Shifts in Paradigms. An Orthodox Psychiatrist on Homosexuality

 

Dr. Lynne (Magdalene) Pappas

Dr. Lynne Pappas, in Orthodox baptism, Magdalene, is a highly respected psychiatrist, board certified in child, adolescent, and adult psychiatry, practicing in Butte county and the Chico area of northern California. She has been practicing psychiatric medicine for over twenty-two years. She is also the president of the parish council of the Church of St. Andrew the Fool-for-Christ in Redding, California, a parish of the Serbian Orthodox Church. Dr. Pappas has agreed to share her professional knowledge with us on one "evil of the day."


—The subject of our conversation today is something that has been troubling many Christians in recent years—the general rise in the acceptance of homosexuality as a norm in many historically Christian countries. Legislature in the U.S. and other countries has dictated that homosexuality is not a psychiatric illness; and although most studies have shown that homosexuality is not genetically inherited, homosexuals are increasingly being treated as a minority group, which requires the protection of human rights legislation and tolerance education. One concern is not only how this affects the Church or society in general, but also how it affects those individuals who are experiencing homosexual inclinations but do not want to consign themselves to a homosexual lifestyle, and are seeking help. As a practicing psychiatrist, you have undoubtedly seen this conflict. What do these people do if they are told that they need to be accepted, rather than healed? What can you tell us about this?

—First, I will speak to what you said in terms of the change in what we will call a paradigm. All of us look to markers in our environment and our world—and we are spiritually affected by them as well—of what is truth, what guides us in how to function in life, what is reality. So, we now have a situation where the world tells us that what was once held as abnormal, not of God, not a healthy lifestyle or choice of relationship, is now normal. We now have a shift in paradigm, the rules are all changed, and people are being told that the prior view was false and that we have a new reality. That reality then says, "Anything that I feel is good for me," whether it be men with men, men with boys, women with young girls, or people with animals (people don’t stop with one thing). Now they are saying that all of these things are just alternatives, and this diversity is "normal". Every individual has an inherent seed within him of the truth of God, and knows somewhere in his heart and soul that these things are wrong—because we do feel that. Yet they are being met with an external environmental world that says, "That which is guiding you inside is not right." It is a pressure that unsettles everything. Thus, people no longer have any boundaries, any anchor, or marker of what truth is. This is very important to remember in looking at this whole issue, because it has taken everything and turned it upside down, so that people do not know where to go.

—Living in California, an especially near San Francisco—the gay "Mecca", do you notice a trend that goes beyond acceptance to outright encouragement of homosexuality?

—Very much so. Furthermore, it is encouraged with an undercurrent of anger, which you can sense when you come into contact with this life and this world—there is actually a very powerful undercurrent, which is in fact the power of evil. There are many different reasons for this anger (and this anger is filled with pride), this power, this dominance, this exertion of an individual right to take care of oneself, and have something be whatever "I want it to be." It is a very powerful thing. So people, especially in California, are coming out and voting to have gay marriages legalized. This has already happened in some other states. But it is not that people are just standing back meekly, saying, "I want to be with my partner." It is actually a campaign, a fervency to force themselves and you to accept their ideology.

—How has this progressed from the gay individual's desire to not be discriminated against, or perhaps just not beaten up, to a planned, financed, aggressive program aimed at all aspects of society—the judiciary, the media, and even the educational system, all the way down to elementary school? From the psychiatric point of view, what is going on in their minds and their hearts that pressures them to try to forge a new society, if you will, in their image? Is it a simply a matter of pride? Of raising their own self-esteem by reforming the attitude of everyone around them?

—I don't know if I can answer that question for you fully. The people who come to me are not often so militant in their desire to change society. Some want that as well—almost, again, as a validation of their choices, a validation of how they have covered up their own wounds. Because, at the heart of this whole struggle is people's desire to be loved, to find a place where they feel that they are cared for, that they belong, are nurtured, accepted. There is a whole host of things that lead people to this place in their lives. So, the militant aspect of it is an extension of that undercurrent. When somebody is hurt or angry, he can have an initial reaction of being defensive, being meek, or beaten down; but then you often find at the other end of the spectrum that those emotions then continue to grow into rage. So, this militant rage is on this continuum of a rage that is present, but not all people exert it to that degree. When we are not living with God, truthfully and at peace, then there is rage, anger. Often that rage is very hidden, tucked away; our defenses are so good that it does not come out for other people to see. At other times that rage is unleashed, and it is not so well hidden—and that is when you find the militant aspect, when people are wanting to push their agendas to "get back", as I think, at God, not just at people. It is a way of lashing out at all the things inside that are so messed up. It is just an externalization, a representation, a symbol, which has nothing to do with what is really going on in their hearts—but they think it is.

