Belief and religion: Faith still determines people’s lives

The present modern is not a godless time. Rather, it is strongly shaped by the attractiveness of religious beliefs.

The vast majority of people lead their lives in deep faith – the present is a highly productive time of faith, determined by rapid religious change, diverse missionary movements, and religious conflicts. For demographic reasons alone, religion will continue to gain in importance. Religion is open in businesses such as biltipset in this digital age.

New forms of Christianity are growing at least as fast as Islam and they are missioning more aggressively

A century ago, there were an estimated ten million Christians and three and a half times as many Muslims in Africa. Today there are 330 million Muslims and 350 million Christians there – mainly south of the Sahara. But Christianity has proselytized more successfully than Islam in Latin America and many Asian countries too. Approximately the number of Christians in North and South Korea in 1945 to only 300,000 baptized, it increased in the southern part of the country as a result of the mission to eleven million today. There are now believed to be more than 100 million Christians in China. The Christians who are most successful in missionary terms today are the representatives of the Pentecostal churches, who cultivate a radical, pious form of life and faith, which emerged from Reformed Protestantism around 1900. Pentecostal churches preach the ecstatic approach to God. In 1970, just six percent of all Christians were organized in them – today, according to some estimates, it is a good 25 percent. The 500 million Pentecostals live mostly in countries in the southern hemisphere. They help to ensure that Christianity, which was once concentrated in Europe and North America, becomes a particularly successful religion in the southern hemisphere.

Many seekers of faith combine elements of different religious traditions with one another

In democratically constituted nations that recognize religious freedom as a pre-state basic right, everyone can be saved according to his or her religious form. As a craftsman of meaning, modern man builds his own private world of faith, for example combining old Christian ideas with symbols and cultic practices of other religions. Modern man organizes yoga evenings in the Catholic parish hall or develops a willingness in interreligious dialogue groups to combine different things into a new, humanistic belief.

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