I hate to be one of those guys but quotes like this seem to be cope. I understand that overthinking can stunt a person’s ability to functionally live their lives but looking from the outside of a religion this seems like bad reasoning to join.
>>18245172Duh? Greek monks are navel gazing spergs. I actually do admire their commitment to moral and spiritual purity but they took the religion both seriously and way too far. If you actually believe in Christianity you should be like them. Pray without ceasing. Approach God with fear and trembling. Do not be defiled by the world. Shit like that.
>>18245172I take it as a response to slander.
>>18245175>Pray without ceasingThe Son of Man has authority to fix mistakes. Pick up your mat and walk.
>>18245207that’s paul you nigger
>>18245207muslims pray a lot because their false god demands itChristians encourage praying a lot because praying means spending time with him. Kinda like talking to someone on your phone.
>>18245207Not all prayers are about forgiveness though. You can just pray for prayer's sake.
>>18245172He's not talking about overthinking, he saying that entertaining sinful thoughts directly leads to sin and the formation of passions. It's quite literally the exact opposite. The problem isn't the existence of the thoughts themselves, but rather our choice to indulge them. We can't outsmart the devil by trying to play his game, so it's best to accept these thoughts can rise but to not entertaining them when they do.
>>18245172It's easy to misunderstanding the Orthodox position here because our own "secular" epistemology is deeply shaped by the theological categories shaped by the Reformation."Justification" (on which so much modern Western epistemology centers) is originally a theological term. It denoted an intrinsic, internal change wrought in man. With Luther, this becomes an extrinsic imputation by God, but as things shift it becomes an external imputation as measured by an idealized "rational agent" or later the "language community." But the idealized rational agent takes on a new view of reason that first becomes wholly discursive (reason as calculative and instrumental, and no longer ecstatic and contemplative) and later also adopts empiricist overtones. To be justified is to have evidence (generally sense data subjected to discursive rationality plus or less notions of innate ideas). Things also get very democratized. The rational everyman becomes the gold standard, as opposed to the saint or sage (as was the standard across pre-modern Western and Eastern thought).In this context, faith becomes "affirming a position without justification." Previously, faith was something that leads too justification. Faith is illuminative. It leads to knowledge, to gnosis. It is part of the development of the virtues that lead to the fullness of participation that includes with it noetic understanding.Faith, is thus better rendered in terms of trust. To have faith in God and to reject doubts is like being faithful to your wife, children, or father even when they give you reason to doubt their love or goodness. It is not to blindly affirm things.To have faith is to not give up on the spiritual life. It is to reject temptation. It is the practice of nepsis (sobriety, watchfulness) where one does not couple with demonic thoughts and let them into the nous.
I'm not one of those anti christian fedora tippers, I'll say this about any ideology: if you have to hide from outside opinions and silence all questions, your religion/ideology is a worthless piece of shit. Actually valuable ideas encourage people to question or try and disprove them, because failure to do so will only reinforce them, and, if they are in fact proven wrong, it means that they shouldn't be followed to begin with.
>>18245272And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many wordsThy willbe doneon earth
