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Author Topic:   Presuppositionalism
AlexCaledin
Member (Idle past 412 days)
Posts: 64
From: Samara, Russia
Joined: 10-22-2016


(1)
Message 124 of 142 (826482)
01-02-2018 2:57 PM


- just found an extremely valuable text for Believers (not for Atheists):
____________
One of Elder Paisios’ spiritual sons recalls, "Elder Paisios always urged us to think positively. Our positive thinking, however, should not be our ultimate aim; eventually our soul must be cleansed from our positive thoughts as well, and be left bare, having as its sole vestment Divine Grace granted to us through Holy Baptism. "This is our aim,’ he used to say, ‘to totally submit our mind to the Grace of God. The only thing Christ is asking from us is our humility. The rest is taken care of by His Grace.
In the beginning, we should willingly try to develop positive thoughts, which will gradually lead us to the perfect good, God, to Whom belongs all glory, honor and worship. On the contrary, to us belongs only the humility of our conceited attitude".
Elder Paisios’ teachings on thoughts and inner watchfulness, drawn from his own profound experience in the spiritual life, are particularly crucial for us who have been formed by modern Western culture. Because he spent so much time listening to people (both monastic and lay) and helping them with their problems, Elder Paisios became acutely aware of the various spiritual diseases afflicting modern Western man. Above all, he recognized and sought to treat the most prevalent disease: rationalism. Although the modern rationalist worldview was born in Western Europe during the Enlightenment era, it has progressively been inundating the entire world, including Orthodox lands such as Greece. Therefore, when Elder Paisios speaks to the spiritual malady of rationalism in contemporary Greece, he is also speaking to our spiritual malady in America and the West.
Ultimately, the malady of modern rationalism comes down to one essential ingredient: trusting the conclusions of one’s logical mind. We of the modern West have been raised with an underlying assumption, summed up in the well-known phrase of Rene Descartes at the beginning of the Enlightenment era: "I think, therefore I am." The worldview of modern rationalism, having lost an awareness of the immortal soul in man, leads us to believe that our thoughts are who we are, and, conversely, that we are the sum total of our thoughts. Therefore, we automatically feel that we have to trust our thoughts, to take a stand for them, to defend them as we would our own flesh and blood.
This is the essential fallacy of the modern worldview. It is precisely by placing absolute trust in the formulations of the fallen human mind rather than in divine revelation that modern Western man has come to water down or abandon his once-cherished Christian Faith. We Orthodox Christians living in the West must act against this influence by refusing to accord outright trust to our thoughts.
Elder Paisios teaches: "The devil does not hunt after those who are lost; he hunts after those who are aware, those who are close to God. He takes from them trust in God and begins to afflict them with self-assurance, logic, thinking, criticism. Therefore we should not trust our logical minds. Never believe your thoughts.
Live simply and without thinking too much, like a child with his father. Faith without too much thinking works wonders. The logical mind hinders the Grace of God and miracles. Practice patience without judging with the logical mind."
Elsewhere Elder Paisius counseled: "We ought always to be careful and be in constant hesitation about whether things are really as we think. For when someone is constantly occupied with his thoughts and trusts in them, the devil will manage things in such a way that he will make the man evil, even if by nature he was good".
____________
https://www.fatheralexander.org/...r_paisios_mount_athos.htm
- we are rather God's thoughts, not ours! Our thoughts are our childish good/evil inventions, to try playing with our model mind, to judge the soul and "debug" the chosen...
Edited by AlexCaledin, : added 8 words in the end

Replies to this message:
 Message 125 by jar, posted 01-02-2018 3:05 PM AlexCaledin has replied
 Message 126 by Tangle, posted 01-02-2018 3:08 PM AlexCaledin has not replied
 Message 131 by RAZD, posted 01-03-2018 9:01 AM AlexCaledin has not replied

  
AlexCaledin
Member (Idle past 412 days)
Posts: 64
From: Samara, Russia
Joined: 10-22-2016


Message 127 of 142 (826487)
01-02-2018 3:36 PM
Reply to: Message 125 by jar
01-02-2018 3:05 PM


my apologies))))

This message is a reply to:
 Message 125 by jar, posted 01-02-2018 3:05 PM jar has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 128 by Phat, posted 01-02-2018 4:28 PM AlexCaledin has not replied

  
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