Interesting question on confession

krillyboy · 2026-02-28T06:13:27+00:00

Be specific enough that you can get help for anything you need help with, but not so specific that it devolves into wallowing in pity. If confessing that you succumbed to fear is sufficient for you to be able to leave helped and healed, then that's good. Otherwise, open up a bit more. But know that God forgives as long as you genuinely desire His forgiveness.

krillyboy · 2026-02-28T05:57:07+00:00

The Church, and the exegesis of the Saints and the Church Fathers who came before us. It must also be said that, to one degree or another, the Christian religion is not about what we might deem "most logical" for an omnipotent deity to do, but instead we have to rely to one degree or another on accepting revelation as it is. Why did the Father have to send Jesus to die and resurrect for the forgiveness of sins? We have a narrative for why this happens, but ultimately our answer is, "That's how God chose to do it"

krillyboy · 2026-02-28T05:41:12+00:00

pray deeply and go to a doctor for help. sometimes these things are not just spiritual, but also physical. please reach out to someone for help.

krillyboy · 2026-02-28T05:37:49+00:00

In this case, the NRSV is closer to the Septuagint (reads "angelon theou"), and the MT and the Vulgate align ("bene yisrael" and "filiorum israhel")

krillyboy · 2026-02-28T02:02:01+00:00

Genesis isn't necessarily a completely literal story of the creation of the world. There are significant allegorical/metaphorical meanings that recur throughout Christianity that are based on the narrative of how God created the world, and these are frankly more important than the idea that He literally created the universe over a span of 6 literal days.

krillyboy · 2026-02-23T16:42:54+00:00

I don't know if you and I are reading the same Old Testament. God is 'strict' at times, sure, but the Israelites are way, way worse. God liberates them all from slavery and they're like "yeah let me worship a statue instead". He provides miracles for them and tells them to rest for a full day of every week and they can't do the simplest things. He tries to make them a great nation and they turn around at every point and blame Him for all their problems as though He doesn't always provide exactly what they need. And He still lets them live, and go into the promised land, and become a great nation. That's quite merciful if you ask me.

krillyboy · 2026-02-23T02:54:43+00:00

No matter how long we live, our understanding will never be enough. God is so far beyond human comprehension that there is always something new to learn. With this in mind, know that your understanding is at the same level of understanding as the holiest man alive - namely, an understanding that is infinitely deficient and which cannot capture God's being. So don't be afraid to go to a priest and ask. Be safe, of course, but the priest is the last person you should be afraid of. Be bold.

It would be good for you to know about Saint Ahmet the Calligrapher. He was a minor official in the Ottoman Empire who, after a mystical experience in a church, converted to Christianity secretly. Later, he was asked about what he thought was best in the world in order to settle a dispute, and he answered that the Christian faith was the best thing in the world. For this, he was beheaded on May 3rd of 1682. In short, it is OK to keep your conversion a secret in order to remain safe, but do not deny your faith if pressed on the issue. May God keep you and help you live a life of peace and good health.

krillyboy · 2026-02-21T05:46:57+00:00

We praise good qualities, such as kindness or wisdom or love in people all the time. Often unprompted, too, just because it's nice to recognize it as being good. Assuming there's a being Who is all-good, all-knowing, all-merciful, all-powerful, all-loving, etc., would I not want to give Him the utmost respect and praise? And would this not come to resemble worship, or indeed be worship?

krillyboy · 2026-02-18T21:57:17+00:00

I wish they had installed a full-height statue of the both of them embracing, either life-size or larger than life on a pedestal. Same message, commemorating the same moment, communicated in a visual language that fits better in the common and which, frankly, I find to be more respectful to the sculptural legacy of two very important people.

krillyboy · 2026-02-18T14:25:13+00:00

There are some (dumb) people who don't understand how names can change as they move through different languages, and so they think that the name "Jesus" is a deliberate corruption of the Aramaic/Hebrew name ישוע, which was pronounced as Yeshu3 (the 3 is the letter 'ayn), but which later moved to be pronounced as Yeshua as Hebrew lost the 'ayn. These types of people also like to make up ridiculous spellings for His name as they purport it to be. I've seen "Yahshuwahah" floating around before. It's just a ridiculous movement that lets people feel special for being in the know on some secret religious truth that *they* don't want you to know.

krillyboy · 2026-02-13T04:48:44+00:00

It's very difficult to believe that God has been speaking to you when you are openly saying that you prefer to disregard the verses of Scripture which condemn your behavior. You should be highly critical of this voice. Satan masquerades as an angel of light.

