Occultism is dangerous. Deuteronomy 18:9–12 warns that all forms of occultism are detestable to God. Exodus 22:18 even instructs that sorceresses were to be put to death—a penalty in Old Testament times that demonstrates how serious the sin of divination was. Leviticus 19:26 commands, “You shall not . . . interpret omens or tell fortunes.” In Acts 19:19 we read that many who converted to Christ in Ephesus rightly destroyed all their paraphernalia formerly used for occultism and divination.
The New Age openness to channeling—consulting psychics in order to contact the dead, or to contact a guardian angel, or to contact “space brothers” aboard UFOs—is an especially heinous sin against God. Deuteronomy 18:10–11 is clear: “There shall not be found among you anyone who . . . [is] a medium or a necromancer or one who inquires of the dead.” Leviticus 19:31 instructs, “Do not turn to mediums or necromancers; do not seek them out, and so make yourselves unclean by them: I am the Lord your God.” In 1 Samuel 28:3 we read that "Saul had put the mediums and the necromancers out of the land." Later, we read that “Saul died for his breach of faith. He broke faith with the Lord in that he did not keep the command of the Lord, and also consulted a medium, seeking guidance.” (1 Chronicles 10:13; see also Leviticus 20:27).
https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/how-cults-corrected-america the pc empire, new communist agenda. ???
Teed He was born in Trout Creek, New York, in 1839. As a boy, he worked along the Erie Canal, experiencing some of the worst labor conditions that nineteenth-century America had to offer. As Adam Morris recounts in a new book, “American Messiahs,” Teed soon became a staunch anti-capitalist, and he spent much of his life trying to abolish wage labor entirely. This didn’t prevent him from pursuing a number of business ventures. At one point, he ran a mop factory; at another, he hawked something called an Electro-Therapeutic Apparatus, which provided its owners with the putative health benefits of mild, recurrent electrocution. Teed was a student of “eclectic medicine,” a branch of healing that rose in response to widespread—and frequently justified—fears of doctors. In Teed’s day, you didn’t become a surgeon if you didn’t have the stomach to wield a bone saw.
Teed also believed that he had, living within him, a spirit of some sort. He would go on to proclaim that this spirit had once empowered Enoch, Elijah, and Jesus. The New York Times headline wrote itself: “A Doctor Obtaining Money on the Ground That He is the New Messiah.” Teed called himself Koresh, a transliteration from the Hebrew version of the name Cyrus, and criticized mainstream Christianity as “the dead carcass of a once vital and active” faith. Then, in the eighteen-seventies, he founded a commune, Koreshan Unity, and announced that “the new kingdom” would be formed through women’s emancipation—he envisioned a group of celibate, bi-gendered beings—and the destruction of monopoly capitalism.
Teed is one of the case studies in “American Messiahs,” in which Morris exhumes the lives and beliefs of a linked procession of self-appointed prophets who tried to upend American religion—and the American way of life. They did so by attracting thousands (sometimes tens of thousands) of followers while preaching a version of what Morris calls “apostolic communism,” which has a clear basis in scripture. According to Acts 4:32, the first Christians, in Jerusalem, “were of one heart and soul, and no one said that any of the things that belonged to him was his own, but they had everything in common.” The typical history of Christianity will tell you that this passage has been influential in certain monastic communities but scarcely anywhere else.
Morris is out to prove this account wrong, and, in many ways, he succeeds. As it happens, a resilient strain of Christo-Marxist thinking has endured in America. Its adherents have almost always been celibate, anti-marriage, anti-family, relatively enlightened on matters of gender and race, and unblushingly communistic. The Americans who spearheaded these movements had another commonality: they all believed, in one manner or another, that they were living gods. For Morris, this fact has too often been exploited as an excuse to dismiss a radical tradition. “Far more than for their heretical beliefs,” he writes, “the communistic and anti-family leanings of American messianic movements pose a threat to the prevailing socioeconomic order.” In other words, these men and women were, morally speaking, light-years ahead of their time—and that’s why we don’t take them seriously.
