I am continually amazed by the amazing amounts of information you can get from the Internet, especially when you don't have a nice old copy of the Encyclopaedia Brittannica laying around the house like we did when we were kids.
For example, I couldn't remember what year (or what century for that matter) The Schism happened between the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic church (The year was 1054). The Reformation wouldn't start to happen for Protestantism until 1517, initiated inadvertently by Martin Luther, who wasn't looking to split the Church, only wanted it to change.
A friend was using the Belief-O-Matic online, and had come up high scoring for believing in many of the same things as Eastern and Greek Orthodox, but wasn't sure what Eastern Orthodox was.
In my travels several years ago, Brian and I went to Greece, including the Greek Island of Samos off the coast of Turkey. The island had the town of Pythagoria (named after the Greek mathematician/philosopher Pythagoras who came up with with the theory of a2+b2=c2, which is a proof that the sum of the squared two sides of a 90% angle equals the square root of the hypotenuse).
Among the other interesting sites on this island was the small, lone, almost toy-sized chapel that sat at the top of the hill between Samos Town and Pythagoria (that's me walking around the side of it). This was fitting since we were also driving the lone rental car on the island, also toy-sized, which had the feel of a car that should have hamsters running it.
We also stumbled upon a monestery, where we gave a few Euro cents to see their chapel that had been built in a cave. It was so small a single person could stay in the one room at a time.
As a result of our travels, I learned that The Greek Orthodox church is also a split off of the Roman Catholic Church. I had no idea that the two were so similar until we went into their cathedrals and churches in Greece.
In the past, when I've done the Belief-O-Matic test, I've come up more Bahai, since I clicked on a different answer for my belief in some of the fundamental beliefs of God and his personal or impersonal involvement in my life. This time, I came up a high match with Mainline to Liberal Protestants, and a very close match for Quakers.
Now I'm going to have to go to Wikipedia and find out more about the Quakers!
So what are you? This test will tell you: Just click on the title and it'll take you to Belief-O-Matic. It take a few minutes, and you have to give yourself a chance to really think things through, but I thought it was well worth it.
3 comments:
Wow... I'm 100% Neo-Pagan, 100% New Age and 93% Unitarian Universalist. Then comes Liberal Quaker, Bahai and Mahayan Buddhism. Whod've thunk it, given that I was raised Baptist and currently participate in a Presbyterian ministry. The main reason for this result is that I think men have tried to define God in terms of human attributes - and I believe God is bigger than all of our attempts to define Him.
I've done this before and I think my results were similar - but I seem to remember mainline Protestantism being higher up on the list than this time -- Mainline to Liberal came in at #13 and Mainline to Conservative came in at #23.
Interesting!
Well, that explains a lot! I have been struggling with being Catholic, and Catholicism lately. Roman Catholic was second to last on the list! Liberal Protestant was top, followed by Universal...something(?). Anyway, I guess I need to reevaluate my beliefs and look at what is best for the kids. Anyway, thanks for sharing, very enlightening!
I took this a year and a half ago, when we first talked about it. My results were Unitarian Universalist then, and still are at 100% today. Nice to see I'm consistent. Unitarian Universalist was followed by (at 96%) Neo-Pagan, then 95% Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants. Who knew? Bottom of the list, Eastern Orthodox, Islam and very last,Roman Catholic.
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