Russian Tensions
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Which is worrying (Putin, that is).
Orthodoxy, unlike modern Roman Catholicism, is more akin to evangelicism, in that, despite its opulent ritual, it has an apocalyptic bent, focussing on the end of the world.Yep, that all sounds like the Orthodox fanaticism I know! Btw, Sts. Vladimir and Olga’s conversion of the Rus peasantry to Christianity was bloody and ferocious.
Why doesn’t he go the whole way and be crowned Tsar?
I wondered at the paradox of a republic restoring the Imperial eagle emblem to its flag and parliament, complete with crown, orb and sceptre.So the Bolsheviks succeeded in neither clearing the capitalists from the Earth nor gods from the skies.
I do not believe that the majority of Russians are genuine religious believers. I certainly do not believe that Putin is. He is a cynic. He uses religion for the purpose of great-power politics. Russian ‘greatness’ is his religion. The Russian Orthodox Church itself, or at least the patriarch and the hierarchy, is concerned above all with great-power politics. Ukrainian Christians have criticized the ROC Patriarch for talking about politics and hardly mentioning religion.
But do you think that Biden is not really a religious believer either but just a cynic whose real religion is American greatness? In other words, is not possible to be a genuine religious believer and the head of a capitalist state? Couldn’t Putin really be a religious nutter?
A warning on where the Western capitalist block pumping weapons into Ukraine could lead:
After the war is over and Russian troops withdraw from most of Ukraine there will a rich vein of anti-Russian feelings that Ukrainian ultra-nationalists will be able to exploit.
But part of Putin’s demands is demilitarization, whereby Ukraine will have to divest itself of heavy weaponry, with Russian monitoring.
Biden was brought up a Catholic and my impression is that he is sincere about religion. According to Wikipedia, following the death of his first wife and daughter in a car accident in 1972: “The accident had filled him with anger and religious doubt. He wrote that he ‘felt God had played a horrible trick on him’.”
As for Putin, he did not have a religious upbringing. And religious nutters did not make careers in the KGB. So he would have had to ‘get religion’ at some point. There is no sign of him undergoing a personal transformation of that kind. He continued to pursue the same goals but in a new institutional context that made it expedient for him to give lip service to religion.
People who “get religion” in later life don’t tend to join the traditional established churches. Born-agains here, for instance, don’t become Church of England or Roman Catholic.
In Russia too, I would imagine that those with “sudden revelations” join minority sects … even Orthodox minority sects, rather than the Moscow Patriarchate.Boris (he needs to change that name to its Ukrainian equivalent, Barys or whatever it is) the Buffoon has just revealed what he thinks the “freedom” is that we are told the Ukrainian state is fighting for:
“In his speech to the Conservative spring conference in Blackpool, Johnson said it is the “instinct of the people of this country, like the people of Ukraine, to choose freedom”, with the Brexit vote a “famous recent example”.“
In their next phone call he needs to warn Zelensky not to apply to join the EU as that would be to lose its “freedom” to a nasty European super-state. Putin might well second that emotion.
But of course nobody takes seriously what he says any more than they do the Foreign Secretary, Liz la Gaffe, who can’t disguise her hope that the peace talks with Russia fail so that Ukraine can fight Russia to the last Ukrainian with NATO-supplied weapons.
This is why the West thinks China might move on Taiwan. The KMT isn’t in power any more.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Progressive_Party
I don’t think that Putin and trump are religious peoples, they use religious for political purposes. Biden is a religious person and he comes from an Irish catholic family
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