What are Russian women REALLY like?

[mendeleyev]

Back to the OP's question: What are RW really like?

I offer Exhibit A, B and C:


First, is Radio A Plus on-air personality Yulia. Yulia is an intelligent and very outgoing young lady. She was born on September 11 of (year) (thanks to Muzh for correction on the year of the Twin towers attack), and has little memory of the Twin Towers tragedy in New York so her worldview is perhaps different from those of us who were adults then. She lives in Belarus and for privacy sake I won't give out any city info. She works at Radio A Plus which is a contemporary rock type station.

She is very good at what she does, lives with her sidekick and co-host and they have a baby.

She is very attractive, not looking for a relationship as she is in one but she has tons of friends. She appears a lot on television.





With her man-cohost-radio partner. 






Next is Sasha. Sasha is also blonde, more reserved but not afraid to smile and get out in public. She is a model and appears often on the cover of men's sporting magazines, etc.

She has a boyfriend and they get along well (so much for the stereotype about bad RM, huh?).





Sasha makes frequent concert and radio appearances and that is why she is sitting in the studio.


Finally we move to Exhibit C, "Dasha" (not her real name):

Dasha is a solid rock, guess that is the attorney in her. Her dual degree landed her a good job in television but the law degree makes her a fierce competitor and interviewer.

Dasha is in her mid 30s, single with a son, very passionate about politics (and soccer!), is practicing Orthodox, and one of the best at getting around "gatekeepers" I've seen in the FSU.

FSU "gatekeepers" are often not just secretaries but often uniformed security as well. They can be 1/2 bitch and 2/3 union truck driver at any given moment and very frustrating to deal with them. Dasha can be a bulldozer if she just plows flat over top these types, but sometimes she uses finesse. Did I mention that she is a Mom?




The man she marries will need understand the concept of: the man is the head and the woman is the neck that turns the head. Otherwise she'll spit him out without skipping a beat.

She is very attractive and gets her exercise walking to/from the Metro daily. She is always well dressed and I'm certain that clothing is an important part of her budget.
                       
I should add that these ladies are examples and not looking for a WM. Sorry, I will not make introductions.

[mendeleyev]

Thank you, Doug. That would be cool!

[Ade]

Just as you see Russia thru non-religious eyes. Neither is different in this regard.


I don't mind someone laughing, as long as they're willing to admit to another view if so proven. I make a valid comparison with other European countries. Even after all the destruction from the Soviet period, few Euro states have as many ACTIVE churches/mosques and GROWTH per community as across the FSU.

Perhaps. I can't say that I go around checking out the local religious communities in the rest of Europe. Although I understand the increase in Muslim immigrants throughout EU Europe pretty much guarantees a general increase in some religiosity or other. That Russia is getting more religious than it was goes without saying - it would have been difficult to get less I think, and given humanities general need to believe in something it's not at all surprising that there's a been a rather large resurgence since soviet times.

Majority of what? I can't argue with Misha's comment on the percentage of baptised being 80% but if you're asking me if the majority of Russians are religious? Hmm, likely not...yet. That would be difficult to determine for either side of the argument because we'd have to first define what is "religious" and that would lead to questions about 2x a year versus 28x per year, fasting versus non fasting, etc.

From my wife's experience, totally anecdotal I know, the 80% is mainly fad and fashion based.

I don't go around saying that a majority of Russians are religious in the sense that who can define the cutoff between practicing and non practicing. Now, if you wish to open a can of worms about integration of religion and culture then many might be tempted to argue that Russians are very religious although I'd personally likely disagree with that argument.

It would be just as baseless for someone to go around and say that Russians are not religious. Either is a over sweeping generalization.

The younger folk, combined Muslim and Orthodox, are who have influenced the federal budget and Duma committees on long term planning. It is difficult to argue with the actions of government planning and budgeting, so as you say there seems to be a trend.

