They do have a secret weapon and it’s called the Consumer Society or “The Society of the totally atomised individual” whose freedom is each and every individual’s unique buying power. This is every individual’s unique and indeed inalienable right “to be” free, happy, and satisfied. And all creeds, nations and religions shall become one, under this ideology that will “inform” and indeed direct them to the temple of the golden calf, where there’ll no longer be any sadness or joy, be just, and indeed democratic “happiness” for all. The consumer society says, “Hey don’t worry about those big questions anymore, they’ll just make your skin old and your hair grey and you’ll just be no fun to be around anymore! So just relax and chill out with a cool star bucks coffee after your exertions around the shopping mall”

So take it easy, relax and give Plato a break!

I’ll start from your second reason, because this way we will be able to understand better the answer to your first reason. In what grounds do you compare Turkey with Rome? The old Roman Empire, as you recall, included many nations and many religions, it was based in ancient Greek thinking, no matter in what ways understood and adopted it, it was based in admiration for Homer and Plato, and it was more after worldly law than after Faith. Turkish people is Islamic. Do you believe seriously that there is just a single chance for an Islamic people to become Christian? Turks had not one but a many-centuries-chance, from the moment they appeared in history and knew Byzantium.

For whole centuries they were listening about Christ, until they conquered a Byzantium exhausted by so many attacks of so many nations, and they lived together with the Patriarch for centuries - still not becoming Christians. Now they came to the point of having cleansed their territory completely, leaving empty of Greeks a place where Greeks were present and creating from the time of the first Ionian philosophers. They have destroyed the Hellenism of Asia Minor completely, and you talk about them listening to sermons of the Patriarch and becoming Christians? They don’t feel any kind of admiration for the Greek culture and they are not open to any degree to the message of the Gospel.

Even the single fact that a people believes for centuries in the fabricated pseudo-religious monstrous creation of Koran should be enough to let you know that Islam has closed ears, instead of expecting them to become Christians!

Thus we come to your first reason. The only way an Orthodox community, even as little as one or two thousand souls, can still be in Constantinople, is the entrance of Turkey into the European Union. Given that Islam as such has not and can not have any relationship with Western values as developed in the ancient Greco-Roman and then Christian history of the western peoples, do you believe that the Patriarchate in Constantinople would be of such a great benefit to Christianity, that in order to have this benefit we should even prepare a faceless islamo-christian non-entity instead of a real European Union?

What would this great benefit be? And a benefit to whom, since Europe will have been destroyed? Don’t you see what happens in your country, the US? Do you believe that a society without society, a common gathering around money, is a bright future for Europe?

Author: John Katrakis

There are two reasons for the Ecumenical Patriarchate to stay in Turkey: 1) to serve the Orthodox Christian community; 2) to be a witness of Christ to the residents of Turkey - from this day on. I am concerned that any motives based on preserving the past tradition and glory of Orthodoxy and Byzantium will end up being counterproductive and will sabotage the Church’s ability to carry out its two responsibilities defined above. I say this as a US native with Greek-born parents, my first language was Greek, I read my first book on the glories of Byzantium when I was 6 - and I am proud of this heritage. However, it’s taken me almost 50 years to realize that we need to focus on witnessing Christ in Turkey - as did the early Christians in the Roman Empire. We ought not be distracted by trying to preserve past ethno-religious glories - and I don’t think that God will allow this.

I understand your feelings, but you don’t offer any arguments at all. That “our life is in Eternity with God” doesn’t mean that the Patriarchate should stay at Constantinople!

I was myself very reluctant to accept the former Archbishop of the US Orthodox Church Iakovos’ view, that the Patriarchate should leave Constantinople. Loving Orthodoxy and Byzantium I wanted a tie to remain alive there even now, even a living symbol of the Orthodox peoples’ common past. None of these benefits can equal the Patriarch’s fight for the entrance of Turkey in the European Union. Let me disagree on what you say about the US as a probable Byzantium. Byzantium was not multicultural, and there is no civilization that can be multicultural. In Byzantium many races could live and many nations, even keeping their customs, but the state was openly Christian and public life in general was under the influence of Christianity. Christianity was not just one religion among others, neither a “personal matter”, it was dominating. Multiculturalism means the absense of any culture, which is happening in the US. Can the Patriarch support such a future for Europe, just to have the Patriarchate staying in Constantinople?

Author: Alice-Sofia

The Patriarch made the right decision to stay at Constantinople, although the Byzantine Empire now lives only in memory of its descendents. However, not by the power of men, by the Spirit of God our Church is built and the world still exists. 2nd, no political reasons should ever influence decisions of the Christ’s Church. 3rd, even if Turkey completes extermination of the Christian community, it will not be 1st time, yet our life is in the Eternity with God. So, the Patriarch is right from all the points of view appropiate for Greek Orthodox Christianity. Personally, I would be most happy to see the Ecumenical Patriarchate moved in the US - the only country left where the true spirit of the Byzantium with all its splendor and wisdom might be restored. I pray God to protect our beloved Patriarch and our Church. With the best wishes, Alice-Sofia.

Just imagine governments that (supposedly) fight terrorism, by organising expeditions and sending troops even without the consensus of their peoples, how blind they must be, failing to recognize that, if we create a ‘world’ without meaning no battle can have meaning.

Our civilization is a civilization of thinking and dialogue, which means that we need the best possible care for language. The geniuses that govern us are not able to understand even this. How intelligent they are is evident from other things too. They create wars to steal oil, and they manage instead to ruin their economy! Lack of consistency and an always increasing hypocrisy can not promote thinking and dialogue, because this is their enemy - our civilization is the greatest enemy of our governments. Therefore, the first they want to destroy, is language.

Maybe you try to say that to deserve the approval of the West, Africans must have achievements and not only ancestors. However, the problem is that they don’t have the ancestors they claim to have (let alone the achievements). But their want of the approval of the West by itself means something good must exist in the West.

On the other hand, perhaps you are not right when you say that the West does not remember the need of having achievements and not only ancestors. The West has achievements (according to its measures), if we agree that Rilke, Hoelderlin, Heidegger, Valery, Dickens, and so many others, can stand together with older western poets and philosophers.

Good or bad as it might seem to you, the West has a a creativity with roots in a tradition. On the African side or on the side of the “Macedonians” of Fyrom, I see only the creativity of a thief and opportunist, without values and without dignity. And if they had indeed the open-heart that you say they have, then their hypocrisy, their falsifications of history, the betrayal of their self and the hideous ways by which they try to become accepted in the West, brings them even more shame.