It is interesting that these movements had progressive goals long before mainstream society did. One of the first prophets Morris writes about is a woman: the Quaker pacifist Jemima Wilkinson, who assumed her prophetic identity in 1776, following a bout of fever, when she was twenty-three. She called herself the Public Universal Friend, the All-Friend, and the Comforter, among other names, and answered only to male pronouns. This had less to do with modern conceptualizations of transgenderism than with Wilkinson’s belief, hinted at through four decades of missionary activity, that the spirit who inhabited her was Jesus. Wilkinson cited a passage from Jeremiah—“A woman shall compass a man”—to account for this possession by the Christ spirit, and she had an abstemious Christian desire to expunge sexual activity from the human experience. (Wilkinson shared this desire with her contemporary Ann Lee, who founded the Shakers, and who was supposed to have said that there are no “sluts in heaven.”)
Wilkinson denounced war and slavery, and her burgeoning flock was largely led by women. Her public image was helped by the fact that she was a skilled horseman, physically indomitable as she ventured into Revolutionary War zones to proclaim the nearness of the End Times. Here is Morris, in one of his typically well-tuned descriptions, relaying the sight of this gender-bending charismatic galloping across the world of George Washington:
Until well into the twentieth century, “women’s work” was highly exploitative. Not even marriage shielded women from indignity and assault, as marital rape was sanctioned by American law. Women have tended to flock to American messianic movements, Morris argues, precisely because such movements promised “equal rights among the faithful.”
For instance, the prophet Thomas Lake Harris—who, early in his career, wrote about doing psychic battle on an astral plane with Milton—ran what Morris describes as an “interracial, intergenerational, and communistic” community, which was “practically unheard of anywhere else in the country.” This was the Brotherhood of New Life, which, in the late nineteenth-century, had outposts in New York and California. Harris, too, believed that God dwelled within him, and his precepts included shared property, celibate marriages, and economies anchored by the production of wine. (He also believed that fairies lived in our bloodstream, and that “divine respiration,” a fancy breathing technique, was the key to paradise.) Like the Public Universal Friend’s incipient feminism, Lake’s “communalism” represented, in Morris’s words, “the ultimate repudiation of the values and institutions that Americans historically hold dear,” among them “the sacrosanct individualism on which American culture thrives.” This is why, Morris goes on, American messianic movements have historically found “reliable opponents in the press, in law enforcement, and in the courts.”
Teed is one of the case studies in “American Messiahs,” in which Morris exhumes the lives and beliefs of a linked procession of self-appointed prophets who tried to upend American religion—and the American way of life. They did so by attracting thousands (sometimes tens of thousands) of followers while preaching a version of what Morris calls “apostolic communism,” which has a clear basis in scripture. According to Acts 4:32, the first Christians, in Jerusalem, “were of one heart and soul, and no one said that any of the things that belonged to him was his own, but they had everything in common.” The typical history of Christianity will tell you that this passage has been influential in certain monastic communities but scarcely anywhere else.
Morris is out to prove this account wrong, and, in many ways, he succeeds. As it happens, a resilient strain of Christo-Marxist thinking has endured in America. Its adherents have almost always been celibate, anti-marriage, anti-family, relatively enlightened on matters of gender and race, and unblushingly communistic. The Americans who spearheaded these movements had another commonality: they all believed, in one manner or another, that they were living gods. For Morris, this fact has too often been exploited as an excuse to dismiss a radical tradition. “Far more than for their heretical beliefs,” he writes, “the communistic and anti-family leanings of American messianic movements pose a threat to the prevailing socioeconomic order.” In other words, these men and women were, morally speaking, light-years ahead of their time—and that’s why we don’t take them seriously.
