www.enjoyturkey.com/info/facts/Religion3a.htm (I advice reading the link if you want more info on)
"Tomas Spidlik, a member of the Society of Jesus, is quite right when he writes: "We must stress one principle and stress it hard, that the Latin Church originated from the Greek Church as a branch grows from a tree trunk. The Church was implanted by the Greeks and expressed itself in the Greek language until the end of the fourth century.""

“Orthodox and non-Orthodox theologian and scholars believe that the Judaization of Christianity would have been fatal”

"Christian thinkers were in constant dialogue with ancient Greek thought and religious experience. Hyalinization affected every aspect of early Christianity including worship."

"In fact, Pannenberg’s position not only allows, but also insists, that the Hellenistic tradition provided the necessary conditions of possibility for a clearer affirmation of the divinity of Jesus Christ and the universality of the eschatological self-revelation of God in the face of Jesus."

“Christian thinkers were in constant dialogue with ancient Greek thought and religious experience. Hellenization affected every aspect of early Christianity including worship.”

“every Christian is, to some extent, a Hellene.”
“The Greek spirit and culture and permanently wedded to the Christian faith, neither of which can be separated from the other without deforming itself.”

“Asceticism and continence as ideals of holiness, and the longing for soteria (salvation) and theosis (deification), were adopted by early Christianity from Greek religious or philosophical practices, from Orphic, Pythagorean, Stoic, and Hermetic teachings and practices.”

"for the good wherever it is found is a property of the truth," as Sokrates So when people deny this then they don’t say what is true therefore not good.
“On the one hand the Greek Church suffered from the Turkish and Islamic oppression and persecution, and on the other, she also suffered from the propaganda, the intrigues, and the proselytizing activities of Western European Christians, both Roman Catholic and Protestant.“
"the survival of the Greek Church under four centuries of Turkish rule is no less than a miracle."
“Both the New Testament and the documents of the late first and early second centuries support the Orthodox teaching that the early Church was governed by a board or a synod of bishops. Christ entrusted His gospel to the Apostles "appointed their successors…to bishops…of those who were to receive the faith," as Saint Clement of Rome writes. “

“all the bishops are equal in rank and authority. He adds that "neither does any of us [bishops] set himself up as a bishop of bishops, nor by tyrannical terror does any compel his colleague to the necessity of obedience…Our Lord Jesus Christ…is the only one that has the power of preferring us [the bishops] as the government of His Church."

Which every Christian sect goes against the early teachings since they have been liberalized. As one Jewish Rabbi said when a religion demands less it is less. The link says more obviously but that was just a few quotes.

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Another said
"Things began to change with the dispersion of the Jews throughout the Roman Empire, at a time when most educated men derived their metaphysics from Plato, their ethics from the Stoics and their logic from Aristotle. This interaction provided a fertile ground for the Christian message to take root."

"Interestingly, Plotinus further distinguished, between God (the first principle) and a two-part divine intellect (generator of 'Forms') of which one part is purely contemplative and another is demiurgic (creative). Neo-Platonists coming after him, named these three different divine agencies 'hypostases of the One God'This is a close precursor of the Christian Holy Trinity composed of three uncreated persons (the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit)"

" Man can acquire knowledge of the 'divine', Aristotle concluded, by a process of abstracting the 'universals' from sensible things, ie by deducing them from the sense-data through the application of a reasoning process."

"The fact that Jesus relinquished Jewish exclusiveness for the sake of spreading his message world-wide explains both Christianity's universal appeal across all boundaries and its failure to make any significant inroads amongst the Jews themselves, proud of the privileged status conferred to them by Moses."

"Christ's message was thus expressed in a language whose basic concepts and theories were familiar to the intellectuals"

"be happy if by ensuring complete self-mastery of mind over body they lived 'in accordance with nature'. The Christians had only to change this last sentence into 'in accordance with the will of God' to find a ready audience conditioned by Stoic doctrines.

"In a nutshell, the Christians felt that the cult of reason they had inherited from the Greeks could be identified with God." "that Jesus was 'Hellenised'"

"Greek influence on budding Christianity was pervasive not only on dogma and ethics but also on liturgy (borrowing from Hellenistic mystery religions), customs (carnivals before the beginning of the Lenten season), architecture, ecclesiastical art, symbolism and even iconography."