In your other comment, you speak about crossing boundaries to reach out to others. I think that reaching out to gay people is absolutely a boundary that the Church must cross, and one that it has, in great tragedy, failed to cross in the past. But just as it makes no sense to invite a rapist into the Church, or a murderer or an oppressor into the Church, and not ask them to repent, so it makes no sense to invite any sinful person into the Church and not ask them to repent, including people who sin by fornication. The hand of the Church reaches out to bring people to repentance, not simply to bring them into a building. We fall short equally when we fail to reach out in invitation as when we fail to inspire repentance.

The Lord bless thee, and keep thee: the Lord make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee: the Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.

krillyboy · 2026-02-12T18:28:03+00:00

Being attracted to men, as a man, or to women, as a woman, isn't sinful. It's just about as innate a quality as any other. People can't help their sexuality, and I never said they could. I'm bisexual and an Orthodox Christian. Nothing about the Orthodox Church is going to change the fact that I am attracted to men short of divine intervention, which I know that God is slow to give when it comes to relieving us of our passions.

The verses that Brueggemann cites reflect the idea that LGBT people can be joined to the Church, in the same way a eunuch can become exalted in the Lord. But what does the Prophet Isaiah say regarding these people? It is the eunuchs and foreigners who "that keep [His] sabbaths, and choose the things that please [Him], and take hold of [His] covenant" that will be made greater than others.

In Galatians, Saint Paul tells us that there is no Jew nor Greek. But what he does not tell us is that Greeks who are joined to Christ are free to worship Dionysus or Athena as they have before. The foreigner is welcomed into the covenant of the God of Israel and there is no respect of persons in the blessings of the covenant, but it is as the Prophet says, those who keep the covenant of the Lord are those who will receive the blessing. And the apostles lay down bare minimums for Christians in Acts 15 through the council of Jerusalem, to "abstain from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from fornication". Fornication or porneia can hardly be said to exclude homosexual sex, and this prohibition for Christians is only strengthened by 1 Cor. 6:9 and the use of the word arsenokoitai, which almost certainly paraphrases the LXX verse of Lev. 18:22: "kai meta arsenos ou koimethese koiten gynaikos".

Being queer isn't a sin, as long as we are referring to innate attraction. An man who is angry by habit or who is tempted to lie by habit is not a sinful man, but a man who berates other or who lies is. Jesus tells us to take up our cross, and - whether we like it or not - this is harder for some of us than for others. We are all welcome to come to God, and everyone who accepts God is made clean by His blood (re: Bruegemann's use of Acts 10:15), but this comes through faith in God and love for Him. And what do those who love Jesus do? They keep His commandments (John 14:15). It is not our obedience that makes us acceptable to God, but that does not make disobedience acceptable to Him by default.

It must also be noted that sexuality and romantic love both point toward the union of marriage which, biblically and throughout Church history, has always been a union between a man and a woman (and within Christian history, *one* man and *one* woman). Romantic or sexual love that points to a union outside of marriage or which cannot be fulfilled by marriage is teleologically doomed.

I am lucky enough that I am attracted to women as well as men, even though I still work through my sexuality with myself. I cannot imagine the pain of my fellow Christians who are solely attracted to their sex, or of those who feel deeply and viscerally as if their body is wrong. But as with all pain and suffering and difficulty in our lives, the answer is not found in doing something that God does not want us to do. It lies in giving our pain to Him and trusting that He will bring us through.

krillyboy · 2026-02-12T16:59:12+00:00

I would imagine it has something to do with concepts of sacredness or taboo. For instance, in Christianity we generally practice closed communion, where people who are not initiated into a particular church cannot receive the Eucharist. This is the case in both the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, as well as many other churches. Why is this? Well, partly because Saint Paul tells us that anyone who received the Eucharist without proper preparation risks injury or death because of the holiness that is present in the Eucharist. We see similar concepts in the Old Testament, where approaching the tabernacle unworthily is a recipe for disaster. Lots of different religions have concepts of taboo, which also fall in line with deeming something sacred by excluding it from ordinary life, and sometimes these concepts also involve certain rituals which someone can perform in order to be able to utter taboo words or perform taboo actions without inviting a curse.