It is interesting that these movements had progressive goals long before mainstream society did. One of the first prophets Morris writes about is a woman: the Quaker pacifist Jemima Wilkinson, who assumed her prophetic identity in 1776, following a bout of fever, when she was twenty-three. She called herself the Public Universal Friend, the All-Friend, and the Comforter, among other names, and answered only to male pronouns. This had less to do with modern conceptualizations of transgenderism than with Wilkinson’s belief, hinted at through four decades of missionary activity, that the spirit who inhabited her was Jesus. Wilkinson cited a passage from Jeremiah—“A woman shall compass a man”—to account for this possession by the Christ spirit, and she had an abstemious Christian desire to expunge sexual activity from the human experience. (Wilkinson shared this desire with her contemporary Ann Lee, who founded the Shakers, and who was supposed to have said that there are no “sluts in heaven.”)
Wilkinson denounced war and slavery, and her burgeoning flock was largely led by women. Her public image was helped by the fact that she was a skilled horseman, physically indomitable as she ventured into Revolutionary War zones to proclaim the nearness of the End Times. Here is Morris, in one of his typically well-tuned descriptions, relaying the sight of this gender-bending charismatic galloping across the world of George Washington:
Nearly every contemporary account remarks upon the dark beauty of the Comforter’s androgynous countenance: a well-apportioned female body cloaked in black robes along with a white or purple cravat, topped by a wide-brimmed hat made of gray beaver fur.It’s fair to assume that the Christ spirit did not inhabit Wilkinson, but whether she believed it did is a thornier question. Morris nods at the likeliest answer when he refers to contemporaneous critics who guessed that her transformation into the Public Universal Friend was “a grandiose stunt carried off by a woman who considered herself too clever to end up an old maid.” Indeed, Morris argues that Wilkinson—and American messianic movements writ large—often provided shelter to those trying to escape the hardships of being a woman.
Until well into the twentieth century, “women’s work” was highly exploitative. Not even marriage shielded women from indignity and assault, as marital rape was sanctioned by American law. Women have tended to flock to American messianic movements, Morris argues, precisely because such movements promised “equal rights among the faithful.”
For instance, the prophet Thomas Lake Harris—who, early in his career, wrote about doing psychic battle on an astral plane with Milton—ran what Morris describes as an “interracial, intergenerational, and communistic” community, which was “practically unheard of anywhere else in the country.” This was the Brotherhood of New Life, which, in the late nineteenth-century, had outposts in New York and California. Harris, too, believed that God dwelled within him, and his precepts included shared property, celibate marriages, and economies anchored by the production of wine. (He also believed that fairies lived in our bloodstream, and that “divine respiration,” a fancy breathing technique, was the key to paradise.) Like the Public Universal Friend’s incipient feminism, Lake’s “communalism” represented, in Morris’s words, “the ultimate repudiation of the values and institutions that Americans historically hold dear,” among them “the sacrosanct individualism on which American culture thrives.” This is why, Morris goes on, American messianic movements have historically found “reliable opponents in the press, in law enforcement, and in the courts.”
It’s true that America was shaped by extreme religious movements. Every November, we celebrate the seventeenth-century Puritans who arrived at our shore seeking religious liberty. We tend to forget that these Puritans weren’t oppressed because they were religious; they were oppressed because they were fanatics. They fled Europe to build a “city upon a hill,” a new and “primitive” Church in which equality reigned and private property was abolished. Their land reform failed, but their exceptionalism remains a vital layer of the American bedrock. As Morris writes, “the impulse to purify the group through separation from mainstream society, now regarded as the signature of a cult, could not be more fundamental to the nation’s history.”
Still, as the Puritans prove, the radical religious impulse need not be accompanied by a leader who claims to be God. At its core, the only difference between a cult and a religion is antiquity. But antiquity amounts to a lot. Among other things, it allows followers to live and believe within the parameters of a complex intellectual tradition.
A human claiming to be God, and making concomitant demands of his or her community, falls into a much simpler intellectual tradition: the cult of personality. It could be that the press, law enforcement, and the courts tend to find fault with self-appointed deities because, as often as not, they do and believe alarming things. As Morris tells us, Wilkinson, despite her abolitionist convictions, mooched her way into a mansion built with a slavery-spawned fortune. Teed was a eugenicist, and his “mind cures” often proved lethal. Harris preached equality but routinely subjected the women and children of his commune to sadistic punishment. To say that these qualities are distractions—that the real reason these messiahs were scorned is that they threatened the American order—is a hard sell.