What I find amazing, and it is the reason why I agreed to write a piece for Ed's website on the topic, is the number of WM who buy into the theory (and that is all it is) that Russia is a non religious place and gals don't care about religion. While for many that is true, for many that is also false. There is a reason why priests chuckle and call it a "blue strip" conversion. If it didn't happen so frequently, there would be nothing to chuckle about.

I think most men would be better off assuming that a woman who lists herself as "Christian" on a MOB site profile, is doing so because 1) it's generic term they use for non-muslim and there's no option for agnostic and 2) they think it's more likely to catch them a western husband, very much like the reason they list themselves as "non-smokers".

[Fashionista]

As is the lack of religion. In fact, you may be surprised to learn that the Soviets did just that for 70+ years.

Lack of religion? That was the instrument? Really? Hint: look up "cult of personality" 

[OlgaH]

In the FSU you don't have Sunday School

Who told it?  We do have Sunday Schools  Almost ten years ago I was invited to be a teacher at our Eparchy Sunday School.

Here some links with photos

http://www.hrampoyarkovo.ru/deyatelnost-hrama/voskresnaya-shkola.html

http://www.kotkishevo.ru/voskresnaya-shkola/

http://karamshevo.prihod.ru/school

[Eduard]

It has taken a long time, but I finally found something we disagree on.
Doug, we gotta talk dude. Legs are where it's at!   

I hope someday I have the honor of meeting you in person.  I don't care if we are talking about legs, boobs, or politics,  I would consider it a great honor to meet you in person.

you guys are both weird!!! Butt is where it's at, every oine knows that!    We need to talk!

[Muzh]

Back to the OP's question: What are RW really like?

I offer Exhibit A, B and C:


First, is Radio A Plus on-air personality Yulia Kopylova. Yulia is an intelligent and very outgoing young lady. She was born on September 11 of 1990, just a year before the Twin Towers tragedy in New York so her worldview is perhaps different from those of us who were adults then. She lives in Belarus and for privacy sake I won't give out any city info. She works at Radio A Plus which is a contemporary rock type station.
         

<Cough, cough>

Better check on that date. 

[Muzh]

As is the lack of religion. In fact, you may be surprised to learn that the Soviets did just that for 70+ years.

The most wonderful thing about a religion is that its a choice. If you don't want one, don't adopt one. Pretty easy.

 Christianity has been destroyed by politics, priests, and get-rich evangelists. Ignore them, writes Andrew Sullivan, and embrace Him.   If you go to the second floor of the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., you’ll find a small room containing an 18th-century Bible whose pages are full of holes. They are carefully razor-cut empty spaces, so this was not an act of vandalism. It was, rather, a project begun by Thomas Jefferson when he was 77 years old. Painstakingly removing those passages he thought reflected the actual teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, Jefferson literally cut and pasted them into a slimmer, different New Testament, and left behind the remnants (all on display until July 15). What did he edit out? He told us: “We must reduce our volume to the simple evangelists, select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus.” He removed what he felt were the “misconceptions” of Jesus’ followers, “expressing unintelligibly for others what they had not understood themselves.” And it wasn’t hard for him. He described the difference between the real Jesus and the evangelists’ embellishments as “diamonds” in a “dunghill,” glittering as “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.” Yes, he was calling vast parts of the Bible religious manure.

    When we think of Jefferson as the great architect of the separation of church and state, this, perhaps, was what he meant by “church”: the purest, simplest, apolitical Christianity, purged of the agendas of those who had sought to use Jesus to advance their own power decades and centuries after Jesus’ death. If Jefferson’s greatest political legacy was the Declaration of Independence, this pure, precious moral teaching was his religious legacy. “I am a real Christian,” Jefferson insisted against the fundamentalists and clerics of his time. “That is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus.”

