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No Other God Besides Me

 

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The first commandment the Lord gave to Moses is to have no other gods besides Him. But as the article "Perun, Slavic God of the Sky and Universe" explains, the slavic god Perun is for many Russians "the supreme god, the god of thunder and lightning, who owned the sky and acted as the patron saint of ruling army units. He is one of the few Slavic gods for which evidence exists at least as long ago as the 6th century CE."

Both ancient and many modern Russians believe that Perun is "god" ("bog" in Russian) or the top "dog" spelled backward, equivalent to the Greek Zeus or the Norse Thor gods of war. His consort is said to be Mokosh, goddess of the sun. "As the liberator of atmospheric water... he was worshipped as a god of agriculture, and bulls and a few humans were sacrificed to him."

Not a few Russians still worship and emulate this pagan warrior god Perun. When we lived in Mari El, one of the republics of central Russia, a close friend told us how thousands of Russians gather yearly to reinact pagan battles that include the god Perun. Newspapers are full of ads about non-Christian beliefs and the occult. Even some Orthodox churches in Moscow had booklets about paganism on their literature racks. When seeing this, I realized how deeply entrenched warlike paganism is in the Russian psyche. Mari El, by the way, is the only government in modern Europe that has paganism as its official state religion.

The 2018 article "Russian Soldiers, Athletes Are Turning to Paganism, Top Church Leader Says" tells of a growing trend of soldiers turning to paganism. It also mentions Mari El where we lived. When we moved to its capital city Ioshkar-Ola ("red city") in 2016, I took a walk to explore the downtown area and saw a little souvenir shop. As I entered, I experienced an extremely creepy feeling of evil and saw a pagan idol on display, so I immediately left the shop.

A common feature of both Mari El and the Udmurt republics where we lived is a "dual belief" system: people will baptize their children, marry them off and bury them in the Orthodox Church, while at the same time in their daily lives practicing paganism. Another article, "More Russian than Orthodox Christianity: Russian Paganism as Nationalist Politics," explains this phenomenon:

"The collapse of the communist system in Eastern Europe enabled the few small pagan movements in the region to surface in the public sphere. At the beginning of the 1990s, they gained momentum in virtually all ex-socialist countries. The majority of these groups subscribed to nationalist politics, but naturally the nature of this nationalism varies between countries. Whereas in Central and Eastern Europe native paganism is often seen as an inherently anti-Soviet and anti-Communist force, Russian pagans' relationship with their past is more complex. Despite this, pagans from Slavic countries have cooperated, especially in a yearly assembly, Veche, in advocating a pan-Slavic nationalist ideology." (emphases mine)

So you can see the connection between a rebirth of paganism in Russia and the trend toward an aggressive form of pan-Slavic nationalism. The article also includes a link the free PDF of the 297-page book The Geopolitics of Faith in the Twenty-First Century (Creative Commons license).

The Moscow Times recently published "How Russia's FSB Embraced Religion in the Face of a Baffling War" that details how the FSB (formerly the KGB) that earlier enforced atheism is now using the Russian Orthodox Church to support Putin's "special military operation" – a euphemism for his invasion and crimes against humanity in Ukraine. It cites a Russian Orthodox priest, Fr. Andrei Tkachev, who stated: "it is much better to wipe out some equipment rather than 40,000 alongside it. We are waging war according to Christian principles because we are destroying transformers, not people who have an immortal soul." But Russia is doing both: destroying tens of thousands of people as well as transformers.

A Christian friend in Russia once told me – "There's a big difference between Russian Orthodoxy and Orthodox Christianity." But to be fair, I must add that we have known many Orthodox people in Russia who are deeply Christian, although the "dual belief" system is deeply engrained in Russian mentality. Thus it pains me greatly to watch and read the news about Russia's aggression and genocidal acts in Ukraine.

Fr. Gregory Jensen writes in "Russian War Crimes and Orthodox Moral Education" –

"Accusing the Russian military of committing crimes against humanity in Ukraine is not the same as accusing all Russians of war crimes. Much less is it to accuse individual Russians. At the same time, concerns about not giving offense to Russian[s] or of being misunderstood by those outside the Church should not prevent us from making these allegations when the evidence warrants:

Evidence continues to mount of Russian war crimes and crimes against humanity, including but not limited to:

  * Massacres in occupied Bucha and Izyum.

  * Deliberate air strikes against civilians, including apartment blocks and clearly marked shelters.