In his author bio, Morris describes himself as “an independent scholar.” He’s a fine writer of prose, with an instinctive feel for storytelling and a genius for quotation. One senses while reading this book the ghost of the proposal behind it—the promise of a smart, revisionist take on American messianic movements. But that message is often muddled, not least because Morris is too entertaining a writer to keep from dunking on his subjects: “Obviously the death of two-thirds of the Trinity was not an auspicious sign for the community,” he writes of one cult. Of Teed, he writes, “Overthrowing capitalism with a communist mop factory proved impossible.”
The fatal flaw THE NEW Atlantis's ON COLLISION COARSE WITH THE biblical God NEW Age Movement
Prominent expressions of the NAM were carried on into more modern times in Europe and America by Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), transcendentalists like Thoreau, Emerson, and Wordsworth (early 1800s), and Theosophy introduced by Madame Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891) (The New Age Rage, pp. 22-24). The decade of the sixties witnessed a revival of Eastern mysticism as traditional values were being challenged. Zen, Carlos Castañada, the Beatles, Transcendental Meditation, and yoga all became popular.
The New Age Movement consists of an incredibly huge and well organized network consisting of thousands of groups, trusts, foundations, clubs, lodges, and religious groups whose goal and purpose is to prepare the world to enter the coming "Age Of Aquarius." A small sampling of only a few of the organizations involved would include: Amnesty International,
Zero Population Growth, California New Age Caucus, New World Alliance, World Goodwill, The Church Universal and Triumphant, The Theosophical Society, the Forum, Planetary Initiative for the World We Choose, the Club of Rome, Church Universal & Triumphant, Christian Science, and the Unity School of Christianity. This list, by no means all inclusive, demonstrates the diversity of organizations operating in economic, political, and religious spheres of influence.
The New Age movement is not a unified, traditional cult system of beliefs and practices, even though its roots derive from Eastern religions and the occult. It has no official leader, headquarters, nor membership list, but instead is a network of groups working toward specific goals. One of its main goals is to bring to the forefront a one-world leader who is called "The Christ" or "Maitreya." Nevertheless, it is estimated that there are millions of worldwide followers of various New Age practices and/or holders of one or more of the major beliefs of the New Age.
The major goal of the New Age Movement is to bring peace to the world upon entering the Age of Aquarius. This will be accomplished primarily through the leadership of "the Christ" (also known as "Lord Maitreya"), who will supposedly come to teach us to live at peace with each other. Some of the other stated goals of the movement are to establish a World Food Authority, World Water Authority, World Economic Order, and an entirely New World Order. It should be noted here that one of the requirements for a person to enter the New Age is that he or she will have to take what is known as a "Luciferic Initiation," a kind of pledge of allegiance to the Christ of the New Age and to the New World Order. The primary goals of the movement then, are to prepare the world to receive the Christ and to enter the Age of Aquarius, thus establishing the New World Order.
The New Age Movement professes a broad-minded openness to all religions, but its basic underlying philosophy represents a carefully calculated undermining of Judeo-Christian beliefs with various combinations of gnosticism and occultism. [Gnosticism is an ancient world-view stating that Divine essence is the only true or highest reality, and that the unconscious Self of man is actually this essence. It is through intuitional discovery, "visionary experience or initiation into secret doctrine" (not the plenary revelation of propositional truth in the Bible), that man becomes conscious of this true Self (Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. 10, 1968, p. 506; New Bible Dictionary, J.D.
Douglas, ed., pp. 473-474).] It bears a remarkable resemblance to the apostate world religion that H.G. Wells claimed as his own and predicted would one day take over the world. It also fits the description of "The Plan" for establishing the new world government that is described in various psychic communications from alleged E.T.'s and ascended masters. There is one more connection: the New Age Movement fits the description of the Antichrist's religion -- a rejection of the Judeo-Christian God and the declaration that Self is God. (Source: The Seduction of Christianity.)
THE ALTERMENT ARROGANCE !!
