>>108847148>>108855839> Moral teachings haven’t changedThe claim that Christian morality is “unchanged” relies on equivocation: keeping labels fixed while radically altering content, scope, enforcement, and justification. Even the most Christofascist Orthodox currents are not inhabiting the same moral world as earlier Christians.
“Christianity never condemned slavery, therefore morality hasn’t changed” ignores how slavery was morally understood. Slavery was ontologically normalized. Masters had near-total authority. Beatings, sexual coercion, hereditary bondage, all morally unproblematic, sometimes even encouraged. Saints owned slaves without scandal.
Today, even in the most Christofascistic Orthodox circles, slavery is framed as a historical tragedy. Saints who owned slaves get morally laundered with excuses (“that was the times”). No serious Orthodox authority argues slavery should be reinstated as a positive good. If morality were truly unchanged, slavery would still be openly defended as good and proper. It isn’t.
Same with women. Historically it wasn’t just “different roles”. Women were seen as morally weaker, more prone to sin, ontologically subordinate, legitimate property of fathers or husbands, barred from education, authority, and autonomy.
Modern orthodoxy, by contrast, insists men and women are equal in dignity and spirit, reframes subordination as “complementarity”, and retreats from explicit claims of inferiority.
And you’re ignoring tons of other shifts too:
human rights, individual conscience, political legitimacy, freedom of belief, childhood and consent, mental illness, disability, war ethics, collective punishment, ethnic violence, etc.
If Christian morality were truly unchanged, early Christians would recognize modern Orthodoxy as faithful, and modern Orthodox believers would accept early Christian practices without flinching. No apologetics would be needed. Instead we get selective memory, strategic reinterpretation, retroactive moral laundering, and constant denial that adaptation occurred.
> Convergence proves an external absoluteConvergence proves institutional discipline, not metaphysical objectivity.
When you have centralized authority enforcing norms, rewarding conformity, punishing deviation, and training its members intensively, convergence is exactly what you’d expect, even if the object is fictional. Convergence is not evidence of transcendence.
> Self-denial disproves self-worshipThe idea that Christianity’s emphasis on self-denial disproves projection completely misunderstands both psychology and power.
A doctrine that aggressively suppresses the self is exactly what you’d expect from a man-made system designed to enforce hierarchy, obedience, and authority.
Across cultures, ideologies that require rigid social order reliably promote submission over autonomy, obedience over moral reasoning, self-sacrifice over self-determination, and guilt as a regulatory tool. These aren’t signs of divine origin; they’re predictable social technologies. The Christianity of the Orthodox Church fits this pattern perfectly.
A belief system doesn’t need to inflate the ego to be projective. In fact, projecting an idealized authority above oneself and demanding submission to it is one of the most common forms of projection.
Projection doesn’t require self-affirmation, only that:
* Human values, fears, and ideals are externalized
* That externalized construct is treated as absolute
* The construct is then used to discipline oneself and others
In Christianity, human moral intuitions become “God’s will”. Human power hierarchies become “divine order”. Human authority figures become “representatives of God”. Self-denial protects the projection by stopping believers from noticing that the standards imposed on them come from human institutions and traditions.
If God were really as believers claim, self-denial wouldn’t be necessary. If God were omnipresent, omnipotent, self-evident, directly accessible, and morally absolute, there’d be no need to break the will, suppress doubt, stigmatize autonomy, or equate disagreement with pride or demonic influence.
Theological language like kenosis, mortification, and submission gets framed as spiritual growth, but functionally it trains people to distrust their own reasoning, transfers moral authority to clergy and tradition, makes resistance feel sinful instead of rational, and turns power imbalance into virtue.
So when Christians say “We deny ourselves, therefore God isn’t us”, they miss the obvious reply: A system that demands self-erasure is exactly what humans create when they want power to appear external, unquestionable, and eternal.
Self-denial doesn’t prove divine origin. It proves how effectively human authority has been externalized. And if God truly existed as an absolute, self-authenticating reality, none of this machinery would be needed.