   What were those doctrines? Not the supernatural claims that, fused with politics and power, gave successive generations wars, inquisitions, pogroms, reformations, and counterreformations. Jesus’ doctrines were the practical commandments, the truly radical ideas that immediately leap out in the simple stories he told and which he exemplified in everything he did. Not simply love one another, but love your enemy and forgive those who harm you; give up all material wealth; love the ineffable Being behind all things, and know that this Being is actually your truest Father, in whose image you were made. Above all: give up power over others, because power, if it is to be effective, ultimately requires the threat of violence, and violence is incompatible with the total acceptance and love of all other human beings that is at the sacred heart of Jesus’ teaching. That’s why, in his final apolitical act, Jesus never defended his innocence at trial, never resisted his crucifixion, and even turned to those nailing his hands to the wood on the cross and forgave them, and loved them.

   Politicized Faith
   Whether or not you believe, as I do, in Jesus’ divinity and resurrection—and in the importance of celebrating both on Easter Sunday—Jefferson’s point is crucially important. Because it was Jesus’ point. What does it matter how strictly you proclaim your belief in various doctrines if you do not live as these doctrines demand? What is politics if not a dangerous temptation toward controlling others rather than reforming oneself? If we return to what Jesus actually asked us to do and to be—rather than the unknowable intricacies of what we believe he was—he actually emerges more powerfully and more purely.
 
And more intensely relevant to our times. Jefferson’s vision of a simpler, purer, apolitical Christianity couldn’t be further from the 21st-century American reality. We inhabit a polity now saturated with religion. On one side, the Republican base is made up of evangelical Protestants who believe that religion must consume and influence every aspect of public life. On the other side, the last Democratic primary had candidates profess their faith in public forums, and more recently President Obama appeared at the National Prayer Breakfast, invoking Jesus to defend his plan for universal health care. The crisis of Christianity is perhaps best captured in the new meaning of the word “secular.” It once meant belief in separating the spheres of faith and politics; it now means, for many, simply atheism. The ability to be faithful in a religious space and reasonable in a political one has atrophied before our eyes.
 
  Organized Religion in Decline
   Meanwhile, organized religion itself is in trouble. The Catholic Church’s hierarchy lost much of its authority over the American flock with the unilateral prohibition of the pill in 1968 by Pope Paul VI. But in the last decade, whatever shred of moral authority that remained has evaporated. The hierarchy was exposed as enabling, and then covering up, an international conspiracy to abuse and rape countless youths and children. I don’t know what greater indictment of a church’s authority there can be—except the refusal, even now, of the entire leadership to face their responsibility and resign. Instead, they obsess about others’ sex lives, about who is entitled to civil marriage, and about who pays for birth control in health insurance. Inequality, poverty, even the torture institutionalized by the government after 9/11: these issues attract far less of their public attention.
 
  For their part, the mainline Protestant churches, which long promoted religious moderation, have rapidly declined in the past 50 years. Evangelical Protestantism has stepped into the vacuum, but it has serious defects of its own. As New York Times columnist Ross Douthat explores in his unsparing new book, Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, many suburban evangelicals embrace a gospel of prosperity, which teaches that living a Christian life will make you successful and rich. Others defend a rigid biblical literalism, adamantly wishing away a century and a half of scholarship that has clearly shown that the canonized Gospels were written decades after Jesus’ ministry, and are copies of copies of stories told by those with fallible memory. Still others insist that the earth is merely 6,000 years old—something we now know by the light of reason and science is simply untrue. And what group of Americans have pollsters found to be most supportive of torturing terror suspects? Evangelical Christians. Something has gone very wrong. These are impulses born of panic in the face of modernity, and fear before an amorphous “other.” This version of Christianity could not contrast more strongly with Jesus’ constant refrain: “Be not afraid.” It would make Jefferson shudder.

   It would also, one imagines, baffle Jesus of Nazareth. The issues that Christianity obsesses over today simply do not appear in either Jefferson’s or the original New Testament. Jesus never spoke of homosexuality or abortion, and his only remarks on marriage were a condemnation of divorce (now commonplace among American Christians) and forgiveness for adultery. The family? He disowned his parents in public as a teen, and told his followers to abandon theirs if they wanted to follow him. Sex? He was a celibate who, along with his followers, anticipated an imminent End of the World where reproduction was completely irrelevant.

