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Dear Reader;

How do I love thee?

Let me count the ways:
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Own it in Paper!

[Editor's note: Our first reporter, assigned to investigate directly with the Canonical Autonomous True Orthodox Synod in Dissent, of the Dregs of the Dregs of Rubbish Outside of Rubbish Bins, ran away screaming. A more seasoned reporter was able to locate a Church scholar with a strong heresiological and religious studies background, who was willing to speak on the record; the official was available for comment but has requested conditions of anonymity.]

Reporter: So how do I get to the bottom of all this? What on earth is "the Article by which the Orthodox Church stands or falls?"

Scholar: Fr. Cherubim, like many after him and even those who anathematized him, retained significant Protestant attributes long after being received into the Orthodox Church. The concept of an Article by which the Church stands or falls stems from the Reformation, when Martin Luther rightly or wrongly pressed the entirety of theology as it was then known into a very small nutshell and cut off things that wouldn't go in. He had a famed three Sola's: "Sola gratia. Sola fide. Sola Scriptura," that we are saved only by divine grace, saved only through faith, and accept Scripture alone as authoritative. The "Article by which the Church stands or falls" is that we are saved only by grace. It was, to Luther, the only doctrine that mattered: if you know whether the Church believes in salvation by grace alone, that is really the only question worth asking.

In Fr. Cherubim, called "Dead Cherubim Jones" by those who anathematized him, there are large bits of intact Protestantism that have survived and gotten a brushstroke or two of Orthodox décor. With or without anyone anathematizing anyone, the zealots, written CATOSDDDRORB, owe Fr. Cherubim a tremendous debt. There is no longer an Article by which the Church stands or falls, but now an Article by which the Orthodox Church stands or falls. Where the former was concerned with momentous questions of grace and salvation, this is concerned by how many miles across the universe is.

Reporter: Dead Cherubim Jones?!? How many mile—whaaa? Is there an indictment of ecumenism in all this?

Scholar: Hmm, yes, those types will give you quite an earful about ecumenism, but there is genuinely more going on. Let me take on a couple of housekeeping details before addressing the meat of the matter.

First, CATOSDDDRORB correctly notes that when people spoke of "Blessed Cherubim Jones," they were making a twisted use of language. For many, many centuries, someone recently deceased in the Lord is referred to as, "Of blessed memory." When Fr. Cherubim's posthumous work came out, he is quite straightforwardly called "of blessed memory," just like many people are referred to as being "of blessed memory" in the years following their demise.

It is an available alternative, and you find this in figures as ancient as St. Irenaeos, that instead of saying, "So-and-so of blessed memory," things are packed in a bit to refer to that person of "blessed So-and-so." So shortly after the death of an Alexander Schmemann or Vladimir Lossky, one can be entirely right to refer to "blessed Alexander Schmemann" or "blessed Vladimir Lossky," and this is not just for famous people. A recently reposed member of your parish may just as rightly be called "blessed So-and-so," and other things as well.

Fr. Cherubim's camp abused this custom to effectively give Fr. Cherubim a seemingly official honorific that sounds like a type of saint. The term sounded more and more official as "blessed" was hardened into a never-dropped "Blessed," and since this did not satisfy, "Blessed" became "Bl."

Then when Fr. Cherubim had the temerity to challenge Protestant assumptions in posthumous unearthed texts, the "Canonical True Autonomous Orthodox Synod in Dissent, of the Dregs of the Dregs of Rubbish Outside of Rubbish Bins" split off from another jurisdiction whose name I don't remember, and as their first act, anathematized Fr. Cherubim. Their second act was to collectively realized that "Bl." really only meant "dead," and that it would be calling a spade to refer to their former pioneer as "Dead Cherubim Jones." With emphasis on "Dead."

Reporter: Wow. You're bending my brain.

Scholar: There's more; if you need to, take a walk or sit outside for a few minutes. I'll be here.

Reporter: Ok; thanks. Is there more?

Scholar: Ok. Have you heard Alan Perlis's quote, "The best book on programming is Alice in Wonderland, but that's just because it's the best book on anything for the layman?"

Reporter: Now I have.

