Hiya. Yep, you're pretty much right in your assessment. There's some areas of USA where churchgoing is more commonplace, say, in like, Florida or other places down South, but once you get to New England and stuff, yeah.
It's good to hear that you're Christian, especially in PRC. Lots of people need to see extremes like PRC to come to their senses about the effects of atheism. Especially state atheism. Your country now has more men than women due to the policies of state atheism. For all the crap people give Christian societies, and Christian societies have never been perfect, Christian societies at least on the whole eliminated exposure of infants and abortion. Unfortunately it seems we're heading back in that direction as society becomes more secular.
Unfortunately threads like this usually get atheists coming in and disturbing us Christians, so I'm glad for your effort making this thread, but yeah, that's 99.9% likely going to happen. Then you're gonna have 10 pages of religious debate with atheists instead of a nice discussion with fellow Christians.
Me, I'm Eastern Orthodox Christian. Right now, I feel like a kinda crappy Christian, I wish I could be like "on fire" like I used to be, I hope God can help me with that. I left my old Charismatic church as I had some disagreements with the theology and a particular leadership person there, but also it was very very social demanding, almost cultlike especially in the way it attempted to evangelize people. Basically "love bombing." But, after my switch to the Orthodox church, it seems like my old church has sorta proclaimed like an anathema against me or something.
The Orthodox Church, basically, it's the church Christ started. It's endured to the end, so it seems. What happened was, there used to be just the Catholic church, and all Christians were Catholics, with the exception of Arians, Manicheans/Gnostics/etc. But then in 1054 there was a split between the Catholics and Orthodox over changes in the Nicene Creed, and the Catholics throughout the ages changed more stuff, whereas the Orthodox Church remained more or less the same. IE, Papal Infallibility, for example, wasn't dogma until the 1800s. The newest one is the Assumption of Mary, which says Mary went to Heaven like Enoch did. They sorta just make up more stuff as time goes on to be dogma. Theologically, if you read, at first you might be like "well that's weird" as it might go against everything you've been taught your entire life (well actually, that might just be me/most Americans, as I was raised Fundamental Baptist) with the invoking of saints and Mary in prayers, kissing icons and all that, it is sorta weird at first. Basically, I read the lives of some of the Saints, and you can see God working marvelously through them. They seemed to deliver upon the promise of "You shall do mightier works than me," that Jesus said. The other thing too, if Protestants are right, that would mean there was no Christians for over 1000 years after Christ, and you can't reasonably say God would let his Church fall into apostasy for a thousand or more years.
That said, being in PRC, you might not have access to an Orthodox Church near you, and honestly things aren't perfect at the Orthodox Church. On paper, yeah, we have the best theological understanding of things, but partially from persecution (IE, the Russian Church was under Communism for a few generations) and partially from stagnation and stuff, we're not the most like, "active" churches anymore. But, just saying, to consider for the future. Right now, you're probably going to a smaller kinda housechurch thing, right? That's how my old church started out, all churches sorta do start like that. Don't get the cathedral overnight, haha. God can and does work marvelously in churches like that, though. The only thing I'd tell you to watch out for, in Charismatic/Pentecostal circles, is not all "spiritual gifts" are of God. St. Paul says "Don't be hasty in the laying on of hands." So many times I've heard stories of Wicca practitioners going to churches and offering prayer via laying of hands, scary stuff really.
Lastly, China does have some spiritual heritage actually.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shangdi
30 Apr 2012, 3:56 am
I agree with 1000knives 
