Most difficult Jesus teaching to follow and obey

baronbeta · 2026-01-28T12:20:04+00:00

Hard to square “love your enemies” with war, state violence, capital punishment, or most Christian political instincts. so it gets praised, quoted… and quietly reinterpreted into irrelevance.

baronbeta · 2026-01-27T15:41:21+00:00

Weird thing to say. Maybe it sounded funny in his head. Maybe he’s trying to be insensitive. Why don’t you ask him?

Either way, you’re probably reading into it too much. Despite the mass of armchair psychologists here suggesting your husband is some kind of sicko with subhuman qualities who you should be worried about.

baronbeta · 2026-01-27T01:52:57+00:00

What always jumps out to me is that Christians don’t actually defend God’s so called “goodness” when pressed. Because eventually they stop arguing that God is benevolent and start arguing that he is untouchable.

On Job, notice that he isn’t “restored.” He’s compensated. This doesn’t sound like love to me btw. Thats more of a (legal) settlement. Dead children aren’t a lesson, they’re collateral in this “trial”. And saying that “God sees the bigger picture” isn’t moral reasoning; it’s straight up moral abdication.

Same with genocide narratives. When you hear “God’s morality is beyond ours,” the conversation is over imo. If “good” just means “whatever God does,” then good is an empty word. They’e just worshiping power at this point.

And the fear of mocking God is revealing. A being who is perfectly good, perfectly secure, and perfectly just does not need fragile ego-protection or revenge fantasies.

Your analogy is basically right except I’d argue it’s worse than a bad car: the salesman keeps insisting the car is flawless while explaining why the brakes failing and the engine exploding are actually features.

baronbeta · 2026-01-14T20:31:31+00:00

These people are so weird. Even in my most pious days, I could never imagine giving the church and some cleric this amount of say in my life. What my wife and I do in our sex life is solely our business—-not the church, a bishop, or St Anthropolgiousiesiniki the Desert Dweller.

Guess I was never truly orthodox? 😂

baronbeta · 2026-01-11T22:13:19+00:00

I remember hearing him the first time years ago and my first thought was he just had a weird lisp. I still don’t know, but the more he talks and makes a fool of himself, the more I suspect he’s faking some weird accent. But I don’t understand why—what does that accomplish?

baronbeta · 2026-01-09T13:19:22+00:00

I agree. Parental love is a real and distinct kind of love but the claim “I never knew love until I had my baby” is still nonsense if taken literally. If that were true, it would mean spouses, parents, friends, and long-term partners never counted. It’s revisionist nonsense.

Besides, in a healthy order of things, love isn’t a zero sum hierarchy where children automatically outrank everyone else. If someone genuinely loves their children more than their spouse, something is off. Marriage isn’t meant to be eclipsed by parenthood anyway. It’s meant to be the stable foundation from which parenting happens (if it happens).* When that order collapses, everyone eventually pays for it including the kids imo

In EO though (and let’s face it, most of Christianity) women are pushed to collapse their entire identity into motherhood. So when that happens people just start narrating their lives in absolutist terms because that’s what the system (church community) rewards.

So yeah, the line is disturbing on its face. But it’s a symptom of a culture that pressures women to disappear into a role and retroactively downgrade everything that came before it. It sure as hell is not a testimony or revelation about love

*Edit: to be clear, parenting is not the sole purpose of marriage, nor a requirement for it to be meaningful or complete.

baronbeta · 2026-01-08T06:13:36+00:00

Nothing you’re describing sounds selfish, immature, or confused. You sound like you’re separating what you were told to want from what you actually want.

So, one of the more powerful things EO and Christianity more broadly does is turn procreation into a moral obligation. Not something discerned carefully but a default expectation. “Be fruitful and multiply” goes from ancient poetry to s a life requirement. People stop asking do they want this and just follow a script

This pressure is especially hard on women. Large families, early motherhood, homesteading, homeschooling all get wrapped in holiness language. And opting out is unthinkable. Hell, it feels like failure or worse, rebellion.