—Your explanation makes sense, but this brings us back to the fact that until rather recently homosexuality was legally regarded as a problem requiring psychiatric treatment. Further back in time it was not viewed as a psychological problem, but it was considered a grave sin, even a crime, and still is in some parts of the world. People were punished for it, so that it would not spread out to the rest of society. All Christians considered it a sin and Orthodox Christians still do. In the U.S., the laws have changed, so that it is no longer viewed as a psychiatric illness, and people no longer "need psychiatric treatment" for homosexuality. Nevertheless, I think that some people do seek treatment for the problems underlying their homosexuality. In your experience, are people seeking psychiatric help for their underlying problems, or specifically for their homosexuality? Are healthy people who engage in homosexual behavior developing psychiatric problems?

—No one who engages in homosexual activity is psychologically healthy. It is, again, an action and a manifestation of a distorted perceptions of pain, feelings of rejection, abandonment, loss, and a desire to be free of our separation from God. It is one other manifestation of how we seek fulfillment in an aberrant way. It is never something that is being led by health of the soul, or heart, or person.

—In the media, we now see a trend of trying to show that homosexuals are mostly psychologically adequate people who have simply taken up this orientation (although as I have read, analytical statistics show otherwise). Therefore, they are perceived as adequate to, say, adopt a child, or lead Boy Scout troops. Of course, the assumption in the child adoption system is that only a mentally stable person should be allowed to adopt a child. If psychiatric practice is showing that homosexuals are not stable, how could they be allowed such control over vulnerable children?

—What you are saying presupposes that psychiatry and the systems have a real notion of what normalcy is. Outside of God, and we live in a godless society, no one really has a sense of what is normal, and so they make it up, they make it fit what they want it to be. That is why we have what we have. They have made a new definition of what normalcy is, and tomorrow they will make another one, based upon whatever urge they have at that point in time. And God is nowhere in the picture. It all comes back to that, and so we have redefined what a family is. We no longer look at what God created and said is a family, what God created and said is the "order of things". We have thrown Him away, because we don't need that, we don't even know that He exists, and we are determining our values according to what "feels" good. Then, the passions drive things—momentary passions. So, the momentary passions and lusts are now what defines normalcy.

—You have run up against this redefined normalcy first hand in the legal system. Can you tell us about this?

—Well, I had a patient who, let's say, struggled with his life of homosexual activity. He was very tormented, and came to see me, to engage in therapy. He was extremely depressed, and struggled with suicidal thoughts and attempts. He was encumbered by drug addiction, cocaine addiction, and he had engaged in perverse practices. You see, the homosexual lifestyle can be extremely perverse; it is perverse by definition. But the perversity can go on a continuum as does all evil; it can continue to get more and more severe. And so he had engaged in significant activities that, again, are quite demonic, in the sense of the torture, torment—the things that people do to one another. He was haunted by all of this. He had been molested as a young male by a male teacher and had never dealt with that trauma, and had accepted from his early years that this situation had occurred because of what he is. He accepted a belief that he would never have had that molestation, that it would never have occurred, if this was not his life. He accepted this external circumstance as an indicator that he was homosexual; because otherwise, he thought, why would a man engage in such practices with him? Well, from that point on, his development as a young boy was very distorted, very traumatized, and every time he would look around him he would find things that he would put into this growing paradigm about himself, things that he would pull in to support the fact that he was gay—things from the media, from other people, the ideology or the feeling that this was something that he was genetically born with. So, he began to incorporate that. How do we begin to incorporate delusion and lie? It just continues to feed, and it feeds. So, before long, by the time he had hit his late teens and early twenties, he had constructed an entire world as if he were a playwright, the world and everyone else were adding in pieces of his character formation, and now his character was being formed by all of this input. This is what happens with society, with the media, with the world—it forms us, and we accept pieces of it, if we have nothing else that forms us, if we do not have God, and there is no one to help us. If we have no sense of what is true and what is not.

