{"id":430,"date":"2017-10-29T14:03:43","date_gmt":"2017-10-29T11:03:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/?p=430"},"modified":"2017-10-29T14:03:43","modified_gmt":"2017-10-29T11:03:43","slug":"faith-and-charity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/430\/faith-and-charity\/","title":{"rendered":"Faith and Charity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Say the word ‘atheist’ 100 years ago and it conjured up a vision of sexy, freewheeling rebels celebrating life, love and creativity in their rejection of a higher power. Say it now and a vision of fun-hating killjoys, desperately scared that somewhere a Christian is having a good time by singing lustily in church on a Sunday morning, comes to mind.”<\/p>\n

“And, sadly, the alleged ‘humanist morality’ never happened \u2013 to this day, 80% of all unpaid and unself-interested voluntary and charity work is faith-driven.”<\/p>\n

This comes from an article-confession by Julie Burchill in the Guardian (read\u00a0complete<\/a>). I don’t agree with everything she says, but I keep this reversal of Nietzsche, who remarked that Christians lack joy, a situation now changed enough in the West (in Byzantium\u00a0it never happened). About the other remark,\u00a0concerning faith and charity, although correct (and I don’t underestimate the significance of charity), I doubt if it can be used to commend Christianity – if it is considered as the highest point a faithful person arrives. Since faith regards God, there is no other action that would really commend faith, except for\u00a0whatever belongs to the immediate relationship with Him – whether poor people exist or not, anywhere and at all times and occasions.<\/p>\n

To place anything above this, or, even worse, to not even know the possibility and reality of\u00a0the immediate\u00a0knowledge of God, of\u00a0the personal\u00a0relationship with Him, and live\u00a0our faith\u00a0in making good works, etc., is like using a rocket to go to the next room! Julie gave to her article the title “For the love of Christ”. The love of Christ is everything – and what we can do because of that – whether to honour that, or just to express it, to transmit it, etc., is less<\/em> than secondary, let alone\u00a0the meaning of faith. Otherwise love for Christ proves only an empty phrase pronounced by some kind of a fanaticism.\u00a0Nowhere will you find real lovers that live for anything else than their love alone – no matter what works come or don’t come out of their relationship. The\u00a0more we connect\u00a0faith\u00a0with charity, the more\u00a0it proves illusive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Say the word ‘atheist’ 100 years ago and it conjured up a vision of sexy, freewheeling rebels celebrating life, love and creativity in their rejection of a higher power. Say it now and a vision of fun-hating killjoys, desperately scared that somewhere a Christian is having a good time by singing lustily in church on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[10],"tags":[1722,118,1954,1952,166,742,1953,1951,1957,665,1955,1956],"class_list":["post-430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-orthodox-christianity","tag-atheists","tag-byzantium","tag-celebrating-life","tag-charity-work","tag-christianity","tag-christians","tag-faithful-person","tag-julie-burchill","tag-morality","tag-nietzsche","tag-personal-relationship","tag-purpose-of-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=430"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}