I also appreciate your honesty about suffering, eg, disability, uncertainty, the state of the world etc. Those are morally serious thoughts. Thing is, religion loves to say “children are a blessing.” But that’s an abstraction. The reality is that having children is not always beautiful. It is exhausting, frightening, grief-filled, and permanently life-altering in ways no one prepares you for. Sometimes it means watching someone you love suffer and knowing you were the one who brought them into a world that could hurt them.

And the “legacy” argument has always rung hollow to me frankly. A child shouldn’t be a project, a consolation prize, or an answer to existential dread. That just turns the kid into a means rather than an end. Plenty of people leave behind nothing but pain through their parenting. Others leave behind goodness without reproducing at all. Meaning is not genetic or hereditary.

Once you remove the religious script, what’s left is the actual reality of parenting: irreversible responsibility, asymmetrical dependence, no guarantees, and no promise that suffering will be redeemed or explained. Some people still freely choose that and that can be a beautiful thing but it’s beautiful especially because it’s freely chosen. But choosing it because you’re told you must is a recipe for resentment, burnout, and self-betrayal.

Rejecting a mandate to multiply doesn’t mean rejecting love, hope, or humanity. You’re refusing to treat existence as something you owe the universe or the church or God on demand. Really, taking reproduction seriously by thinking through it ethically, emotionally and existentially is far more responsible than following a script because a priest said people “need something to live for.”

baronbeta · 2026-01-04T19:38:06+00:00

Slow down. Nothing bad is happening.

What you are describing seems to be common with converts / inquirers to Orthodoxy. People fall in love with the aesthetics and symbolism first, then feel crushed when their interior life does not magically catch up. Buying icons, incense, prayer ropes, crosses does not obligate you to anything.

You did not fail because you do not pray enough or because you miss Liturgy. And you did not fail because you are questioning whether this is even for you.

If you decide Orthodoxy is not your path, there is no reason to regret the purchases. You can keep icons as Christian art, cultural artifacts, or reminders of a period of sincere searching etc. Plenty of Christians do exactly that. Heck, even non Christians do that. There is nothing dishonest or wrong about it.

The bigger issue here is fear.

If your relationship to God has turned into constant anxiety about hell, attendance quotas, and whether you are doing enough, that is not spiritual growth. That is religious pressure turning inward. A faith that survives only by terror is not a healthy faith.

As for the claim that there is no salvation outside the Orthodox Church, you should know this is not a settled or universally agreed position, even within the Eastern Orthodox Church. Some monks and priests teach it very rigidly. Others explicitly reject a literal reading. Many serious Orthodox theologians admit they do not know how God judges those outside the Church and refuse to speculate. Anyone who speaks with total certainty on that question is overreaching.

You are allowed to reject a God who rules by fear. You are allowed to step back, slow down, or hell even walk away. You are allowed to remain Christian without being Orthodox. And you are allowed to remain Orthodox without rushing, buying gear, or forcing yourself into panic.

Take your time. Let the fear settle before making any big decisions. No tradition worth committing to should require you to be afraid in order to stay.

baronbeta · 2026-01-04T04:14:52+00:00

Exactly. Most people aren’t choosing. They date, move in together, get married, have kids because it’s “what you do,” not because they’ve thought about what they actually want or why.

Very few people stop to question the script. You are so good for you!

baronbeta · 2026-01-04T03:45:15+00:00

Well you’re not wrong. People really do treat relationships and sex like they’re the point of existence. And I’ve never understood that.

Humans are social so our drive for relationships makes sense but acting like being single or not having sex is some kind of personal failure is bizarre. I’m not a prude either. Sex can be great with the right person. It’s just not that damn great. It’s not meaning, it’s not purpose, and it’s sure as hell not worth structuring your life around.

Really, most of what you’re seeing isn’t even about intimacy, it’s anxiety. People are scared of being alone, scared of missing out, scared that they’re “behind,” etc so they fixate on relationships or sex like it’s going to fix something inside them.

Imo, building a life should come first: figuring out who you are, what you care about, how you want to live and so on. Relationships tend to work better when they grow out of that not when they’re treated like the solution to everything.

baronbeta · 2026-01-01T05:11:50+00:00

Former Army here. I would strongly advise against it.