So, when he came to me he was very traumatized, but his initial desire to look at his sexuality was not what he came for. He came to look at his depression. Well, with time, how can one look at one's depression without looking at what led up to his being depressed? He was looking at his life, his upbringing as a child, his relationships with his mother and father, the aspects of nurturance, non-nurturance, and his question of whether he ever fit in, was ever accepted or loved. It became clear over time that he was accepted and loved by this man. Here was someone who showed him incredible attention—physical attention, comments about him, etc. That then became his accepted way of life. All of this began to uncover for him, and he began to question his previous assumption that he was born gay. He then started looking at issues of his life, and chinks started happening in that armor, that paradigm. All of a sudden, pieces of light started coming through, and he was somewhat unsettled by that.

Well, I have never hidden my Orthodoxy during my practice; I never hid who I am and where I come from. You know, I had a professor at the child psychiatry department where I trained who once said to me, seeing that I wear a cross, "You need to take that off." I said, "Why is that?" He said, "Because you are supposed to be a blank slate for people as a psychiatrist, and you are influencing somebody by wearing that cross. Your cross influences their thinking, whereas they are supposed to come up with things on their own. You are being a paradigm." I looked at him and said, "Well, frankly I think that I am at least honest. At least my belief is on the outside, so that people know who I am in my paradigm. I could go to someone else, a Buddhist or a Hindu, and his or her paradigm is still going to come through in everything he or she says to me, but I won't know it. To me, that is deceptive. "

Thus, the patient could see that I wore a cross, and he began asking questions about God. Over the next couple of years he began moving to a place of not believing that he was born gay; he started working through his history, even became involved with a woman, and was in love with her. She became pregnant but terminated the pregnancy, and he was devastated. In his devastation, he had a relapse of his drug addiction and everything fell apart, and he blamed God—and me. So, ultimately, he sued me for what had become an unethical thing with the psychiatric association, because in essence, homosexuality is no longer considered pathological, and therefore my Christianity was cited as being an improper "imbalance of power". By having a cross around my neck, an icon on my wall, and a Bible on my desk, I was accused of unduly influencing this man, who—voluntarily—came to me. That he came voluntarily and stayed for three years was irrelevant to them. It was the mere fact that God was present, and that I had "forced" him to listen to this.

—This is a case in point. Obviously, he sued you because he was not balanced, but the state did not take that into consideration?

—Because the state says that he is. Because the laws and what has been determined as normalcy by the world say he is "okay".

—Was he successful in this lawsuit?

—I settled the lawsuit. We went as far as a deposition, and I settled the lawsuit without going to trial.

—So, to a certain extent, it could be said that he "won" because he received a settlement. Now, could this have a cooling effect upon other psychiatrists who are of the mind that their patient's homosexuality is part of the whole problem that is making them depressed?


—I will say to you that homosexuality is a causative factor in depression. There is not a "maybe." It is not the only thing, but unequivocally, it is an issue. Now, will you find other psychiatrists that are willing to say that? Maybe a few. But again, you are going to find that, even among Christians—and I am speaking of the denominational, versus the Orthodox world —you'll see it is as with heresy in Christianity: before long, anything is acceptable. So, you will find many people who consider it just fine, and they will not make a statement, as I have.


—Where does that leave people who really need healing—healing of their homosexuality? Does that mean that they are more and more just out of luck, with no one to go to? Will they find that there are fewer and fewer psychiatrists willing to talk about it?

—Not necessarily. If a person comes to a psychiatrist or psychologist ready to make that statement, they will find someone to help them. I think that the question you are posing is: what about all the people who don't realize that it is a major part of their struggle, their pain, their continued disease? It is interesting that when we talk of disease, we think automatically of a pathogen or bug growing in us, or an infection caused by bacteria or virus, as opposed to something that is caused by an infection of the soul. That is what this is. As with so many things in our society today, it is getting harder and harder for people to see what the infection is, because we have "normalized" so much, in terms of the parts of our soul that are becoming devoured by sin that we have now declared "normal."

—Like declaring, on the physical level, that cancer is normal?