   The Crisis of Our Time
   All of which is to say something so obvious it is almost taboo: Christianity itself is in crisis. It seems no accident to me that so many Christians now embrace materialist self-help rather than ascetic self-denial—or that most Catholics, even regular churchgoers, have tuned out the hierarchy in embarrassment or disgust. Given this crisis, it is no surprise that the fastest-growing segment of belief among the young is atheism, which has leapt in popularity in the new millennium. Nor is it a shock that so many have turned away from organized Christianity and toward “spirituality,” co-opting or adapting the practices of meditation or yoga, or wandering as lapsed Catholics in an inquisitive spiritual desert. The thirst for God is still there. How could it not be, when the profoundest human questions—Why does the universe exist rather than nothing? How did humanity come to be on this remote blue speck of a planet? What happens to us after death?—remain as pressing and mysterious as they’ve always been?  That’s why polls show a huge majority of Americans still believing in a Higher Power. But the need for new questioning—of Christian institutions as well as ideas and priorities—is as real as the crisis is deep.

   Back to Jesus
   Where to start? Jefferson’s act of cutting out those parts of the Bible that offended his moral and scientific imagination is one approach. But another can be found in the life of a well-to-do son of a fabric trader in 12th-century Italy who went off to fight a war with a neighboring city, saw his friends killed in battle in front of him, lived a year as a prisoner of war, and then experienced a clarifying vision that changed the world. In Francis of Assisi: A New Biography, Augustine Thompson cuts through the legends and apocryphal prayers to describe Saint Francis as he truly lived. Gone are the fashionable stories of an erstwhile hippie, communing with flowers and animals. Instead we have this typical young secular figure who suddenly found peace in service to those he previously shrank from: lepers, whose sores and lesions he tended to and whose company he sought—as much as for himself as for them.
 
The religious order that goes by his name began quite simply with a couple of friends who were captured by the sheer spiritual intensity of how Francis lived. His inspiration was even purer than Jefferson’s. He did not cut out passages of the Gospels to render them more reasonable than they appear to the modern mind. He simply opened the Gospels at random—as was often the custom at the time—and found three passages. They told him to “sell what you have and give to the poor,” to “take nothing for your journey,” not even a second tunic, and to “deny himself” and follow the path of Jesus. That was it. So Francis renounced his inheritance, becoming homeless and earning food by manual labor. When that wouldn’t feed him, he begged, just for food—with the indignity of begging part of his spiritual humbling.
 
  Francis insisted on living utterly without power over others. As stories of his strangeness and holiness spread, more joined him and he faced a real dilemma: how to lead a group of men, and also some women, in an organization. Suddenly, faith met politics. And it tormented, wracked, and almost killed him. He had to be last, not first. He wanted to be always the “lesser brother,” not the founder of an order. And so he would often go on pilgrimages and ask others to run things. Or he would sit at the feet of his brothers at communal meetings and if an issue could not be resolved without his say-so, he would whisper in the leader’s ear.

   A Vision of Holiness

   As Jesus was without politics, so was Francis. As Jesus fled from crowds, so did Francis—often to bare shacks in woodlands, to pray and be with God and nature. It’s critical to recall that he did not do this in rebellion against orthodoxy or even church authority. He obeyed orders from bishops and even the pope himself. His main obsession wasn’t nature, which came to sublime fruition in his final “Canticle of the Sun,” but the cleanliness of the cloths, chalices, and ornaments surrounding the holy eucharist.