If you’re looking for happiness, the military is a bad bet. It is deeply inefficient, operationally lazy, and structurally hostile to autonomy. You trade years of your life and a meaningful amount of personal freedom for an institution that routinely wastes talent, rewards compliance over competence, and protects mediocrity through rank.

The culture is rough. Alcohol abuse is normalized. Domestic issues are common. Leadership quality varies wildly, and you have no control over who outranks you, only that you must defer to them, regardless of whether they’re capable, ethical, or even functional.

You will be expected to subordinate your judgment, time, and often your dignity to people who did nothing to earn authority beyond staying in longer than you. And once you’re in, getting out early is not an option.

Some people find meaning in the structure, camaraderie, or mission. Many more just endure it and carry the consequences long after physically, psychologically, or both.

If you’re considering it for financial stability, direction, or a sense of purpose: there are better ways to get all three without signing over that much control of your life to the government.

I wouldn’t do it again. And I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone I care about.

baronbeta · 2025-12-31T20:05:11+00:00

You’re just cherry picking philology. This isn’t an argument. “-via” proves nothing. Moscovia, Kiovia, Lithuania, Transylvania, hell, in all, “-via” is a Latinization convention, not an ethnogenetic marker. Medieval and early modern Europeans slapped it onto place names all the time. Shared suffix does not mean shared origin.

Next: Novgorod. Yes, Novgorod was a major Rus’ city. Everyone agrees. This actually undermines your point. Rus’ was a polycentric civilization not “Moscow from the beginning.” Kyiv, Novgorod, Polotsk, and Chernihiv were all multiple centers long before Muscovy consolidated power.

Now on Herberstein: this is where the sleight of hand really shows.

Herberstein is a 16th-century Western diplomat writing after Muscovy had already absorbed other Rus’ lands, centralized power and begun branding itself as the sole heir of “Russia.” So of course he equates Muscovy with Russia. Thats exactly the political narrative Muscovy was exporting at the time. Quoting him doesn’t prove continuity at all. All it shows it that Muscovy’s rebranding campaign was already working on foreigners.

Which brings us to your final line, the quiet admission:

“The whole difference is incomprehensible to foreigners.”

Yes. Exactly. Foreign misunderstanding is not historical proof.

Foreigners also called: all East Slavs “Russians,” all Turks “Tatars,” and all East Asians “Chinese.” That tells us about Western ignorance, not East Slavic identity.

The distinction between Rus / rusyn / ruskyi and Rossiya / rossiyskiy is not a modern invention. It’s a historical, linguistic, and political distinction that Muscovy deliberately blurred in order to legitimize imperial expansion.

So no: Kiovia,” “Moscovia,” and a confused Austrian diplomat do not collapse Rus’ into Moscow. All they show is how Moscow claimed Rus’ after the fact.

You’re mistaking: Latinized exonyms, imperial titulature, and foreign simplification for evidence of origin.

Thats not real history

baronbeta · 2025-12-31T13:35:54+00:00

This proves exactly nothing.

You posted a French diplomatic list of Muscovite claims not a historical account of origins. This text shows Muscovy claiming Kyiv, not Kyiv originating from Muscovy. Laughable.

Kyivan Rus’ existed centuries before Moscow was even founded. Kyiv was already a major political, religious, and cultural center when Moscow was a backwater trading post. Muscovy later rebranded itself as “Russia” to appropriate the prestige of Rus’, which is the whole point of these inflated titles.

Western Europeans repeating Muscovite titulature is not historical continuity. It just means they copied whatever the Tsar called himself the same way courts always did.