It is important for Christians to recognize even the most disguised forms of the New Age Movement. Some New Age practices are: rebirthing; inner healing; biofeedback; yoga; I Ching; reflexology; black and white magic; fire-walking; trance-channeling; therapeutic touch; transpersonal psychology; witchcraft; parapsychology; Magick; Tai Chi; Shamanism; hypnotherapy; acupuncture/acupressure; TM; martial arts; Zen; Relaxation; Erhard Seminar Training (est); Silva Method (formerly Silva Mind Control); visualization; etc. Some prominent New Agers are: Alice Bailey, Alvin Toffler, Dr. Barbara Ray, Benjamin Creme, Levi Dowling, George Trevelyan, Fritjof Capra, Abraham Maslow, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Ruth Montgomery, Shirley MacLaine, J.Z. Knight, Marilyn Ferguson, David Spangler, Jeremy Rifkin, Norman Cousins, Elizabeth Clare Prophet, John Denver, George Lucas, and Norman Lear.
Many New Agers attach great importance to artifacts, relics, and sacred objects, all of which can be profitably offered for sale: Tibetan bells, exotic herbal teas, Viking runes, solar energizers, colored candles for "chromotherapy," and a plethora of occult books, pamphlets, instructions, and tape recordings. Crystals are the favorite New Age object. These are not only thought to have mysterious healing powers, but are considered programmable, like a computer, if one just concentrates hard enough. Other New Age objects would include the rainbow; butterfly; pyramid; triangle; eye in triangle/pyramid; unicorn; Pegasus (winged-horse); swastika; yin-yang; goathead on pentagram; concentric circles; rays of light; crescent moon; etc.
New Age music is a term applied to the works of various composers and musicians who strive to create soothing audio environments rather than follow song structures. Born of an interest in spirituality and healing in the late 1970s, it is often used as an aid in meditation. The defining features of New Age music are harmonic consonance, contemplative melodies, nonlinear song forms, and uplifting themes. New Age performers may use traditional ethnic, acoustic, electric, or electronic instruments, or even sounds from nature. New Age music is meditative, almost invariably instrumental style with roots in Oriental, jazz, and classical music; often derivative, New Age compositions can sound like minimalist music or like lush evocations of the natural environment. Prominent New Age musicians include electronic-music pioneer Brian Eno, multi-instrumentalist Kitaro; solo-piano artist George Winston, vocalist Liz Story; harpist Andreas Vollenweider, and electric violinist Jean-Luc Ponty.
Athletes are using guided imagery. Graduate schools of business are invoking Zen, yoga, and tarot cards in teaching courses on creativity in business (e.g., Stanford Graduate School of Business). Stock market gurus employ Fibonacci numbers and "wave theory" in their forecasting, both based upon astrology. Even some churches teach that the best way to get to know God is to visualize Christ, ignoring that visualization is a powerful occult device. (Visualizing an entity, even God or Christ, ultimately puts one in touch with a masquerading demon.)
Endnotes
"Old Occult" -- The New Age Movement is a modern revival of very ancient, divergent, religious traditions and practices. The actual original root is squarely centered in Genesis 3:1-5, and reverberates throughout the movement's continued historical expressions. In the original lie, Satan questions God's word, His authority and benevolent rule (v. 1), disputes that death results from disobedience (v. 4), and claims that through the acquisition of secret or Gnostic wisdom man can be enlightened and can be "like God" (v. 5).
Many of the occult practices and beliefs revived by the modern NAM were a part of very early pagan cultures. Many practices common to the NAM, such as witchcraft/sorcery, spiritism, divination, (clairvoyance; seeing the future), necromancy (consulting the dead), and astrology, are clearly and strongly condemned in Scripture (Deuteronomy 18: 9-17; Isaiah 47: 9-15). These and other occultic practices were spread through the ancient magic and mystery religions of the Chaldeans, Egyptians, and most notably, the Assyrian-Babylonian culture (Ancient Empires of the New Age, pp. 15-62). Noting the scope of its continuing presence, the Bible informs Christians of Babylon's eschatological implications. The lie of Genesis 3 is significantly developed in Babylon (Isaiah 47) and continues to its ultimate state of development, revealed as Satan's one-world system at the end of the age (Revelation 17-18).