  * The deportation of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians to Russia, including the abduction of thousands of Ukrainian children from Russian-occupied territory.

  * An ongoing effort to erase Ukrainian culture and cultural heritage from Russian-occupied territory.

These atrocities shouldn't come as a surprise given Moscow's horrific track record in Syria and elsewhere, but they nonetheless remain shocking and appalling in both scope and scale. No wonder high-level U.S. government officials ... have publicly and formally accused the Kremlin of committing crimes against humanity – crimes for which Putin and his cronies must be held accountable, unlike the pass Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria has received.

I've spoken to many Orthodox Christians – clergy and laity – whose thinking about Russia's Invasion of Ukraine is confused. This confusion, I would ask you to consider, is symptomatic of the poverty of moral education both in our schools and especially in the Church. Many Orthodox Christians – like many American Christians – have never been exposed to the Church's moral tradition beyond a rather bare list of 'do's and don't's.'"

The disinformation campaign by Russia's government and church is designed to sow doubt and confusion in the West by claiming that the new Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) is uncanonical because Ecumenical Patriarch has no right to grant it autonomy. Yet it is the Moscow Patriarch who has no right to grant autonomy to the old Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC-MP) or to the Orthodox Church of America. This is the old "divide and conquer" disinformation warfare technique, projecting one's own errors onto others. We must pray for a deep repentance and restoration of true Christianity in Russia!

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BROKEN CISTERNS CAN'T HOLD WATER

 

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"Has a nation changed its gods, which yet are no gods? But my people have changed their glory for that which does not profit. Be astonished, you heavens, at this, and be horribly afraid, be very desolate, says the Lord. For my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the spring of living waters, and hewed out for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water" (Jeremiah 2:11-13).

Imagine yourself to be like the person in this photo: after "having fun" – several "partners": never settling down, getting married, buying a home, and having a family. Now you're 70 – no spouse, no kids, no grandkids, no property, still working. You thought all that was too much bother. Now it's hell on earth, returning to your rented apartment exhausted and nobody greets you, nobody calls you, nobody's a close friend. Fun?

Click on the above photo, and you'll see an article on demographic decline in The Atlantic. It lists several reasons including Covid-19 deaths and it tacitly approves of illegal immigration, but the most important reason it lists is this:

"Finally, yes, Americans are having fewer babies – like basically every other rich country in the world. Since 2011, annual births have declined by 400,000. Two years ago, I wrote that “the future of the city is childless,” and the pandemic seems to have accelerated that future. Just look at Los Angeles: L.A. County recorded 153,000 live births in 2001 but fewer than 100,000 in 2021. At this rate, sometime around 2030, L.A. births will have declined by 50 percent in the 21st century."

What's going on? Pursuing pleasure and possessions has the direct result of decreasing the population: luxury and licentiousness lower the birth rate. The morals in much of the world have been turned upside-down: "Archbishop of Canterbury Promises LGBT Activists to 'Root Out' Certain People From the Church of England." Who are those "certain people"? Members of the Anglican General Synod who oppose same-sex marriage, and Anglican Archbishop of Uganda, Stephen Kaziimba, who wrote "To those who are recruiting children into homosexuality, I want to sound a very strong warning to you. These are not my words, but the words of Jesus: 'If anyone causes one of these little ones…to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.'"

The homosexual practices of Roman Catholic priests and resulting charges of sexual abuse of minors has been so broadly reported over the years that I need not quote more articles. But many young Protestants have also suffered from this type of abuse: "1 in 10 Young Protestants Have Left a Church Over Abuse." The LGBTQ movement is even attempting to make inroads among Eastern Orthodox churches but it is being strongly resisted: "Sexuality and Gender: Response to "Orthodoxy in Dialogue" Open Letter."

If the birth rate stays below 1.6 babies per woman, that society will collapse within just a few generations. In the last decade, the birth rate in the U.S. has fallen to 1.5 babies per woman: see the second chart in "The Mystery of the Declining U.S. Birth Rate," but that article can't seem to explain why this is happening. I believe the main reason that we are witnessing this demographic disaster is explained above: young people are being indoctrinated in schools and in the media to reject traditional morality and instead to march in the LGBTQ parade.

We desperately need to pray for the younger generation and convince them that they will come face-to-face with the reality of demographic collapse – nobody left to take care of them when they grow old – unless they reject this indoctrination and return to Christ, the Living Word of God.

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