—Absolutely. It is eating you away inside, and you keep covering things up, and acting as if that is how it should be. This is how it is with a life of homosexuality. You think, on the surface, that you are okay, you are happy, but in reality, inside, you are not. You keep playing at it, and playing at it. I know people that have been in homosexual relationships for fifty years, and they would say to me, "See, this is perfectly fine." I would say back, "It is wonderful that you have a caring for one another, but you are still not able to see that which is separating you from God." And that is the crux of it. They are willing to settle for that momentary feeling of comfort by holding on to someone in the world, because they don't know that what they are really looking for is God.

I suppose I keep coming back to that, because you can't examine this problem outside of God. And in the world today, where you don't examine it with God, it is going to be what it is. So if people who are struggling don't know that they are missing God, then they are not going to arrive at seeing that this is what it is all about.

—One holy father said that every human being possesses an unquenchable thirst for God, but it is a satisfying thirst, even in its unquenchability. If people are not seeking God, that thirst is not being filled, and so they try to satisfy it through insatiable passions.

—That is what happened with this young man. I have tried to help other people with whom I have worked to come to an understanding that this thirst that they have is really a thirst for God. They didn't know it because they grew up without God in their lives. They were not raised in a Church, or with any understanding of God, and so all they understood is that they had an unquenchable desire and thirst for something, and the only markers that the world has around us are the passions. There is no other explanation for this longing offered; thus, only when you begin to say that that is what it is, that God is what they really want does a window open, and they can start seeing that God is what they crave. That is why people in these fifty-year relationships will, on the surface, defend to the hilt their belief that everything is just fine. But if you look in their hearts, you will see their emptiness, and how it all falls short. It is the falling short of what they are looking for that is so evident to me in my work with these people. Because it is not of God.

—So, the rest of the world, through the media, is also being convinced that these people are all just fine.

—Again, they are convincing themselves. We lie to ourselves, over and over again, and we don't know how to listen to that voice in our heart. That voice in our heart talks, but people are used to drowning it out.

—This tragedy on an individual level is unfortunately developing into a problem that affects whole Churches, denominations—the idea that you can have a pastor, even a bishop, ministering to families, who is openly gay. Of course, the issue is still clear in the Orthodox Church. But what would you say to people who are Orthodox, but suffer from this weakness? Should the Church be tough on these people? Should they be summarily brought out into the open? Or should they be dealt with quietly, individually? How can we avoid the catastrophe that the Catholic Church is now experiencing?

—I do not want to even pretend to think that I know how things should be done, but I would hope that it be dealt with on an individual basis. My prayer for all people is that in the Church—the True Chruch—we would have people bold enough to come alongside brothers and sisters who are struggling in sin, in some way, with a desire to help them see their failing. Again, as with anything to which we are blind, we are defensive, we are prideful, we are very fallen, and we don’t want to see that which is painful for us to see. But how else can you deal with this but by individually coming alongside someone in love, and having ways to minister to people, to help them gain sight? That is what this is about. We have the fathers, we have the Word, we have so many things that are there, what God gave us as our truth, and we have love. That is what we have to give people in order to open a door for them to begin to see what wounded them, and what their hearts have done to try to take care of themselves. Because that is what this is: a method of trying to take care of our own heart when we have been so hurt—when we felt abandoned, rejected, when we felt that God is not there for us, that we have to do something on our own to make it okay.

—Backtracking a bit, could a large portion of homosexuals reveal an incident in their past similar to the one experienced by the patient you described? Could this be called an epidemic, spread by people who need to be stopped? In other words, were former societies justified in putting these people in prison?

—No. (Unless, of course, they do commit a sexual crime such as rape or child molestation.) It is a reflection of how we as human beings deal with things that frighten us, with things that we don't understand, and that make us uncomfortable and threaten us. We are filled with rage, we become dominant, powerful, and hurtful, and try to destroy them. In essence, our hearts are just as sinful, but it is coming out in a different venue.

People come to a life of homosexuality, or experiences of homosexuality, from different causes. There are people who have had molestations, and then began to be afraid of the opposite sex, but still want nurturance. You have other people who as children were not nurtured, who were not fed, cared for, loved, or stroked, and they seek nurturance. It gets misplaced. They start looking for a mother, as are many women living a lesbian life, or a father, in the case of male homosexuals, and it all becomes so distorted. They don't see it on the surface, but what is driving them is a desire to connect, and not necessarily in a sexual or erotic way—but that is the only way our fallen world knows how to do it. Everything is sexualized. So people automatically jump from a heart that needs to be nurtured and stroked to something erotic, because that is where the world has told them to go. Yet, everyone who has struggled with this desire to be loved in a homosexual way is searching for the purity that I am talking about. It does not have to be the outcome of trauma or abuse—they can just start exhibiting this activity as children. Does that mean they should be locked away? No. Should they be criminalized? No. They should be offered an understanding of love, and know what is in side of us, what they are searching for.

