Other religions (like Baptists, Adventists, Jews, and Muslims) forbid the ingestion of alcohol and/or certain kinds of meat in a purely Judaizing fashion. Gnosticism also forbade both sexual intercourse and flesh-consumption on the grounds of matter being intrinsically evil and unredeemable. But Orthodoxy doesn't do that. Coupled with the fact that the vast and overwhelming majority of Orthodox Christians world-wide are at the very best nominal and lukewarm in the practice of their faith, not to mention that many of them don't even give a rat's posterior about some of the very basic moral teachings of their own religious belief, this creates to outsiders, both Orthodox and un-Orthodox, the illusion or false impression that our faith is very 'friendly' and permissive: it is not, I assure you! Why? Because, though allowing all these things and viewing them as being clean and permissible, at the very same time Orthodoxy also teaches its faithful followers that their hearts, minds, souls, and bodies are not to become enslaved by any of these things, through the tyranny of lusts, passions, cravings, addictions, and compulsions, all of which are forms of spiritual idolatry:
1 Corinthians 6:12 ¶All things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any.
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