Three major world religions whose beliefs and practices are entwined with the NAM are Hinduism, a product of 5,000 years of development, Buddhism, circa 560 B.C., and Taoism, circa 500 B.C. (Eerdman's Handbook to the World's Religions, pp. 170, 221, 252). Another prominent occultic influence in Europe was Druidism, the religion of the Celts, which extended from 300 B.C. into the middle ages (Ibid., pp. 114-19). [Return to Text]
Reincarnation -- Christians should be able to demonstrate that the Bible does NOT teach reincarnation. When Jesus calls John the Baptist "Elijah," He is clearly speaking metaphorically. Luke 1:17 demonstrates that John was filling the office of Elijah, fulfilling the prophecy of Malachi 4:5-6. In fact, Elijah was seen with Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration in Matthew 17:1-3. The meaning of the resurrection is the opposite of reincarnation (Hebrews 9:27; 1 Cor. 15:12-28). Point out that if God is an impersonal force, then love and forgiveness are not possible. These are personal attributes as opposed to impersonal karmic law. Fundamentally, intercessory prayer is absolutely necessary. The battle for the souls of men is won through God's grace, intervening and drawing them to Himself.
THE GREAT DELUSION!!!
FS
Still, as the Puritans prove, the radical religious impulse need not be accompanied by a leader who claims to be God. At its core, the only difference between a cult and a religion is antiquity. But antiquity amounts to a lot. Among other things, it allows followers to live and believe within the parameters of a complex intellectual tradition.
A human claiming to be God, and making concomitant demands of his or her community, falls into a much simpler intellectual tradition: the cult of personality. It could be that the press, law enforcement, and the courts tend to find fault with self-appointed deities because, as often as not, they do and believe alarming things. As Morris tells us, Wilkinson, despite her abolitionist convictions, mooched her way into a mansion built with a slavery-spawned fortune. Teed was a eugenicist, and his “mind cures” often proved lethal. Harris preached equality but routinely subjected the women and children of his commune to sadistic punishment. To say that these qualities are distractions—that the real reason these messiahs were scorned is that they threatened the American order—is a hard sell.
In his author bio, Morris describes himself as “an independent scholar.” He’s a fine writer of prose, with an instinctive feel for storytelling and a genius for quotation. One senses while reading this book the ghost of the proposal behind it—the promise of a smart, revisionist take on American messianic movements. But that message is often muddled, not least because Morris is too entertaining a writer to keep from dunking on his subjects: “Obviously the death of two-thirds of the Trinity was not an auspicious sign for the community,” he writes of one cult. Of Teed, he writes, “Overthrowing capitalism with a communist mop factory proved impossible.”
The fatal flaw THE NEW Atlantis's ON COLLISION COARSE WITH THE biblical God NEW Age Movement
New Age or Old Occult?*
The New Age Movement (NAM) is both a religious and a social movement. In fact, Western culture is currently experiencing a phenomenal, spiritual, ideological, and sociological shift. It is a religious world view that is alien and hostile to Christianity. It's a multi-focused, multi-faceted synthesis, in varying degrees, of the Far Eastern, mystical religions, mainly Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Western Occultism, adapted to and influenced by Western, materialistic culture. It sometimes appears in secularized forms.Prominent expressions of the NAM were carried on into more modern times in Europe and America by Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), transcendentalists like Thoreau, Emerson, and Wordsworth (early 1800s), and Theosophy introduced by Madame Helena Blavatsky (1831-1891) (The New Age Rage, pp. 22-24). The decade of the sixties witnessed a revival of Eastern mysticism as traditional values were being challenged. Zen, Carlos Castañada, the Beatles, Transcendental Meditation, and yoga all became popular.