   His revulsion at even the hint of comfort or wealth could be extreme. As he lay dying and was offered a pillow to rest on, he slept through the night only to wake the next day in a rage, hitting the monk who had given him the pillow and recoiling in disgust at his own weakness in accepting its balm. One of his few commands was that his brothers never ride a horse; they had to walk or ride a donkey. What inspired his fellow Christians to rebuild and reform the church in his day was simply his own example of humility, service, and sanctity.

   A modern person would see such a man as crazy, and there were many at the time who thought so too. He sang sermons in the streets, sometimes just miming them. He suffered intense bouts of doubt, self-loathing, and depression. He had visions. You could have diagnosed his postwar conversion as an outgrowth of posttraumatic-stress disorder. Or you can simply observe what those around him testified to: something special, unique, mysterious, holy. To reduce one’s life to essentials, to ask merely for daily bread, forgiveness of others, and denial of self is, in many ways, a form of madness. It is also a form of liberation. It lets go of complexity and focuses on simplicity. Francis did not found an order designed to think or control. He insisted on the simplicity of manual labor, prayer, and the sacraments. That was enough for him.

   Learning How to Live
   It wouldn’t be enough for most of us. And yet, there can be wisdom in the acceptance of mystery. I’ve pondered the Incarnation my whole life. I’ve read theology and history. I think I grasp what it means to be both God and human—but I don’t think my understanding is any richer than my Irish grandmother’s. Barely literate, she would lose herself in the rosary at mass. In her simplicity, beneath her veil in front of a cascade of flickering candles, she seemed to know God more deeply than I, with all my education and privilege, ever will.

   This doesn’t imply, as some claim, the privatization of faith, or its relegation to a subordinate sphere. There are times when great injustices—slavery, imperialism, totalitarianism, segregation—require spiritual mobilization and public witness. But from Gandhi to King, the greatest examples of these movements renounce power as well. They embrace nonviolence as a moral example, and that paradox changes the world more than politics or violence ever can or will. When politics is necessary, as it is, the kind of Christianity I am describing seeks always to translate religious truths into reasoned, secular arguments that can appeal to those of other faiths and none at all. But it also means, at times, renouncing Caesar in favor of the Christ to whom Jefferson, Francis, my grandmother, and countless generations of believers have selflessly devoted themselves.
 
The saints, after all, became known as saints not because of their success in fighting political battles, or winning a few news cycles, or funding an anti-abortion super PAC. They were saints purely and simply because of the way they lived. And this, of course, was Jefferson’s deeply American insight: “No man can conform his faith to the dictates of another. The life and essence of religion consists in the internal persuasion or belief of the mind.”
 
  Jefferson feared that the alternative to a Christianity founded on “internal persuasion” was a revival of the brutal, bloody wars of religion that America was founded to escape. And what he grasped in his sacrilegious mutilation of a sacred text was the core simplicity of Jesus’ message of renunciation. He believed that stripped of the doctrines of the Incarnation, Resurrection, and the various miracles, the message of Jesus was the deepest miracle. And that it was radically simple. It was explained in stories, parables, and metaphors—not theological doctrines of immense complexity. It was proven by his willingness to submit himself to an unjustified execution. The cross itself was not the point; nor was the intense physical suffering he endured. The point was how he conducted himself through it all—calm, loving, accepting, radically surrendering even the basic control of his own body and telling us that this was what it means to truly transcend our world and be with God. Jesus, like Francis, was a homeless person, as were his closest followers. He possessed nothing—and thereby everything.

