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France is super secular, yet it seems horoscopes are pretty popular. I think that's more of a fascination for mysticism and paranormal in the country of rationality and enlightment. People rarely talk about it out in the open though.
Actually I always thought mysticism and weird paranormal stuff was more commonly accepted in protestant countries than in catholic ones because the church forbids a lot of stuff.
Honestly, i think religions have to have some organization behind them. The more organized a religion is, the least someone can take advantage of religious doctrine in any way. Take Evangelists for example, there doesn't seem to be any organization behind them and this enables preachers to take advantage and bend teachings in any way so that they can influence poorly educated people for their own profit.
Another aspect i can't stand of Evangelism is proselytizing, something which is very uncommon in eastablished churches which have a well structured organization.
At least in Brazil the evangelists are highly organised, and catholic people in general don't care much about religion; they pray for some saint or for Our Lady of Aparecida when they are in a difficult situation (lack of money, diseases and so on). São Paulo and Rio have a lot of megachurches and their influence on politics and media are strongly and worringly increasing each year; I fear that Brazil in a future will become somewhat like a gospel version of Iran. Amongst the dozens of TV stations, only SBT (owned by a jew) has no religious programmes. I don't like organised religions because of this.
I wouldn't say religion plays that large of a role in Italy anymore, the young generations are pretty secular on the whole and if it weren't for the Vatican playing an influential role in politics i think the role of religion would be really minimal. I mean, go to a church in Turin, Milan but even in the Northern countrysides and you might find several empty ones even on Sunday's mass. The church doesn't find people willing to take vows anymore and they are now bringing clergy from Subsaharian Africa and this people are usually quite conservative which scares more people away. It's a neverending and slowly going spiral into irrelevance
If i might take a guess, i think mostly because they haven't understood that the concept of God used by Christianity and most mainstream religions is outdated, because they don't care much about and aren't interested in the matter, because the way the clergy acts might have scared them away or because they found deep contradictions in the various holy books and merely see them as a cultural construct of the age they were written in.
Source: I'm atheist although the reason i am one is because of the last option
At my place the number of people that goes to the church is so little that we have only the Sunday's mass, for the other days it has been suppressed. There are still some celebrations such as funerals, the via crucis or the mass at midnight the day of Christmas eve (which has been anticipated at 10:30, because we share the priest with the near village). Instead a regular mass in a normal Monday morning is no more celebrated (with great protests of the 10 old ladies that were still attempting them).
We really are starting to have a really hard time at finding new priests, right now we have an African priest that we share with the neighbor village (which means that he celebrates all the mess, celebrations ecc.. twice, once here and once in the other village). He has some serious problem with Italian, and in practice he just read what the bishop of our diocese wrote for him.
Situation like our one are quite common here in the "Northern countrysides", in particular on the mountains where the population is fragmented into several little villages with less than 1000 inhabitants.
In practice the situation is really depressing for really religious people. Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, this is not a big deal. I really don't care about it. I haven't gone at the mass neither for Christmas or Easter for practically 10 years right now (when I was a child I was obliged to because of the "catechismo", which is practice are weakly lessons organized by the local church for teaching Catholicism to the children and things like that). The last time I went in a church was for a funeral.
I really can't stand our church because of all the superfluous elements, I see it as a huge container of rituals, habits and hypocrisies. For example something like the 50% of a catholic Mass is made of ritual sentences that are repeated without variation every single time. In the church you just see the priest speaking in front of a lot of uninterested people, that seem to wake up only when they should repeat some prayer or sentence themselves (sentence whose meaning is usually ignored by the most of the present). Also the "variable part", which consists in the reading of parts of the Bible and its comment by the priest, after a while becomes repetitive. In practice the most of the people I know that go regularly to church do this only for demonstrating that they are "more virtuous than the others", not for the message. Masses and other religious celebrations always give to me a sensation of "emptiness", of "lack or real contents".
Other things that are considered "normal" here in my village and that I can't stand is that we are supposed to donate money to the church every year (we publish a little magazine for the activity of our church, and at the end there are the names of the ones that have donated something to the church. And you are no one if you aren't on that list!), we are supposed to have our homes blessed by the priest once at year (he arrives in an hurry into your house, he reads some lines from a piece of paper as fast as he can and then he spreads some holy water around. Last year I started to laugh, it was too absurd the way the priest did it). Every year we are also supposed to pay for a Mass in honor of each one of our relatives who died in the last few years, which in practice means that at the end of the Mass the priest says "this Mass was for remembering... (list of people to which the Mass is dedicated to). I really can't understand why we are supposed to pay for it...
In practice I just can't stand the churches and priests system. Generally speaking I have no problems with religion and spirituality, but I really can't be religious and spiritual myself.
Spoiler
Oh, this one was the thread about horoscopes... sorry for the Off topic then
Horoscope is one of most idiotic things ever. I can't imagine how can anyone in their right mind believe in this nonsense.
About religion: I can assume that there is some sentient force (call it God or no) that created the universe (we can't prove or disprove it, anyway), but even so, I'm completely sure it has nothing to do with any gods in any religions. Religion is just an attempt to explain natural phenomena. The primitive humans didn't know why there is raining, why the lightning strikes, why the sun shines, why are there diseases and so on, so they didn't know how to explain this except for some sentient force beyond this. Nowadays, with modern science, religion is completely outdated worlview.
12-23-2016, 11:50 PM
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Incredibly popular to understand. The Astrological Zodiac Map is fascinating to those who are spiritually mindful. Divine revelation to tons of individual psychological information to enter the system. Especially on https://www.astro.com
Not at all. Whoops, my username reveals my zodiac sign. Well, anyway, we are so thoroughly protestantised that people cannot be bothered by stupid horoscopes.
Are you Aries? I totally guessed so. It's so obvious lmao.
Anyway here people talk about it all the time. Lots of people think that it's something specifically credible when it comes to relationships. I like it too lol, I think it's fun.
In Brazil it's not something people use to talk about. But we do read, have curiosity about it. There are lots of videos on YouTube and so on.
I'm very interested in numerology, and most of brazilians numerologists are men.
In Astrology something that I discovered that is definitely true is that following the order of the signs (Aries,Taurus, etc) the distance from your sing to your partner's has to be always an even number.
It' s interesting to compare my own answer after just some months studing this subject!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Fabio SBA
Much of the people (although I won't say most of them) talk openly about astrology and read it in the newspaper, but it's generally perceived as a curiosity, a superstition or even a joke, not to be taken seriously.
Being myself as an exemple, we can notice that people that act like this have not studied their own birth charts. After doing this it changes a lot.
I believe that this is the main reason why it is not so disclosed. It's a lot more revealing and shoking that commom people suppose it is.
Many who are agnostic still belong to the church, some only for the reason that the church does much valuable charity. The percentage seems to be correct, I doubt it would be much higher.
Even though a great deal of people in Finland , just like much of Europe, do not believe in God or not sure if there is a God, even so there has been an increase in amount of people that believe in God in Finland.
Four years ago, just 27 per cent of Finns said they believed in the God of Christianity, Evangelical Focus reports.
Now, that figure stands at 33 per cent. A further 19 per cent of Finns said they believe in God, although this is a different God to that taught by the churches. More than one in ten do not know whether they believe in God or not.
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