Originally posted by Shakyamunison
What is a Russian Orthodox? How do your beliefs differ from other Christians?
All Eastern Churches differ immensely to the western Christianity, from practices to beliefs.
Orthodox Christianity is older than all Western Christianity, including Catholicism. They look at the Julian Calendar, so the Christmas falls on 7th of Jan, (6th if you belong to Armenian church) and Eastern Orthodoxy does not have range of denomination West does.
That means that they agree on majority, if not all things, unlike western Christianity.
Unlike Western Christianity, Eastern one has always had a wave of mysticism about it.
Originally posted by debbiejo
I'm not sure, but I believe it's a belief/religion that goes back to when the church originally split. The east church form the west church. They are the more Orthodox and original church. I'm not sure if the Pope controls the Eastern Orthodox church.
don't the easterners have their own pope?
I read an interesting article recently about the history of Russian attempts to get rid of religion entirely throughout the last couple centuries. But despite concerted efforts from the government and various other atheist and/or marxist factions, the people remain fairly steadfastly "believers" (even census information during the times of the worst oppression suggests that a comfortable majority remained people of faith in some sort of divinity).
Not directly related to this, but I thought it was interesting, mainly because it shows the perserverance of religious beliefs in much of the world. Whether or not the oppression strengthened this, or just made it more apparent, is undertermined....but I found it surprising that so many retained faith despite the lack of centralized religion in Russia for so long.
Originally posted by yogert
orthodox is considerd eastren cathlic and that is broken up into more fractions of
churches
uuum, no. It is never referred to as Eastern ''Catholic''.
Its always referred to as Eastern Orthodox (there are also oriental orthodox). That is what the great Schism was all about, between Rome and Constantinople, which led to separation of the Church of the West, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Eastern Orthodox Church.
Eastern Christianity can be Catholic or Orthodox, but it is not called ad it not Eastern Catholicism by any strech of imagination.
Russian Christianity is official Russian Orthodox Church, like Greek is Greek Orthodox, Bulgarian Orthodox, Cypriot Orthodox, etc whoever else is in the Orthodox clique.