—Have you known people who were able to work their way through this struggle by the Sacrament of confession?

—Yes.

You work around, you work underneath, you work on what is occurring with them, because the defenses are so great on the surface.

—So, this is not a job for just anyone who comes along.

—No. But I think that there are people who are able to do this kind of work, and understand how to approach these things, unlike the medieval world where you just put them all in prison. There are people who are designed, trained, or brought up by God to find a way into someone's heart, around their defenses.

—Of course, we know that this has always existed, and we find mention of it even in patristic literature. We also all have our free will.

—If I want my child to go do something he does not want to do, I will not necessarily say, "I want you to go do this," but will phrase it and work with him in a way that will not excite his defenses, which are geared to opposition. Rather than saying, "go make your bed," I will try to say something to engage another part of his heart, so that he will want to do it himself. Then he will go make his bed, and we don't have a war. This is knowing the heart of my child, and it is knowing the heart of our brothers and sisters. It is coming to someone in love, realizing that a matter of the heart is at stake. We ask, how does God direct us to deal with that person?

—And of course, we pray for them.

—Absolutely. That is where we must always begin.

Nun Cornelia (Rees) spoke with Dr. Lynne Pappas

Abolition of Man moreover (C.S. Lewis p. III)...

The truth finally becomes apparent that neither in any operation with factual propositions nor in any appeal to instinct can the Innovator find the basis for a system of values. None of the principles he requires are to be found there: but they are all to be found somewhere else. 'All within the four seas are his brothers' (xii. 5) says Confucius of the Chün-tzu, the cuor gentil or gentleman. Humani nihil a me alienum puto says the Stoic. 'Do as you would be done by,' says Jesus. 'Humanity is to be preserved,' says Locke.⁴ All the practical principles behind the Innovator's case for posterity, or society, or the species, are there from time immemorial in the Tao. But they are nowhere else. Unless you accept these without question as being to the world of action what axioms are to the world of theory, you can have no practical principles whatever. You cannot reach them as conclusions: they are premisses. You may, since they can give no 'reason' for themselves of a kind to silence Gaius and Titius, regard them as sentiments: but then you must give up contrasting 'real' or 'rational' value with sentimental value. All value will be sentimental; and you must confess (on pain of abandoning every value) that all sentiment is not 'merely' subjective. You may, on the other hand, regard them as rational—nay as rationality itself—as things so obviously reasonable that they neither demand nor admit proof. But then you must allow that Reason can be practical, that an ought must not be dismissed because it cannot produce some is as its credential. If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. Similarly if nothing is obligatory for its own sake, nothing is obligatory at all.

To some it will appear that I have merely restored under another name what they always meant by basic or fundamental instinct. But much more than a choice of words is involved. The Innovator attacks traditional values (the Tao) in defence of what he at first supposes to be (in some special sense) 'rational' or 'biological' values. But as we have seen, all the values which he uses in attacking the Tao, and even claims to be substituting for it, are themselves derived from the Tao. If he had really started from scratch, from right outside the human tradition of value, no jugglery could have advanced him an inch towards the conception that a man should die for the community or work for posterity. If the Tao falls, all his own conceptions of value fall with it. Not one of them can claim any authority other than that of the Tao. Only by such shreds of the Tao as he has inherited is he enabled even to attack it. The question therefore arises what title he has to select bits of it for acceptance and to reject others. For if the bits he rejects have no authority, neither have those he retains: if what he retains is valid, what he rejects is equally valid too.