I know some are thinking about the 12 gods but they are like how we have saints. For example Poseidon is like St. Nick (original) which they are both care takers of the sea. There is a statue called mother goddess or snack goddess which she holds 2 snakes which if anyone took art history might have seen it. St. Paul saw the statue when he went to Greece called “the unknown God” since they knew there was one and St. Paul filled them in on it. Also The

On another note Christ was a Semite which he did not have blond hair, while skin and blue eyes in how most see him *** but short curly hair, Semitic skin color, and brown eyes which is how he has been portrayed by the Orthodox Church for 2000 years. Well they do have an original portrait of Christ painted by one of the apostles. Also his name is not pronounced Jesus but if you saw Indiana Jones you would know it starts with an I to be Iesus the “I” sounds like the E like eat, and the U sounds like “oo” like soon (Esoos). Well I guess I should be happy some don’t call him the devil like the free masons mix the 2 together.

******** My general comments about it.*********
What else would you expect from people that knew that the world war round, knew math, science, art, philosophy, music, religion before other have even grasped it and it would be illogical not to assume that. This would explain also how the Christian traditions are similar to Ancient Greek ways, like for example the Christian chanting is similar to the Ancient Greek music as historians have said. There is a difference from Tradition and Christian Tradition. We can not say a 5 year old can grasp or to make quantum physics before a mathematician, but the mathematician helped paved the way for the 5 year old to know it and not the other way around. The problem to that is that the 5 year old will not understand logic as much as disagree and if they have power like a gun will force what they say as has the non orthodox nation done since they are behind to understand what is going on. Being humble to find the truth is hard which is why so many defend illogical concepts and can not escape it. But now other sects do not keep what original since they are not the originators to pave the way for Christianity and so they put their own views in that distort it.
The Ancient Greeks said “"Preserve the natural!" The acorn may most certainly be observed, commented upon, ridiculed or revered; but it must be allowed to become an oak tree. The idea that within the acorn there is a weeping willow struggling to "come out" would have been met with the ridicule and scorn such fuzzy-minded thinking deserves.” But now we have other liberalized sects that push away the natural order like Protestant sects that let gay marriage happen and say that women can be a man, or other unnatural things

Which that would explain why they are the only nation that the culture is also religious, unlike other sects that have their culture clash with Christianity which is why the saying from Shaw stated about how Christianity being converted to barbarism since others put their own views. The other orthodox countries do not do that and make their culture be more Christian like the Greeks since they follow the religion to be humble than change it to what suits them. As Alexander the great said a non Greek can be Greek. Which would explain a lot, also that most of the apostles lived their lives with the Greeks which help spread to the eastern Europe, Christ renamed some of his apostles into Greek names, Christ commented about how they came and said that they would bring glory to God, they made the first Churches and help write the bible, they have the first apostolic succession as stated. But it all makes sense if people are humble enough to look at it as a whole.

Those were just a few in why the Orthodox followers know the origin while the liberal media doesn’t even try to mention is. After the Catholic Church invaded with the crusades and the Muslims with the help of Jews attacked it after it did not flourish much and some say it is a miracle that they are around despite the 3 unholy alliances did which their tactics to gain popularity is no not have a contender and force others to convert. Then those 3 spawned out other sects which as Christ said a bad tree can not bear good fruit which is why so much confusion goes on. I expect Russia to help continue spread Orthodox the right way and not the wrong way which the #1 problem to Christianity is altered or liberal Christian sects. Even when Christianity first came out other fake Christian sects came out after to destroy it but the apostils quickly said no to them since there is only one right way. Now so many fake Christian sects have flourished and everyone accepts that any one is ok but as history showed it was not. People will be doomed to repeat history if they don’t know it.