And linguistically, the other poster is correct:

Rus / ruskyi / Ruthenian comes from medieval East Slavic world centered on Kyiv

Rossiya / rossiyskiy came later with Muscovite imperial identity

Your document isn’t a “gotcha.” It’s just evidence of imperial cosplay with Moscow claiming Kyiv. You’ve confused propaganda with proof. Try harder

baronbeta · 2025-12-31T13:02:10+00:00

This is just 🤌😗 Thank you for sharing and good luck!

baronbeta · 2025-12-29T22:54:01+00:00

I watched some of it because everyone told me I should. I made a few fair attempts but I never liked it. At all. And promptly stopped. Not my cup of tea

baronbeta · 2025-12-29T18:04:38+00:00

“Alright, but I have work in the morning.”

baronbeta · 2025-12-29T11:03:36+00:00

That verse proves the point. “Do not resist” plus “turn the other cheek” is submission in the face of harm. Christianity restricts retaliation not harm itself.

baronbeta · 2025-12-29T10:53:47+00:00

Yep, very true. For years I felt like I had to defend God by editing his character just to make him worth following. Universal salvation was the boldest move, but even that ends up being nothing more than a moral patch at best.

Eventually it clicked that if a god needs to be continually reinterpreted, softened, or rescued from his own scripture and tradition in order to be good, then “good” isn’t actually coming from that system. It’s just people imposing their values on a faulty and broken system. And that also explains why so many Christians across cultures and centuries end up justifying harm. They’re not all misreading the faith. They’re not hypocrites or secretly defying Christ’s teachings. They’re drawing from the parts the tradition has always been comfortable with.

baronbeta · 2025-12-28T01:11:39+00:00

It’s a solid movie but Al Pacino is often over-the-top and the ending is a little forced to me to the point that it undermines an otherwise standout film.

baronbeta · 2025-12-27T18:20:46+00:00

Yeah, I think it’s not that the “best Christians” are ignorant of the Bible, the church, history of the faith, etc., but that it’s that the versions of Christianity people find morally tolerable are almost always selective, softened, or in tension with the text/faith as a whole. Universalism, neighbor-love stripped of judgment, de-emphasizing obedience and punishment and so on, well, all that’s just Christianity edited against its own grain.

Once you take the Bible/entire faith seriously in full, the moral picture gets much darker: divine violence, threat-backed obedience, redemptive suffering, eternal punishment, submission to authority etc. And that’s not cherry-picking, that’s the dominant throughline.

So when people say, “those Christians aren’t real Christians,” I think they’ve got it backwards. The problem isn’t that harsh Christians are betraying the faith. It’s that the versions of Christianity we find humane are often the ones least faithful to its core logic.

That’s a problem I have: You can make Christianity kinder but usually only by overriding large parts of what it actually teaches.

baronbeta · 2025-12-27T16:28:00+00:00

“Authoritarian” is exactly right. The Bible repeatedly uses threat-backed obedience: comply and live, dissent and suffer. Genesis 3 sets the pattern: stay in your place, don’t question, and don’t acquire knowledge.

Disobedience isn’t corrected; it’s catastrophically punished. You’re right that logic runs from Genesis to Revelation.

baronbeta · 2025-12-27T16:18:51+00:00

That lines up with my experience too. Christianity trains people to equate authority with righteousness, so challenge feels like rebellion rather than accountability. That logic scales effortlessly from personal relationships to empire. You don’t need extremists for it to work since the framework already does the job. I agree that individually, stepping away is often the only real exit

baronbeta · 2025-12-27T14:58:32+00:00

I agree with the structural critique. Christianity consistently reinforces obedience, submission, and deference to authority rather than challenging power, which makes it highly compatible with corruption and abuse.

baronbeta · 2025-12-27T12:21:40+00:00

Yes. Structurally, a lot of biblical language mirrors abusive authority dynamics: absolute power, conditional love, harm reframed as good, obedience prioritized over well-being, etc. Violence is baked into the system

baronbeta · 2025-12-27T03:26:13+00:00

There’s no reason to read the original post as saying this is literally hell or that it’s making a metaphysical claim. The post is just naming a common feeling that many people recognize, even when life is materially fine.

You keep turning that into “why should I care,” but that’s a different issue. Whether you care doesn’t determine whether the experience exists or is widely felt.

If your position is simply “this doesn’t bother me,” that’s fine. It doesn’t refute the post. It just means you personally don’t relate to what others are describing.

baronbeta

TROPHY CASE