The Innovator, for example, rates high the claims of posterity. He cannot get any valid claim for posterity out of instinct or (in the modern sense) reason. He is really deriving our duty to posterity from the Tao; our duty to do good to all men is an axiom of Practical Reason, and our duty to do good to our descendants is a clear deduction from it. But then, in every form of the Tao which has come down to us, side by side with the duty to children and descendants lies the duty to parents and ancestors. By what right do we reject one and accept the other? Again, the Innovator may place economic value first. To get people fed and clothed is the great end, and in pursuit of its scruples about justice and good faith may be set aside. The Tao of course agrees with him about the importance of getting the people fed and clothed. Unless the Innovator were himself using the Tao he could never have learned of such a duty. But side by side with it in the Tao lie those duties of justice and good faith which he is ready to debunk. What is his warrant? He may be a Jingoist, a Racialist, an extreme nationalist, who maintains that the advancement of his own people is the object to which all else ought to yield. But no kind of factual observation and no appeal to instinct will give him a ground for this option. Once more, he is in fact deriving it from the Tao: a duty to our own kin, because they are our own kin, is a part of traditional morality. But side by side with it in the Tao, and limiting it, lie the inflexible demands of justice, and the rule that, in the long run, all men are our brothers. Whence comes the Innovator's authority to pick and choose?

Since I can see no answer to these questions, I draw the following conclusions. This thing which I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgements. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgement of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or (as they now call them) 'ideologies', all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they possess. If my duty to my parents is a superstition, then so is my duty to posterity. If justice is a superstition, then so is my duty to my country or my race. If the pursuit of scientific knowledge is a real value, then so is conjugal fidelity. The rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they had destroyed themselves. The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of imagining a new primary colour, or, indeed, of creating a new sun and a new sky for it to move in.

More of the Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis - instincts?

But why ought we to obey Instinct? Is there another instinct of a higher order directing us to do so, and a third of a still higher order directing us to obey it?—an infinite regress of instincts? This is presumably impossible, but nothing else will serve. From the statement about psychological fact 'I have an impulse to do so and so' we cannot by any ingenuity derive the practical principle 'I ought to obey this impulse'. Even if it were true that men had a spontaneous, unreflective impulse to sacrifice their own lives for the preservation of their fellows, it remains a quite separate question whether this is an impulse they should control or one they should indulge. For even the Innovator admits that many impulses (those which conflict with the preservation of the species) have to be controlled. And this admission surely introduces us to a yet more fundamental difficulty.

Telling us to obey Instinct is like telling us to obey 'people'. People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war. If it is held that the instinct for preserving the species should always be obeyed at the expense of other instincts, whence do we derive this rule of precedence? To listen to that instinct speaking in its own cause and deciding it in its own favour would be rather simple-minded. Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of all the rest. By the very act of listening to one rather than to others we have already prejudged the case. If we did not bring to the examination of our instincts a knowledge of their comparative dignity we could never learn it from them. And that knowledge cannot itself be instinctive: the judge cannot be one of the parties judged; or, if he is, the decision is worthless and there is no ground for placing the preservation of the species above self-preservation or sexual appetite.

The idea that, without appealing to any court higher than the instincts themselves, we can yet find grounds for preferring one instinct above its fellows dies very hard. We grasp at useless words: we call it the 'basic', or 'fundamental', or 'primal', or 'deepest' instinct. It is of no avail. Either these words conceal a value judgement passed upon the instinct and therefore not derivable from it, or else they merely record its felt intensity, the frequency of its operation and its wide distribution. If the former, the whole attempt to base value upon instinct has been abandoned: if the latter, these observations about the quantitative aspects of a psychological event lead to no practical conclusion. It is the old dilemma. Either the premisses already concealed an imperative or the conclusion remains merely in the indicative.³

The Ring of Power

Another interesting argument is Stratford Caldecott's theological view on the Ring and what it represents. "The Ring of Power exemplifies the dark magic of the corrupted will, the assertion of self in disobedience to God. It appears to give freedom, but its true function is to enslave the wearer to the Fallen Angel. It corrodes the human will of the wearer, rendering him increasingly “thin” and unreal; indeed, its gift of invisibility symbolizes this ability to destroy all natural human relationships and identity. You could say the Ring is sin itself: tempting and seemingly harmless to begin with, increasingly hard to give up and corrupting in the long run"

Caldecott, Stratford (January/February 2002). "The Lord & Lady of the Rings". Touchstone Magazine. http://touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=15-01-051-f. Retrieved 27 March 2011.

Evil is nothing, without substance, not substantive...

"The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. I don't think it gave life to Orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them ..."
(The Return of the King, p. 190) John Roland Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973)

Abolition of Man...