The New Age Movement consists of an incredibly huge and well organized network consisting of thousands of groups, trusts, foundations, clubs, lodges, and religious groups whose goal and purpose is to prepare the world to enter the coming "Age Of Aquarius." A small sampling of only a few of the organizations involved would include: Amnesty International,
Zero Population Growth, California New Age Caucus, New World Alliance, World Goodwill, The Church Universal and Triumphant, The Theosophical Society, the Forum, Planetary Initiative for the World We Choose, the Club of Rome, Church Universal & Triumphant, Christian Science, and the Unity School of Christianity. This list, by no means all inclusive, demonstrates the diversity of organizations operating in economic, political, and religious spheres of influence.
The New Age movement is not a unified, traditional cult system of beliefs and practices, even though its roots derive from Eastern religions and the occult. It has no official leader, headquarters, nor membership list, but instead is a network of groups working toward specific goals. One of its main goals is to bring to the forefront a one-world leader who is called "The Christ" or "Maitreya." Nevertheless, it is estimated that there are millions of worldwide followers of various New Age practices and/or holders of one or more of the major beliefs of the New Age.
The major goal of the New Age Movement is to bring peace to the world upon entering the Age of Aquarius. This will be accomplished primarily through the leadership of "the Christ" (also known as "Lord Maitreya"), who will supposedly come to teach us to live at peace with each other. Some of the other stated goals of the movement are to establish a World Food Authority, World Water Authority, World Economic Order, and an entirely New World Order. It should be noted here that one of the requirements for a person to enter the New Age is that he or she will have to take what is known as a "Luciferic Initiation," a kind of pledge of allegiance to the Christ of the New Age and to the New World Order. The primary goals of the movement then, are to prepare the world to receive the Christ and to enter the Age of Aquarius, thus establishing the New World Order.
The New Age Movement professes a broad-minded openness to all religions, but its basic underlying philosophy represents a carefully calculated undermining of Judeo-Christian beliefs with various combinations of gnosticism and occultism. [Gnosticism is an ancient world-view stating that Divine essence is the only true or highest reality, and that the unconscious Self of man is actually this essence. It is through intuitional discovery, "visionary experience or initiation into secret doctrine" (not the plenary revelation of propositional truth in the Bible), that man becomes conscious of this true Self (Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. 10, 1968, p. 506; New Bible Dictionary, J.D.
Douglas, ed., pp. 473-474).] It bears a remarkable resemblance to the apostate world religion that H.G. Wells claimed as his own and predicted would one day take over the world. It also fits the description of "The Plan" for establishing the new world government that is described in various psychic communications from alleged E.T.'s and ascended masters. There is one more connection: the New Age Movement fits the description of the Antichrist's religion -- a rejection of the Judeo-Christian God and the declaration that Self is God. (Source: The Seduction of Christianity.)
THE ALTERMENT ARROGANCE !!
It is important for Christians to recognize even the most disguised forms of the New Age Movement. Some New Age practices are: rebirthing; inner healing; biofeedback; yoga; I Ching; reflexology; black and white magic; fire-walking; trance-channeling; therapeutic touch; transpersonal psychology; witchcraft; parapsychology; Magick; Tai Chi; Shamanism; hypnotherapy; acupuncture/acupressure; TM; martial arts; Zen; Relaxation; Erhard Seminar Training (est); Silva Method (formerly Silva Mind Control); visualization; etc. Some prominent New Agers are: Alice Bailey, Alvin Toffler, Dr. Barbara Ray, Benjamin Creme, Levi Dowling, George Trevelyan, Fritjof Capra, Abraham Maslow, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Ruth Montgomery, Shirley MacLaine, J.Z. Knight, Marilyn Ferguson, David Spangler, Jeremy Rifkin, Norman Cousins, Elizabeth Clare Prophet, John Denver, George Lucas, and Norman Lear.
Many New Agers attach great importance to artifacts, relics, and sacred objects, all of which can be profitably offered for sale: Tibetan bells, exotic herbal teas, Viking runes, solar energizers, colored candles for "chromotherapy," and a plethora of occult books, pamphlets, instructions, and tape recordings. Crystals are the favorite New Age object. These are not only thought to have mysterious healing powers, but are considered programmable, like a computer, if one just concentrates hard enough. Other New Age objects would include the rainbow; butterfly; pyramid; triangle; eye in triangle/pyramid; unicorn; Pegasus (winged-horse); swastika; yin-yang; goathead on pentagram; concentric circles; rays of light; crescent moon; etc.
