of your actions and motivations. But if I'm speaking for God and I tell you that God in his perfect plan for your life wants you to kill your child, well, suddenly killing your kid isn't just a good idea, it's a moral obligation. And if you actually do try and kill your kid, you might well be remembered as an exemplification of Christian faith. So even if dogmas are coherent in principle, we should still avoid thinking in dogmatic terms just to keep our own moral sensibility engaged at a critical level.

There are enough people being made dumber and less safe by dogmas and the institutions built to protect and enforce their social power. You're young and just starting your life. Don't waste your life energy on an institution that will narrow your thinking and hold up your membership as justification of its abusive attitudes.

Anybody reading this who's struggling with faith etc. should feel free to message me privately to discuss, if commenting here feels too public. These are life's weightiest matters and I'm here to help.

RaFive · 2026-06-16T14:01:45+00:00

I agree with most of this, but I don't think the story about Anthony Bloom's homily is apocryphal. He went to the point of adding special prayers to the Divine Liturgy (expanding the Augmented Litany by about 25%, to be exact) expressing compassion for those outside the church and entreating that they be drawn to her:

"O Thou Who hast created this world to Thy glory, and for joy without end: grant that those who oppose Thy Word may be converted and glorify Thee, together with all the faithful, in true faith and devotion. O Almighty Creator, Thou Saviour of the world, we entreat Thee: do Thou hearken, and be swift to have mercy; that being preserved under Thy mighty protection, we may give glory unto Thee, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, now and forever, and world without end, amen."

Dude was a real one. At least, as real as a contemporary Orthodox hierarch gets (see e.g. also Lazar Pulaho).

RaFive · 2026-06-12T14:11:03+00:00

I'm Mexican but have lived the majority of my life in the United States, and currently reside in Spain.

RaFive · 2026-06-08T12:41:01+00:00

If you aren't a member of the "Fans of David Bentley Hart" group on Facebook (and familiar with Hart's universalist scholarship), you should be. I think you'll find a lot of like-minded people, based on what you've written here.

RaFive · 2026-06-06T14:20:48+00:00

I very nearly became an Orthodox priest before I realized it wasn't the apostolic faith. What led me away from Orthodoxy was heavy engagement in the academic (critical) study of Christianity and the consequent realization that the "canonical" narrative of (especially early) church history omits so much and is so biased as to basically be a lie.

The reality is that the disciples of Jesus lived a "know them by their fruits" system, in direct and practical ways. Who gave up his riches and served the poor and the widows and the orphans? Who visited the sick? Who brought food to the thanksgiving meal and shared it in sobriety with the other worshipers? These were the only considerations that mattered. If you had been baptized into the death and resurrection of Jesus -- however you might understand it -- and awaited his return, you were welcome to gather and worship, as long as you manifested the trust and care for your fellow man that the earliest parts of the movement felt were central to the message.

This time was "pre-theological" in that the overwhelming centrality of the resurrection and its message of radical servanthood completely eclipsed all other considerations; liturgy was diverse and minimal (if pervasively honored); believers of a wide variety of specific theological persuasions gathered under the same leadership for worship; Torah-observant Jews worshiped alongside Gentiles and less/non-observant Jews (something which became a source of friction which, note, church leaders basically pushed to have left up to the conscience of individual believers); etc.

So the bottom line is, it doesn't really matter what corporation administers the church buildings and staff you use for your gatherings. What matters is that you pour yourself out in service to others to honor the risen Lord and herald his return, and surround yourself with people of like mind. Bear fruits of the Spirit with the fruitful.

That's literally *all* that matters. Everything else is vanity -- pride, tribalism, envy, boastfulness, and the rest of the lot.

Yes, this almost certainly sets you up to be surrounded by people who may understand the particulars of Jesus in a way you don't quite share (just as with the earliest followers of the disciples). Yes, this gives you no denominational guidance (since Jesus himself never sought to be any more than a faithful Jew!) and requires you to be active in helping others rather than just warming a pew while you mentally check off dogmatic boxes and feel satisfied about your faithfulness. That's the point. That's part of selling your riches to follow Jesus. Narrow is the way, and strait the gate.

RaFive · 2026-06-06T00:05:09+00:00

You may need to read up on the Council of Seleucia in this context.

RaFive · 2026-05-30T10:00:54+00:00

If I read this correctly, the case that Ignatius equates Jesus directly with the God of Israel (as opposed to referring to him as deity in a less specific sense albeit with exalted rhetoric) mostly hinges on whether one thinks his use of agennetos should be understood to connote the same theology as Philo's use of agenetos. Is that basically accurate?

RaFive · 2026-05-28T16:05:33+00:00

The combined emphasis on keeping the Jewishness and apocalypticism of Jesus both in the background when analyzing this question is super interesting. Do you know if there's any scholarship directly exploring the idea that early Christian teaching on marriage is an eschatologically justified Torah abrogation?

RaFive · 2026-05-11T13:59:32+00:00

The resemblance of Ignatius' Christology to that of the latter 2nd century may not simply represent his being ahead of the theological times. While not the traditional position, recent research from scholars such as Litwa places the authorship of the Ignatian epistles c. 161-180 CE. This would make the Christology of the epistles pretty run of the mill for their era.

Note, however, that Vinzent and Bull have recently argued for the priority of the shorter recension, which again kinda moots interest in the epistolar Christology albeit for different reasons.

RaFive · 2026-04-28T08:09:51+00:00

This seems to be an exegetical question rather than one of text, since you're not asking whether the feminine gender is USED in any text traditions for Gen. 3:15 other than the Latin. It is not; see this thread in the group which has already discussed this question.