C.S. Lewis writes that if the standard of law or the way, the dao, is destroyed or on trial, then the only standard that will survive is pleasure.  A group of guardians will decide what is good or bad for man, not on any standard above them that they also must follow, but on pleasure alone. We also will not be able to place value judgements like, "Bad", or "corrupt", etc upon them as these are value judgements and cannot be applied since there is not objective law, way, dao, or truth that will define these terms. It will simply be "Thus I will, thus I command... sic volo sic jubeo. The law of God is on trial and something else has to take its place. And that something else is the new standard imposed by those who feel it is best for us. Now presently, we see the debates about morality as a popular belief debate, vote of the masses. So then what standard dictates what is good besides popular beliefs or appeal to the masses? Moral relativism? Decide what is good from a person to person perspective: your truth is not my truth, and my truth is not your truth. Have we all become little gods without earning that right? Judges of right or wrong within ourselves and for ourselves? Was Eden the attempt for men to become god-like with proper striving and delay of self-gratification? If man had attained Christ-like virtue and become god-like, then would God have shown the knowledge of good and evil to them and they, by grace and virtue, would have rejected it as nothing? C.S. Lewis says that traditions were passed down to teachers who also followed those traditions and taught them not as above the traditions but below them. So they kept these standards and taught them as well. Now when the traditions are on trial, what is the source of objective truth to judge our acts? What then replaces these things? It can only be man and his pleasure principle. What is good for one man may not be good for another. The pleasures of some are not the pleasures of others. Who will decide? Since we cannot judge one pleasure over another as that is a "value" judgment and we have passed that stage, we must then be motivated by the strength of the pleasure or passion; its emotional content or weight will decide. The impulse and its persistent nature must rule.

Elder Paisios: On Darwinian and Theistic Evolution

By Elder Paisios the Athonite

The nonsense we hear in schools these days about Darwin's theory and the rest, even the teachers themselves do not believe what they are teaching. Instead they proceed because they want to pollute the minds of our youth and take them away from the Church.

This is what someone told me: "Let's say the soil contained various substances and micro-organisms, and God took these and created man..."

"You mean," I replied, "that if those elements did not exist in the soil, God would not have been able to create man? It would have been really difficult for Him?"

"Well, let's say," he continued, "that He took some things from the ape and perfected them. Couldn't that be how it happened?"

"Are you trying to say," I answered, "that God cannot create a perfect creature, that he cannot create a human being, even after dedicating a whole day to it? What should He have done? Go get spare parts? Why don't you read the prophecy of Job [1] from the Scripture readings of Holy Thursday? Science does not accept all the claims about our kinship with apes. How long has it been since man went to the moon? In all these years, have apes evolved enough to build a bicycle or at least a skateboard? Have you ever seen an ape on a skateboard? Of course you can teach him to do that, but that's not the same thing."

But the man would not give up. He would insist, "Let's assume this," or "let's say that...."

"Well, let's just say that you will not assume a thing," I finally told him. "This way you'll find the certainty you want."

The theory of evolution was being taught by a professor I knew at the University. Once, I said to him: "In time and with proper care a green bean plant will become a better green bean plant, the eggplant a better eggplant. If you feed and take care of an ape, he will become a better ape, but he will not turn into a human being."

And then there's this thing to think about. Christ was born of a human being, the Panagia. Are we to believe that His ancestors were apes? What blasphemy! And those who support this theory don't realize that they are blaspheming. They throw a stone and do not check to see how many heads they have cracked. All you will hear from them is: "Mine went further than the other fellow's." That's what they are all about these days; they marvel at who will throw a stone the farthest. But they care nothing about those who are passing by and the many heads their stones will crack.

Q: Elder, some people think these theories will help bring Marxists to the Church.

A: Well, perhaps a few Marxists might come to the Church at first. But then they will want to organize as a party and start giving dictates to others: "Now you must go to church; now you may not. Now do this, now do that." They will have rules for everything. And in the end, they will start telling people: "Who told you that there is a God? There is no God! The priests are all making it up to deceive you." This is what will happen; the Marxists will use these good willing folks to achieve their goal. Marxists with a good will and disposition will come back to the Church, repent, and go to confession. But those who have no good disposition, they will never change.

1. Job 38:14 - "Or perhaps it was you who took dust from the earth, formed clay, made it into a living being with a mouth and the ability to speak, and placed him on earth."