Scholar: Precise measurement as we know it didn't exist. We have a platinum one meter bar under lock and key; we have measuring implements made to the most minute precision we can. Whereas, in the ancient world, under conditions of poverty that you can hardly imagine, having all kinds of measuring tools would be costly on tight purses. So, among other units of measure, they used parts of their own bodies for measurement. If a man straightens out his forearm, the distance from the outside of the elbow to the tip of the finger would be one cubit: a solution that was free, sensible, and practical. It, by the way, remains a brilliant idea today: circumstance permitting, if you want to measure a distance of a certain general neighborhood, if you don't have a measuring implement handy, you can measure it in cubits, multiply it by some other tool and divide by the length of your body's cubit. Voilà: approximate measurement in a pinch when you don't have any artificial measuring-tool.

This may not be a direct observation of the Bible, but literature in the medieval West had creatures who at times appeared to be the size of insects and at others reached adult human stature, and there was a remarkable lack of interest in nailing down an exact size for such wondrous being. The astute viewer may watch some cartoons that take radical changes in size to be perfectly unremarkable, and entirely natural.

Now there are certain translation issues between the Hebrew and the Greek for the Old Testament, possibly stemming from relations between the arm and the leg. The "hand", in modern Greek, interestingly extends to the elbow, and "daktulos" without further clarification can apply to either fingers and toes. Scientifically speaking, an arm and a leg are the same basic kind of thing; their proportions are different and their uses are different but they are each one of our four limbs.

And what gets really interesting is when you take Protestant fundamentalist efforts to determine the size of the Universe from the Bible.

Reporter: What's that?

Scholar: According to the Hebrew and the Greek Old Testaments, the CATOSDDDRORB devotees yield a size of 4000 miles for the Hebrew, and 7500 for the Greek, and they decided to do things the Orthodox way and settle with the universe conclusively being 7500 miles in size.

Reporter: Um, uh, ok... does that do any real harm?

Scholar: Maybe, but that's not really the point. The CATOSDDDRORB eagerness to straighten out scientists' "backwards understanding of science" has irritated a number of members of the academy.

Reporter: That's not too bad.

Scholar: There's worse.

Reporter: Present CATOSDDDRORB members were scandalized when some further manuscripts were put to publication.

First, Fr. Cherubim said everything we said above and more. He said that a "foot" may be a unit of measure, maybe, but a foot of what? Of an insect? A dinosaur? Ezekiel seems to specify an explicitly human cubit. The Old Testament in either Hebrew or Greek seems to trade in "feet" (I will not comment on some ambiguities), but not "foot of man" as such.

Second, this draws on mathematical subtlety, but a distance on earth, straightened out as much as a sphere permits, corresponds to a certain angle of an arc. Distances between places can be a linear measure of how much surface is crossed, or (if they are straight) they can be an angle.

What this means is that distances, if we are dealing cosmologically, are cosmological distances. There are the difference represented by an angle between two rays from the earth's center. In normal science, scientists are quick to use so-called "scientific notation" where the total size of the universe is a mouthful of 500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles wide but you write it as 5.0e+23.

But here's the interesting thing. Fr. Cherubim was not dogmatic, or at least not dogmatic about the size of the universe.

Reporter: Huh?

Scholar: Of course he was dogmatic about some things; he is dogmatic that this universe in entirety belongs to God, and scarcely less adamant that God could have created the universe at any size he wanted. However, his scholarship on the universe's size never really nails down dogmatically that the universe is either 4000 or 7500 miles wide, or a number with lots of zeroes. If you are at all careful, you will recognize that he mentions something more devastating to CATOSDDDRORB: the size of the universe does not seem to be a particularly live question, or one that attracted particularly much debate. The Fathers didn't really make a fuss about it. But he also fails to vindicate the standard model. Not only does he not make known use of scientific notation, but he does not seem to name the numbers that motivated people to create scientific notation in the first place, or for that matter numbers at all. One gets the impression that he envisioned a "middle-sized" universe, incredibly large to the CATOSDDDRORB crowd, ludicrously small to standard science. The gist of his writing is not to help people get the right numeric calculation. It is, here, to draw to people's attention to how much they don't know, and gently draw their attention to greater things.

Reporter: What was the reaction to that?