Orthodoxy has converted the most and not by force by saying convert or die unlike the other sects, or have overpopulated the most, or suppress, attack, or enslave like the other sects and their offspring sects have done. People will choose what is right when they want to see and many do not even bother since people will believe what they “want” and not what they “need”. I am sometimes amazed how clueless most people are about Orthodoxy, its origins and history, but also they do not even know their own sect well. You have the catholic church that has the pope that thinks he is above others which that is blasphemous since as Christ said all are equal, or the protestant that has King Hennery that made his own sect to divorce and kill his wives and many of his people, and the other sects that came out of them or in spite of them. People can not live long enough to learn all the mistakes they make and learn all and the Orthodox Church seem to have over 2000 years of experience in what is right unlike many sects that do not even have 500 years and they start all over looking for answers. It is like a child that wants to learn himself and not read books and then they grow up as if they know it all but are clueless. And since we have been talking about Ancient Greeks they say that the smartest man was Socrates and he said that all he knows is that he knows nothing which help push him to achieve more. Other sects, atheists, and other religion make money when people do not know history.

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"The conversion of a savage to Christianity is the conversion of Christianity to savagery." George Bernard Shaw (Hence christian sects)
"Hell is paved with good intentions, not with bad ones"
"Matthew 7 21. Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven;... depart from me, ye that work iniquity."
Orthodox Info

And on that note, obviously I will not learn Christianity well if I go to South America, Japan, etc. but by seeing who was like it before and after, and what recommendations and actions Christ and his apostle’s made which leads me to Greece.

The highly decorated historian Edith Hamilton of her 1930’s book "The Greek Way" which shows some clues about the Christian. One good thing about this book is that it is not as modern to be influenced by liberal views and agendas. I only have these short quotes from 4 chapters. If you care to read more Goggle books has it online. I will also mention another book after this one.

----- intro
Mind and spirit together make up that which separates us from the rest of the animal world, that which enables a man to know the truth and that which enables him to die for the truth.

We are composite creatures, made up of soul and body, mind and spirit. When men's attention is fixed upon one to the disregard of the others, human beings results who are only partially developed, their eyes blinded half of what life offers and the great world holds.
The Greeks came into being and the world as we know it began.

The witness of the games is conclusive. And when Greece died and her reading of the great enigma was buried with her statues, play, too, died out of the world. The brutal, bloody Roman games had nothing to do with the spirit of play. They were fathered by the Orient, not by Greece.
-------- West VS East
The Greeks were intellectuals; they had a passion for using their minds. The fact shines through even their use of language. Our word for school comes from the Greek word for leisure. Of course, reasoned the Greek, given leisure a man will employ it in thinking of finding out about things. Leisure and the pursuit of knowledge, the connection was inevitable to a Greek.

Philosophy=The Greeks meant by it the endeavor to understand everything there is, and they called it what they felt it to be, the Love of Knowledge.

The Greeks called their healers physicians, which means those versed in the ways of nature.

For the first time in the world the mind was free, free as it hardly is to-day. Both the state and religion left the Athenian free to think as he pleased.

The right of a man to say he pleased was fundamental in Athens. "A slave is he who cannot speak his thought" said Euripides

"Egypt and Phoecia love, money," Plato remarks in a discussion on how nations differ. "The special characteristic of our part of the world is the love of knowledge."

Indeed their intellectuality has been obscured to us precisely by virtue of the transcendent achievement.

What marked the Greeks off from Egypt and India was not an inferior degree of spirituality by a superior degree of mentality. Great mind and Great Spirit combined in them.

Spirituality=It would be impossible for the nation that produced the art and the poetry of Greece to have a permanently superficial view of religion, just as it would on homer's gods and goddesses.

"for as I passed by and behold your devotions I found an alter with this inscription, To the Unknown God." St. Paul “think this certain, that to a good man no evil can happen, either in life or in death" Socrates

-----------art
The studio of the Greek was not a lonely cave of meditation, but the world of moving life.

In the eastern rug all desire to express any semblance of reality has gone. Such a work of art is pure decoration. It is the expression of the artist's final withdrawal from the visible world, essentially his denial of intellect.

To study the literature of Greece was to discover the idea of the freedom of the mind and to use the mind as it had not been used since the days of Greece. Once again there was a fusion of rational and spiritual power.

Thought and mysticism never go well together and there is little symbolism in Greek art. Athena was not a symbol of wisdom but an embodiment of it...

There could be nothing less akin to the ways of symbolism than their beautiful, normal humanity. Nor did decoration really interest the Greeks.