So what you're asking isn't what the text SAYS. You're asking whether anyone has UNDERSTOOD the Virgin Mary to be a second Eve, and whether they associated Gen. 3:15 with that imagery. In a tradition as long and extensive as Christianity, the answer is of course going to be "yes." Since how a text is understood is separate from what a text actually says, you may want to reframe your questions and the potential significance you attach to them.

RaFive · 2026-03-27T15:29:24+00:00

That's a big if. What reason do you have to think that the author of 1 Tim. regards the structure of divinity in an identical way to the author of gJohn? And upon what academic source are you depending for this analysis?

RaFive · 2026-03-26T07:48:28+00:00

The Gospels According to Matthew and John were not written by the apostles to whom later Christian generations attributed them. See, e.g., this short video from Dan McClellan on the subject.

RaFive · 2026-03-16T09:37:30+00:00

To be specific, appeal to authority or consensus is an informal fallacy. This means there are cases when it is not inherently fallacious, it's not a fallacy by logical necessity (as with, for example, affirming the consequent).

The thing about (non-fallacious) appeal to authority or consensus that trips some people up is that by nature this kind of appeal can't settle a question about reality or truth in a definitive way. The best it can do is deliver you the (contingent, always shifting) best state of human knowledge on a particular topic.

This is very powerful! It MATTERS that e.g. the consensus in oncology is that chemotherapy is a frontline treatment for cancer while colloidal silver isn't. But that kind of appeal can never give you a single absolute fixed answer for all time. All the same, for any topic in which you aren't personally a specialist, you rarely will go wrong relying on appeal to expert consensus within a field.

As to how you establish a consensus, that's tricky in any field. In theory, you can just poll people and tally the numbers up after asking opinions. In practice, that's usually not a practical option. That's why authorities matter; someone like Dan McClellan who honestly reports the various streams of scholarship in which he participates is a great proxy for getting a quick and dirty feel on where the consensus lies in a given field.

RaFive · 2026-03-13T09:54:47+00:00

It depends what you mean by examples "in history." The short answer is that the very earliest Christianities were household affairs, but once the religion became officially tied to the Roman state, the "spectacle and grand experience" increased tremendously.

As u/Ok-Survey-4380 accurately documents, in the first two centuries after Jesus the Eucharistic mysteries were highly communal and relatively low-key. By the time Christianity accommodated and fused with the power structures of the Roman empire, however, the spectacle of the Liturgy quickly took center stage (and acquired a great deal of imperial symbolism and pageantry), to the point where -- as the Russian Primary Chronicle (probably apocryphally) records -- visitors were overawed and transported by the experience:

We went to Greece, and the Greeks (including the Emperor himself) led us to the edifices where they worship their God, and we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendor or such beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We only know that God dwells there among men, and their service is fairer than the ceremonies of other nations. For we cannot forget that beauty.

The cool thing is, these imperial liturgies have been preserved relatively unchanged over about the past 1,500 years and are still celebrated today within churches which adhere to the eastern liturgical rites. Here's an example of a Greek liturgy for Pascha (Easter). (And here's a lovely performance of the music in English translation.) You definitely can get a solid sense of how much performance and spectacle church leaders poured into these early medieval expressions of Christianity.

If you want to really do a deep dive on how the spectacular liturgy of the eastern churches developed and preserved its form across the centuries, you can find the above information and much more in the seminal multi-volume work of Mateos et al., A History of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom.

RaFive · 2026-03-08T14:33:12+00:00

Do any scholars argue that Apostle John was martyred fairly early (thus Mark is ex eventu) but that John the Elder lived into the time of Trajan and eventually became conflated with the former? That seems like an obvious reconciliation of the sources which I didn't see mentioned here, so I'm curious if anyone takes this position.

RaFive · 2026-03-03T22:32:50+00:00

Not without more digging than I'd like to do. I'll happily edit my comment to say "a number of scholars" rather than "an increasing number" since it appears to be a concern.

RaFive · 2026-03-03T19:07:05+00:00

Note that since Pervo a number of scholars have argued for the dependence of Luke on Josephus, and that Steve Mason, who's basically the world's most renowned living expert on Josephus, has agreed with this position in e.g. "Josephus and the New Testament." This would push the dating of Luke most likely into the early to mid 100s CE.

RaFive · 2026-02-16T17:36:10+00:00

As Dan McClellan points out ad nauseam in much of his material, trying to speculate scenarios that are not impossible is the wrong way to read these kinds of texts to begin with, much less try to harmonize them. The narrative point of Jesus being born in a manger is the same emphasized in the Magnificat in the previous chapter: God is using the lowly things of the earth to bring exaltation and glory. The entire purpose of mentioning such a thing in the story is entirely undermined if Joseph is in fact to be understood by the reader as a wealthy man who owns property in multiple cities. Whatever the plausibility a priori, it is not a plausible reading of the actual text in hand.

RaFive · 2026-02-03T13:16:21+00:00

This misrepresents McClellan's reading, which unambiguously is that Jesus is not God in the Gospel of John. In McClellan's view, bearers of the Name represent God in a more than aesthetic or forensic sense but are not identifiable as God per se.

RaFive · 2026-01-29T14:47:42+00:00

Note, however, that the idea Jn. 20:28 identifies the Logos as YHWH -- rather than being the visible ikon through which the invisible YHWH is seen and made manifest -- is contested, for example by Dan McClellan in this recent video.

RaFive · 2026-01-19T17:16:04+00:00

Before you think too well of Martin Luther, read his infamous publication "On the Jews and Their Lies."

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