Scholar: In a heartbeat, "Blessed Cherubim Jones" became "Dead Cherubim Jones," and the new Canonical Autonomous True Orthodox Synod in Dissent, of the Dregs of the Dregs of Rubbish Outside of Rubbish Bins anathematized him. The chief complaint was that he failed to buttress their efforts to take a beloved Protestant ambiance in Biblical exegesis, substitute the Greek for Hebrew Old Testament, and make their calculation of a 7500 mile wide Universe into the Article by which the Church stands or falls.

Reporter: This has been very interesting. Do you have any further reading to recommend?

Scholar: Sure! Here's my spare copy of Alice in Wonderland!

Read more of The Seraphinians: "Blessed Seraphim Rose" and His Axe-Wielding Western Converts on Amazon!

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Eight-year-old Uriah Hittite is an African-American boy with a disturbing history. He has been found guilty of single-handed, extended, and wasteful manipulations and draining government resources at a scale comparable to a large and coordinated /b/tard trolling attack.

Like a polished con artist, Hittite manipulated others so deftly they never guessed the bomb he was about to drop. He was reported to be outgoing, friendly and vigorous in physical activity. Neither friends, nor family, nor all the regular doctor visits showed the faintest problem.

Then, shortly after he turned five, he was administered a safe and routine second MMR vaccination, and only then did he tip his hand. And wow, did Hittite pull a surprise!

At first it started as a tiny trickle; he feigned such ordinary sickness as most healthy children do; his birth parents gave him a few days' bed rest in the hopes that that would clear things out. Instead, he started acting worse and worse, to his birth parents' complete bewilderment. Besides remaining symptoms of sickness, he drew into a shell, and his speech became much clumsier. While his birth parents were of limited means and not insured, they did what they should have done immediately and took him to the shelter of a local hospital's emergency room.

The emergency room staff far too trustingly fell to Hittite's deceit, and ran usual tests that failed to produce a medical explanation. Psychiatric staff, experienced as they were, were taken in too. His birth parents continued to foolishly request tests and all but appoint themselves as their little Uriah's own doctors when it became evident that none of the MD's was providing any sort of explanation.

When the birth parents failed to improve the matter, one of the doctors suggested that a change of scenery, without the birth parents' dubious expenses. The birth parents consented to a brief and provisional custody.

Once inside better custody, external settings were better and he received the benefit of highly skilled cult deprogrammers who helped free him of certain needlessly constricting beliefs. This was done at great expense to the State, as deprogramming is difficult enough with grown adults of adequate intelligence, and he refused to communicate even at the level of a boy of his calendar age. It was decided to extend the custody indefinitely.

Finally a diagnostician was willing to call a spade a spade, and identify a classic case of Machiavellian Syndrome by Proxy (MSBP). There was nothing wrong with Hittite physically; he just had a master plan to squander and drain the states' resources. However, with the laws presently in force, you are not allowed to unplug a useless eater. He remains a ward of state, in bed for twenty-three hours each day, not talking with anyone. The total amount he has drained state coffers is in the millions, not counting the expenses of quieting his former parents' inappropriate efforts to regain contact with their former child.

There ought to be a law against demonstrating Machiavellian Symptom by Proxy (MSBP) like this!

Read more of Subtle Humor: A Joke Book in the Shadow of The Onion Dome, The Onion, and rec.humor.funny on Amazon.

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Own it in Paper!

Thessaloniki (DP). A monk from one of the communities explained a recent uproar:

During a recent voyage that crossed the U.S., the Ecumenist Patriarch was approached by a beggar, and asked one of the priests with him to "Give him some change."

The importance of this request simply cannot be overstated. It might perhaps have been appropriate to say, "Give him 37 cents," or "Give him nothing," or even "Give him twenty (or a hundred) dollars," costly as that may be. However, to say to give someone some money, without specifying the amount, is in no way consistent with best practices in accounting. And what is Orthodoxy, if not a training ground for the life of an accountant?

Our reporter said, "Yes, but aren't there two principles of accounting? Isn't there room for both strict precision that knows what you have down to the last cent, but also a much smaller area where it isn't worth the bother to keep tabs. Doesn't basic accounting have some degree of flexibility for both basic principles, even if the absolute precision bit is the deeper of the two?"

The monk coughed, and shifted his position slightly. "I planned fifteen minutes for this interview. I see that those fifteen minutes have already elapsed."

Read more of Subtle Humor: A Joke Book in the Shadow of The Onion Dome, The Onion, and rec.humor.funny on Amazon!