Orthodox Christians?

[pragon]

What is up with Orthodox Christianity? What makes it different from Protestant and Catholicism? Why do they stand during services?

[MaskedOne]

You could likely fill libraries with books (of varying value) on the subject. The short version: the Orthodox church(es) broke off from the Catholic Church in 1054 due to a variety of doctrinal disagreements (one of which being, the rightful authority of the Bishop of Rome aka the Pope). Protestant sects started breaking off from the Catholic Church (and not getting annihilated as heretics) during the Reformation. Now in 2018, you have various splinter sects of Christianity that have been operating independently and developing their own distinct views on how to follow Christ properly for anywhere between a couple decades, a couple centuries, and nearly a thousand years. The end result is that different churches operate differently and some hold to ideas that others find silly or sometimes even heretical. For a simple example of one distinction that get's beaten up a lot, Catholic veneration of Saints is frequently considered blatant heresy by some (there are a lot of Protestant sects) Protestant sects.