Quote:
Originally Posted by Mynydd
There is another possible reading of this. One which I believe that it is more interesting to us.
Admitting that science doesn't have the answers beyond its own limits, which are our own limits, and admitting that a spiritual belief on the other hand can help answer those questions, why would someone from a country in Christendom turn to a foreign spiritual belief instead of one which is home-grown?
This has, in my opinion, little to do with Islam itself. Already before Islam became an issue of concern you had people who were confronted to the questions that cannot be answered through science, and who looked to the east in search of these answers, converting to religions such as Buddhism or Hinduism.
What was striking here is that such people often did not bother with looking closer to them, and they ignored the rich tradition of Christian mystics.
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One of the possible explanations can be that this man is coming from the otherwise wonderful country of Bohemia (in Czech it's
Česko, but here, speaking in English, I prefer the old designation to the ugly sounding "Czech Republic"), which has been impregnated with the intensive anti-Catholic (mostly of Freemasonic inspiration) propaganda for the last 200 years. Catholicism has been understood as the religion of the oppressors, the Habsburgs, who had ruled the country with an iron fist since the defeat of the Czech nobility - the considerable part of which had converted to Protestantsim - at the Bilá Horá (White Mountain) in 1619, until 1918. So the Czechs tried other religions, from Eastern Orthodoxy to Protestantism, as well as secular creeds like Panslavism, Atheistic rationalism (Freemasonic), Communism...
I say, this is only one of possible explanations, because things like that happen in other countries as well, which were not exposed to such an amount of anti-Catholic feeling like Bohemia.
An alternative explanation for the phenonema like this is that Christianity is not being presented in a proper way by the Church and its representatives. We can speak here of a massive betrayal of much of the priesthood on their own respective peoples.
Christianity is being presented either as: 1) a pure custom bereft of any real substantial meaning, like you know, it's our heritage and tradition, you go twice a year to the Church etc (in this case you don't have even to believe in God, the only important thing is that your relatives and acquaintances see you occasionally attending a mass); or as 2) some kind of soppy emotionalism, which can appeal only to some women (not even all women); or as 3) dry and lifeless moralizing (while morals and ethics are extremely important, they also have to be intertwined with faith, otherwise moral degenerates into moralizing, which are two different things).
Due to all the above mentioned versions of how is Christianity being presented nowadays, many people turn away from it and go for some eastern "spiritualities" (or even American "Evangelical" cults), which they perceive as being more
absolute and not so watered down.