   Christianity Resurrected
   I have no concrete idea how Christianity will wrestle free of its current crisis, of its distractions and temptations, and above all its enmeshment with the things of this world. But I do know it won’t happen by even more furious denunciations of others, by focusing on politics rather than prayer, by concerning ourselves with the sex lives and heretical thoughts of others rather than with the constant struggle to liberate ourselves from what keeps us from God. What Jefferson saw in Jesus of Nazareth was utterly compatible with reason and with the future; what Saint Francis trusted in was the simple, terrifying love of God for Creation itself. That never ends.  This Christianity comes not from the head or the gut, but from the soul. It is as meek as it is quietly liberating. It does not seize the moment; it lets it be. It doesn’t seek worldly recognition, or success, and it flees from power and wealth. It is the religion of unachievement. And it is not afraid. In the anxious, crammed lives of our modern twittering souls, in the materialist obsessions we cling to for security in recession, in a world where sectarian extremism threatens to unleash mass destruction, this sheer Christianity, seeking truth without the expectation of resolution, simply living each day doing what we can to fulfill God’s will, is more vital than ever. It may, in fact, be the only spiritual transformation that can in the end transcend the nagging emptiness of our late-capitalist lives, or the cult of distracting contemporaneity, or the threat of apocalyptic war where Jesus once walked. You see attempts to find this everywhere—from experimental spirituality to resurgent fundamentalism. Something inside is telling us we need radical spiritual change.

   But the essence of this change has been with us, and defining our own civilization, for two millennia. And one day soon, when politics and doctrine and pride recede, it will rise again.

   CORRECTION: Due to an editing error, the print version of this piece incorrectly stated that Thomas Jefferson started editing the Bible when he was 27 years old. Jefferson was 77 years old when he began the project. The text has been updated to reflect the change.
 
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/04/01/andrew-sullivan-christianity-in-crisis.html

[Jack]

Hey Mendeleyev,

I was when I first saw this, and even today, really surprised as to the great amount of religious people I see in Russia and Ukraine.   

[mendeleyev]

Lack of religion? That was the instrument? Really? Hint: look up "cult of personality"

Fashion, in context of the thread yes lack of religion.

You are right however about cult of personality replacing the "opium of the people" with another opium/individual.

My second apartment in Moscow was rented from a lady (an attorney) who stipulated that there was one chair in the main room reserved for Stalin and a condition of me renting was that nobody would be allowed to sit in that rocking chair. Poor Stalin, I must have sat on his lap 100,000 times. 

Some time ago I wrote a piece about visiting a broadcaster from Voice of Russia in her home. Her piano stool was reserved for Stalin's ghost.

[mendeleyev]

<Cough, cough>

Better check on that date.

Thanks! I'll correct it.

[mendeleyev]

Who told it?  We do have Sunday Schools  Almost ten years ago I was invited to be a teacher at our Eparchy Sunday School.

Olga, but not in enough churches or of such popularity to be considered "social" events in the same way as US based churches.

I think you'd agree that activities such as after-church coffee and fellowship type activities such as sewing circles, etc, are nowhere nearly as developed as what we can experience in the West, especially what is common in the USA.

Here are some additional photos of a summer (2011) camp in the first two photos and an after church session with a local priest:







These types of things are slowly making their way into the Orthodox church after decades of rarely being available.

[mendeleyev]

you guys are both weird!!! Butt is where it's at, every(one) knows that!    We need to talk!

Oh Ed, we do need to talk! 

[Gator]

Mendeleyev,

You perhaps do not realize that you are debating religion with an individual who has never had a religious (spiritual) experience.  And you are debating your opinion about the mentality of Russian people with the same individual who has perhaps spent only one week in Russia.  And you are the journalist who has resided in Russia for more than a decade. And by the way, that same individual has demonstrated himself to be rather intractable.   Nevertheless, nice try!  I was pleased to see you take off you gloves for once.
 
BTW, thank you for enlightening us.  Most of the RW I met would light a candle and pray when we visited a church.  One even kissed the glass top to the coffin containing a mummified saint. 

[Boethius]

If you are referring to Ade, he has spent far more than one week in Russia, probably more than you have, TBH.
 
Russia is really a hop, skip and a jump from Norway.  Ade has posted quite a bit about his trips to Russia when he and his wife were dating.
 
In Orthodoxy, pretty much everyone lights a candle when they pray, so it's not any indication of any degree of piousness.  However, it is not acceptable to light a candle during Gospel readings, the Epistle, Little/Great Entrances, or the sermon.
 