New Age music is a term applied to the works of various composers and musicians who strive to create soothing audio environments rather than follow song structures. Born of an interest in spirituality and healing in the late 1970s, it is often used as an aid in meditation. The defining features of New Age music are harmonic consonance, contemplative melodies, nonlinear song forms, and uplifting themes. New Age performers may use traditional ethnic, acoustic, electric, or electronic instruments, or even sounds from nature. New Age music is meditative, almost invariably instrumental style with roots in Oriental, jazz, and classical music; often derivative, New Age compositions can sound like minimalist music or like lush evocations of the natural environment. Prominent New Age musicians include electronic-music pioneer Brian Eno, multi-instrumentalist Kitaro; solo-piano artist George Winston, vocalist Liz Story; harpist Andreas Vollenweider, and electric violinist Jean-Luc Ponty.
Athletes are using guided imagery. Graduate schools of business are invoking Zen, yoga, and tarot cards in teaching courses on creativity in business (e.g., Stanford Graduate School of Business). Stock market gurus employ Fibonacci numbers and "wave theory" in their forecasting, both based upon astrology. Even some churches teach that the best way to get to know God is to visualize Christ, ignoring that visualization is a powerful occult device. (Visualizing an entity, even God or Christ, ultimately puts one in touch with a masquerading demon.)
Endnotes
"Old Occult" -- The New Age Movement is a modern revival of very ancient, divergent, religious traditions and practices. The actual original root is squarely centered in Genesis 3:1-5, and reverberates throughout the movement's continued historical expressions. In the original lie, Satan questions God's word, His authority and benevolent rule (v. 1), disputes that death results from disobedience (v. 4), and claims that through the acquisition of secret or Gnostic wisdom man can be enlightened and can be "like God" (v. 5).
Many of the occult practices and beliefs revived by the modern NAM were a part of very early pagan cultures. Many practices common to the NAM, such as witchcraft/sorcery, spiritism, divination, (clairvoyance; seeing the future), necromancy (consulting the dead), and astrology, are clearly and strongly condemned in Scripture (Deuteronomy 18: 9-17; Isaiah 47: 9-15). These and other occultic practices were spread through the ancient magic and mystery religions of the Chaldeans, Egyptians, and most notably, the Assyrian-Babylonian culture (Ancient Empires of the New Age, pp. 15-62). Noting the scope of its continuing presence, the Bible informs Christians of Babylon's eschatological implications. The lie of Genesis 3 is significantly developed in Babylon (Isaiah 47) and continues to its ultimate state of development, revealed as Satan's one-world system at the end of the age (Revelation 17-18).
Three major world religions whose beliefs and practices are entwined with the NAM are Hinduism, a product of 5,000 years of development, Buddhism, circa 560 B.C., and Taoism, circa 500 B.C. (Eerdman's Handbook to the World's Religions, pp. 170, 221, 252). Another prominent occultic influence in Europe was Druidism, the religion of the Celts, which extended from 300 B.C. into the middle ages (Ibid., pp. 114-19). [Return to Text]
Reincarnation -- Christians should be able to demonstrate that the Bible does NOT teach reincarnation. When Jesus calls John the Baptist "Elijah," He is clearly speaking metaphorically. Luke 1:17 demonstrates that John was filling the office of Elijah, fulfilling the prophecy of Malachi 4:5-6. In fact, Elijah was seen with Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration in Matthew 17:1-3. The meaning of the resurrection is the opposite of reincarnation (Hebrews 9:27; 1 Cor. 15:12-28). Point out that if God is an impersonal force, then love and forgiveness are not possible. These are personal attributes as opposed to impersonal karmic law. Fundamentally, intercessory prayer is absolutely necessary. The battle for the souls of men is won through God's grace, intervening and drawing them to Himself.
THE GREAT DELUSION!!!
FS
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