Posted on 05/13/2012 6:46:14 AM PDT by markomalley
Say not ye, There are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest.
Therefore said he unto them, The harvest truly is great, but the labourers are few: pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that he would send forth labourers into his harvest.
In all fairness, there is a lot of historical background that is needed here. Here is a map of pre-WWII religions in Germany.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Germany#History
Then after the war, with the assent of America, I might add, Prussia and much of the East was swallowed up by Poland and Russia. The Germans there were either killed or driven out, mostly West. To a great extent this killed western Protestantism and a big chunk of the Catholic territories as well.
The Russians didn’t miss a beat in destroying every church they could, so a lot of clergy were killed on top of those killed by the Nazis.
Then moving forward to the fall of the wall, afterwards, while there was a push to revitalize the economy of the East, missionaries and clergy should have poured in there, but there was only a trickle of some very dedicated individuals.
Much of that could be attributed to the weakness of the churches in the West, which can be compared to some of the more weak-kneed, liberal and p.c. churches in America.
Even today, a lot of East Germans could possibly be brought back into religion, if someone made a serious effort to proselytize them, with something other than the stale and weak version of the West.
That distinction belongs to North Korea
Home to Nietzche is the most Godless place on earth???? Wow, who would’ve thought that — you could knock me over with a feather!!! </sarc>
I wonder if this athiesm is a holdover from the time of the occupation of East Germany by Russia. People were afraid to say they were Christians. It’s only twenty years, after all.
We can’t force someone else to believe in something. I believe in God but my neighbor does not. What can I do about that? I don’t understand the point of the article.
bump
Take them outside on a cloudless night and tell them to look up at the stars. Is what you see happenstance?
Drove through most of East Germany, there doesn,t appear to be a shortage of churches. Want to see many more go through rural Poland and the Ukraine. And yes there were people going in and out of them. I,m in that area of Europe at the moment. We stopped at several to admire their interior decor. Christianity is alive and well in the eastern part of Europe and we have photos to prove it. We were also impressed with the neat appearence of the youths, who were reminicent of those of the USA in the mid 50,s. (Not the Greasers.)
Some undoubtedly is. But at the same time, it’s a golden opportunity for some church to offer the East Germans more than just secular success.
A better example might be others of the former eastern bloc. Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, etc. Yet they seem to be a lot more religious than the former East Germany. And yes, they do have a lot more atheists today, as well.
Since you have visited Germany, can you confirm something I read a while back about the automatic deduction of church tithes from paychecks?
IIRC, the article said that if you declared yourself a member of a state-recognized church, your employer automatically deducted your tithe (10% I presume) and sent it to the church. This practice, which I assume also applied to synagoges and mosques, was said to lead to a flourishing religious establishment that is detached from congregations they have little accountability to and, outside major holidays, very poorly attended services.
If this is the case, the high atheism rate might, in part, be an economic reaction to the poor post-unification job environment in eastern Germany: declare yourself an atheist and avoid having tithes deducted from your pay.
Ask a believer, they know the answer.
It isn’t as if one finds churches full on Sundays in the former West Germany.
I never heard of actual believers leaving the churches because of the tax, but there are a lot of people who are not into religion but never bothered to go to the offices and change their religious affiliation. They normally leave when they have money problems or they read another catholic child abuse story.
More than two decades after its political reunification, Germany continues to be divided along religious lines. Christianity still holds a fair amount of sway in the West. Not so much in the East, where two thirds of the population – young and old – are declared atheists.
In church a 3 or 4 weeks ago we sat in on a presentation by a couple raising support to be missionaries in Berlin. That's pretty much how they described the situation. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that when Communism fell it was not an unmixed blessing for those in the old communist areas.
Another missionary I know of, is (I think) in former East German, working primarily with Turkish guest workers.
Most astronomers are Atheists/Agnostics
1. Well Duh! If the parents are atheists, then their children will be socialized as such. "It's a family tradition."
2. With the leftwing/green idiocy the clergy keep spewing forth from the pulpit each week, who in their right mind would go to church?
I concur. I few years ago, I happened to talk with a missionary from USA who was stationed in Eastern Europe. In a nutshell, that was his take.
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