Greek art is intellectual art, the art of men who were clear and lucid thinkers, and it is therefore plain art.

Greek architecture of the great age is the expression of men who were, first of all, intellectuals artists, kept firmly within the visible world by their mind, but, only second to that, lovers of the human world.
----------- religion
Greek religion has got confused with Greek mythology.
Their morality, even, is more than questionable and also their dignity.

Religion in Greece shows one of the greatest of what Schopenhauer calls the "singular swing to elevation" in the history of the human spirit.

religion=was developed by poets and artists and philosophers, all of them people who instinctively leave thought and imagination free, and all of them, in Greece, men of practical affairs.

They never tried to define it; only to express or suggest it. St. Paul was speaking as a Greek when he said the invisible must be understood by the visible. That is the basis of all great art, and in Greece great artists strove to make the visible express the invisible.

Nothing to him (Socrates) was important except finding the truth, the reality in all that is, which is another aspect is God.

"Excellence" is the nearest equivalent we have to the world they commonly used for it, but it meant more than that.
A man must strive to attain it. We needs must love the highest when we see it.

Aristotle summed up the search and struggle:” Excellence much labored for by the race of men." The long and steep rough road to it was the road Greek religion took.

In Homer Magic has been abolished. The enormous spiritual advance this shows- and intellectual, no less- is hard for us to realize. Before Greece all religion was magical. Magic was a supreme importance.

Magic that others thought=It was enslaved by terror.
A magic universe was so terrifying because it was so irrational, and therefore completely incalculable. Fear is of all the emotions the most brutalizing.
The Greeks dismissed it. They changed a world that was full of fear into a world full of beauty.

An early Greek philosopher wrote: "All things were in confusion until Mind came and set them in order." That mind was Greek, and the first exponent of it we know about was Homer.

Homer=He was not a Greek Bible; he was the representative and spokesman of the Greeks. He was quintessentially Greek.

The Shrine of Apollo the most Greek of all the gods... who stood for moderation and sobriety, upon whose temple was graven the great Delphic saying "nothing in excess."

It could not happen to a people who knew better than any other that liberty depends on self-restraint, who knew what freedom only when controlled and limited. The Greeks could never wander very far from Apollo.

Plato said the perfect state was one in which the citizens wept and rejoiced over the same things. That deep community of feeling came to pass in the theatre of Dionysus. Men lost their sense of isolation.

No one would pursue evil except through ignorance. Once let him see what evil was and he would fly from it.

Aristotle says happiness is activity of soul.
He believed that unexamined life, the life of those who we knew nothing of themselves of their real needs and desires, was not worthy to be lived by a human being.

****************** Another book this time
"Greek Ways" by Bruce S. Thornton called 1990's

I got the quotes form Amazon which disputes modern lies about them since many lie to try to destory the origins of christianity which is why we have the anti christain thing going on in the media.

"In the process he responds with calm reason and broad and deep learning to the unhistorical, tendentious and foolish assaults launched against them as part of current political agendas. The happy result is this spendid book that allows the Greeks themselves to speak and reveal the absurdity of the modern barbarians who abuse them." Donald Kagan, Yale Univeristy

"This book sets out to rescue the Greeks from the clutches of the postmodernists, deconstructionists and polymorphous perverse who have invaded the modern Classics department. Rather than seeing them as The Other, strangers in our midst, or as hypocrites who preached democracy while practicing slavery, etc., Thornton sees the Greeks squarely--in their own terms--and finds them to be our brothers. What is valuable in the much abused Western tradition--the examined life, the pursuit of truth, the dialogue about the place of the individual in the larger group--comes from the Greeks."

Odd can we read the book off Amazon? I guess a part of it.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/1893554570/ref=sib_fs_top/103-5875150-3558251?%5Fencoding=UTF8&p=S00M&checkSum=svZJNR5ZZx0dV%2FD6xi%2FUFD6zdtP7VrsK1Xl8jvFaeos%3D#reader-link

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"The conversion of a savage to Christianity is the conversion of Christianity to savagery." George Bernard Shaw (Hence christian sects)
"Hell is paved with good intentions, not with bad ones"
"Matthew 7 21. Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven;... depart from me, ye that work iniquity."
Orthodox Info