Oddbean new post about login | logout God helped my family find a Japanese Christian community in Texas which will greatly ease my wife's (from Tokyo) faith journey. "..and all things will be provided unto thee."
God is great!
Have a friend and she's in a similar situation. Where in Texas is it?
Won't say.
Buddhism, secular, or something else?
Your wife, I mean.
Most of Japan is secular, wherein various Buddhist practices remain embedded within the Japanese culture.
My mother in law is Korean, and the Korean church she is a member of really is a blessing in her life.
Isn't Shintoism the main religion of Japan? Much like Confucianism, ancestor worship, respect your elders, this sort of thing.
It was. Now it's all integrated into "Japenese culture".
lol this is a good explanation
Similiar phenomenon to Christianity in the West; many secular households still are culturally Christian.
A lot of Japanese Christians (if they came from the mainland) are Roman Catholic. If it's home grown in Texas then yeah, probably some kind of charismatic group.
Mom drug us to one for 5 years when we were kids because the pastor was a family friend, I swear I have hearing loss from the whole thing. Those people were insane, it was like the wildest version of Pentecostals you can find online, and maybe even crazier. Insanely loud, disorienting speakers as well.
This book, whether you like Orthodoxy, does a good job taking charismatics to task. https://www.amazon.com/Orthodoxy-Religion-Future-Seraphim-Rose/dp/188790400X/
My Great Grandma was very involved in the charismatic movement, she could sometimes converse in Greek without ever having learned a word, but she couldn't understand Greek. That's a real case of the phenomenon. More often than not, the Pentecostals are just screaming gibberish, and it doesn't sound like genuine language, it's always something like "halshamadamanai" way too repetitive to be authentic communication. It's hard to argue that it's intentional deception, though. I think the extreme degree of crowd control, hormones pumping, etc. triggers some kind of euphoria where they just speak nonsense and they don't even realize it's just their brain short circuiting.