A religious experience and a spiritual experience are not necessarily the same thing.  I am not certain I can peer into the soul of another person, even one close to me, to conclude whether or not he/she has had a spiritual experience.
 
 

[CDW]

What are their characteristics? Any Russian ladies out there?

You never understood American women so what makes you think you will understand Russian women 

[Daveman]

You never understood American women so what makes you think you will understand Russian women 

What man really has understood women?  The best we can do it fake it, followed by periods of feigned indifference.. 

[ML]

You never understood American women so what makes you think you will understand Russian women 

I really (honest) felt bad, and sorry for a woman one time when she said to me:

"And I thought it was always said that 'women' are hard to understand."

[Slumba]

Men have 137 accepted theories about women... and all of them are wrong!

[Ade]

If you are referring to Ade, he has spent far more than one week in Russia, probably more than you have, TBH.
 
Russia is really a hop, skip and a jump from Norway.  Ade has posted quite a bit about his trips to Russia when he and his wife were dating.

Facts n' stuff, a bit of nuisance ain't they?


For you and mendeleyev. From the horses mouth as it were; http://o-religii.ru/pravoslavie_v_rf.htm and one of the more telling articles referenced in that; http://religion.ng.ru/events/2009-07-01/3_vocerkvlenie.html

And interesting quote, crudely google-translated from that last page; "Orthodoxy in Russia today - ethnic, religious and not a sign - says sociologist Zorkaya. - "I am Russian, and therefore, the Orthodox" 

For those that don't understand use google translate or, better yet, get a Russian wife.

[mendeleyev]

As I mentioned upthread Ade, I don't buy totally into the nationalist thinking (a minority view) that Orthodoxy is synonymous with being Russian. You'll have to do better than one isolated article and trying to call it a "fact" if you don't mind. Several million Muslims would disagree with you, just for starters. Add millions of atheists and this "fact" wilts like a rose in the Arabian desert.

However I do appreciate you reading an Orthodox related site! That is a good start. 

I do also appreciate your good humour and also the many insights you have into RW and the Russian bride scene.
 

[mendeleyev]

In Orthodoxy, pretty much everyone lights a candle when they pray, so it's not any indication of any degree of piousness.  However, it is not acceptable to light a candle during Gospel readings, the Epistle, Little/Great Entrances, or the sermon.

Excellent.

Someday there should be a thread on protocol in an Orthodox church for men who wish to respect their ladies' faith but are not sure what to do and when to do it while at church.

[Ade]

FWIW, I don't say these things to be annoying or to try to put anyone down, I say it to try to impart some realistic expectations in those that think Russia is full of pious, practising, Orthodox Christians. It's not and most aren't. This is especially relevant for the very religious, generally American wife seekers.

Another interesting article written by a Research Fellow at the Department of Philosophy of Religion Philosophy Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences  http://www.pravmir.ru/skolko-pravoslavnyx-v-rossii/

[Ade]

However I do appreciate you reading an Orthodox related site! That is a good start. 

I do also appreciate your good humour and also the many insights you have into RW and the Russian bride scene.

 


You're good guy and I think your heart is in the right place even if I disagree with you sometimes. And, I have to say, I'm impressed by all the information you post for the masses on these sites - mainly a lost cause for the majority though I think. 

[Boethius]

Mendy, I think the Russian government is advocating Orthodoxy as Russia's religion.  I recall reading a lot about this a decade ago.  Fast growing Evanglical movements have been banned from Russia, allegedly for abuses, but as I recall, there was also concern on the impact on the Orthodox Church.
 
In Ukraine, belief is increasing.  In 2006, only 58% of Ukrainians were believers.  That has increased to 71% now.  Of that number, 76% are either Orthodox or Greek Catholic, but the fastest growing churches in Ukraine are Evangelical.
 
Mendy is a true gentleman.  I really appreciate his thoughtful posts and all the information he takes the time to post.