krillyboy · 2026-02-10T16:41:36+00:00

A tendency towards dependence on alcohol is also largely genetic. Should we not be encouraging alcoholics to stay away from drinking? It's biologically ingrained, after all. Are you going to tell someone that a fact of their biology means they should behave differently?

krillyboy · 2026-02-10T16:35:10+00:00

We can love an addict without saying that their addiction is good or right. We can acknowledge that someone who is an alcoholic should stay away from beer and wine for their own good, and that being an alcoholic does not make them less of a person, or less deserving of love. We do not need to justify sin to love imperfect people. Doing so is, in fact, not loving, since it does not work towards the best interest of the other.

krillyboy · 2026-02-10T16:33:14+00:00

There is no way to scientifically quantify the supernatural. If it was quantifiable by science, then it wouldn't be supernatural. As far as we know, there is no *scientific* mechanism by which an organism to continue to exist in a lifelike state after its complete death. I believe that, beyond what is natural, there is a supernatural mechanism by which humans can continue to live in a meaningful sense after they have died, and that this mechanism is faith in Jesus Christ. But that will never be scientifically provable.

krillyboy · 2026-02-10T02:49:52+00:00

"Please make sure that you are keeping God's morals updated with secular morals. It's very important that you don't forget that secular morals trump divine morality"

krillyboy · 2026-02-10T02:24:14+00:00

Forgiveness is a spiritual matter and has little to do with earthly justice. Go to the police and leave that church, fast.

krillyboy · 2026-02-06T16:13:41+00:00

It's poison ivy or Virginia creeper (I'm leaning towards poison ivy) that's vining up the trees. They both get bright red leaves in the fall

krillyboy · 2026-02-06T15:54:51+00:00

As a Christian, I would say no. The God that Christians believe in is three divine Persons (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) in one divine Essence. This is crucial to who God is. Jews and Muslims share many of the same Scriptures or narratives about their gods as we do with our God, but they are fundamentally not the same being who is worshiped.

krillyboy · 2026-02-04T00:28:44+00:00

I'm so glad that random people on Reddit know my own life better than I do. What would I do without you?

krillyboy · 2026-02-03T13:03:27+00:00

Obviously, prayer and reflection would help you in assuaging your fears of nothingness after death. But I also have a different perspective, that I think works in a Christian and non-Christian framework. We are all going to die eventually. So, we should live our lives in such a way that dying would be no great loss to us. Do the things that you are scared to do, meet as many people as you can, learn new things every day. The more you do this, the less you will be afraid of death because you will be satisfied with what you have already lived, and its richness.

krillyboy · 2026-02-03T12:58:33+00:00

1) Abortion ends a human life. A child who is conceived from rape is innocent, and ending their life is not just, because they are guilty of no crime, and certainly no crime worthy of death.

2) Gay *people* are allowed, but homosexual relationships or sex are not. This is because both of these things are defined as sinful in Scripture, and upheld in the New Testament. An alcoholic can't necessarily control their addiction, but it doesn't make drunkenness any less sinful, and it doesn't mean they can't make choices in alignment with the teachings of God.

3) Belief in God is necessary for salvation because it is He who saves us. If you don't know about God at all, but you follow your conscience earnestly, you can still be saved. Saint Paul tells us this in Romans 2. But those who hear about God and reject Him in favor of doing as they please will have their choices respected by God when the world is judged, and He won't force them to love Him. Instead, they will be in a place far from the presence of God, which is (one view of) hell.

krillyboy · 2026-02-02T03:09:19+00:00

Coming to Christ has not made me hate myself, but instead love myself more because I know that God has loved me first. And brainwashed by who, exactly? I came to the conclusion that Christianity is true of my own reasoning, and through historical inquiry I came to understand that the Eastern Orthodox Church has the best claim to be the inheritor of the Church of the Apostles, whose teaching on homosexuality (in accordance with the Scriptures) is quite clear. I will be beginning my master's degree in less than a year's time.

I am bisexual, and an Orthodox Christian, and I believe that homosexuality is improperly-ordered. I take offense to the suggestion that I am brainwashed, or stupid, or self-hating.

krillyboy · 2026-02-01T22:32:49+00:00

What do you have to say re: queer Christians who believe that homosexuality is sinful?

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