Thinking Christian

Someone sent me a link to this YouTube video on “The Church of Oprah Exposed.” Oprah Winfrey has launched a series of webcasts in partnership with New Age author Eckhart Tolle, and claims viewership of 2 million people. I invite you–Christians, in particular–to view the YouTube video. I think it’s pretty persuasive, especially for those who begin with a Biblical mindset, but I’m not going to comment further on that here. Instead I’ve gone to Oprah’s website to see what she has to say for herself. (I’ll come back to the video in a bit also.)

Actually, the most telling reading on Oprah’s site was from Tolle. There is, for example, an excerpt from his book A New Earth. It gets off to a classic New Age beginning:

Is humanity ready for a transformation of consciousness, an inner flowering so radical and profound that compared to it the flowering of plants, no matter how beautiful, is only a pale reflection? Can human beings lose the density of their conditioned mind structures and become like crystals or precious stones, so to speak, transparent to the light of consciousness? Can they defy the gravitational pull of materialism and materiality and rise above identification with form that keeps the ego in place and condemns them to imprisonment within their own personality?

The possibility of such a transformation has been the central message of the great wisdom teachings of humankind. The messengers—Buddha, Jesus, and others, not all of them known—were humanity’s early flowers. They were precursors, rare and precious beings.

Regarding Tolle’s teachings,

This online class is not for or against any religion. It is intended to help all human beings, all over the world, bring about a shift in consciousness. Eckhart says, “How spiritual you are has nothing to do with what you believe but everything to do with your state of consciousness…. When I occasionally quote the words of Jesus or the Buddha…or from other teachings, I do so not in order to compare, but to draw your attention to the fact that in essence there is and always has been only one spiritual teaching, although it comes in many forms.

I do not accuse Tolle of willful deception. For all I know, he may be fully convinced this is true. Nevertheless this is entirely wrong. These sorts of things are commonly believed among adherents of new spirituality, but they are quite simply and thoroughly false.

In one aspect, the New Age is not wrong: in its calling persons to spirituality. I have written in support of that, as has Christian psychologist and author Henry Cloud. I fully endorse the search for something deeper, stronger, better than day-to-day material existence.

But this new spirituality is wrong–most obviously wrong, that is–in its claim that it supports, completes, and unites all the sages’ wisdom. This cannot be done, and I object in strongest terms to the distortion of Christianity–and of Jesus Christ himself–that this entails.

Jesus Christ did not say that spiritual fulfillment is about developing a new state of consciousness. He most decidedly did not say (as new spirituality proponents typically do) that it’s about recognizing one’s own divinity. He did not say, as Oprah did in the video linked above, that “There couldn’t possibly be one way;” that there are millions of paths to God. He did not say, as Oprah said in the video, “God, in the essence of all consciousness, isn’t something to believe, God is; and God is a feeling experience, not a believing experience… if God for you is still about a belief, then it’s not truly God.”

In fact, when Jesus rebuked his followers it was for their lack of belief. He said he was the one way to the Father. He said that spiritual fulfillment comes from recognizing we are not God, that we need God, and that we can only come to God through recognizing and believing who he is, how we fall short, and how he graciously draws us to himself anyway through Christ. Tolle cannot reconcile that with his supposedly all-inclusive teachings.

Supposedly all-inclusive, I emphasize. In another video Tolle says that “the moment you say that only my belief or our belief is true, and you deny other people’s beliefs, then you’ve adopted an ideology, and then religion becomes a closed door.” Mr. Tolle, I ask you this: do you believe that? Do you then deny what I wrote in the previous two paragraphs? You say you are not for or against any religion; but Christianity does claim to have an exclusive claim through Jesus Christ: are you not opposed to that exclusive claim?

Christianity’s scandal in today’s mindset, which I have fairly emblazoned in fire across this page, is its exclusivism, its claim that it is true and contradictory beliefs are false. For this I do not apologize. It is nothing more nor less than saying that what we believe is true, we believe is true. Tolle, for his part, is saying that if his way is true, then Christ’s claims are false. He excludes my religious beliefs. In fact all belief systems are exclusivistic. (Hindu teachers in Asia are appalled at Western versions of Eastern religions that claim to accept all truths as equal. They at least know better.)

Yet, oh, this new spirituality sounds so inviting! It sounds so marvelous that we could enter into a new form of consciousness and find the freedom we so desperately want! Indeed there is freedom to be sought and to be found, in Christ. There is light, and enlightenment, and spiritual guidance, and refreshment, and all the things the New Agers tell us they can provide. There is also one thing they cannot offer: truth. For their way is patently self-contradictory, and further, it requires us to believe that we are God ourselves, that we have it within ourselves to solve all our own eternal problems (really, now!) and that Christ’s life, his death on the cross, and his resurrection were just one among many of the universe’s nice ideas.

I have great sympathy with the new spirituality’s rejection of modernist materialism. Thus far, so good. The rest, however, is rubbish.

Related: Knowing the True God

Commenter Havok has been asking for evidences that could convince him that Christianity is true. He has been asking for the answer to one type of question in particular, as here:

But there are many different Gods experienced. Some claim Yahweh, others Jesus, others Allah, others Ganesh etc. With all of these conflicting experiences, how can you trust that any one experience is accurate? To me, they all seem to be based on the same evidence, that is personal testimony of an internal revelation.

Given that there are many different religions, how can we have confidence that one of them is true? That’s a big question, and I’m relaxing on a Friday evening, I’m going to ask you for help with it. If you’re willing to do this with me, we’re going to define the question more clearly. I’d like your answers to this:

Assume for the sake of discussion that there is one true religion, that it can be known to be true, and that its truth means that contrary beliefs are false. How could its truth be known? What might be some indicators of its being more trustworthy and reliable than other beliefs?

I’m not asking for answers in the form “here is the test and this is why Christianity passes,” or conversely “this is why Christianity fails.” I’m just asking for the first part of it: what would you consider to be the kind of thing that might indicate the truth of a religion? If you want to tell us you think Christianity does or does not measure up to your test, that’s fine, but you need not go into how it succeeds or falls short. We’ll come back to that very soon. For now, I’d be interested just to know what readers think would constitute a useful truth test for a religion.

Please think in terms of real-world tests. I’m not asking for signs like, “If God wrote Jesus’ name on every brick in the world, then I’d know.” Even those of you who are skeptics or atheists might be able to think of tests like that. You could think about how you might fill in X here: “If I were to find out that X, then I might believe that Y was the one true religion.”

I hope this is clear. Thanks for participating!

A few days ago I confidently announced I was going to blog my way through J.P. Moreland’s Christianity and the Nature of Science: A Philosophical Investigation. What I failed to recognize was that the first chapter is considerably more “bloggable” than the rest. I’m scaling back my plans now.

Moreland’s book began with the difficulty of strictly defining what science is or is not. Within his set of reasons there was one easily extracted subset, from Judge Overton’s decision in a creation science trial. The conclusions Moreland drew were both significant and relatively uncontroversial, as witnessed by neo-Darwinist Michael Ruse’s general agreement. All this made it rather easy to blog.

I let myself think the rest of the book would be similarly easy to condense, but it isn’t. (I should have known better from the start.) Though it’s not my first time reading the book, it’s the first time I’ve done it with blogging in mind, and now I’ve recognized it won’t all summarize into this format.

There are some things I will come back to, like the misconceptions surrounding the “scientific method” we all learned in school: science doesn’t always use it, science doesn’t only use it (other disciplines employ many of the same methods). There’s some very fascinating stuff there to discuss.

But I’m backing off on my plans to cover it all. It won’t condense that way. That opens the door again, though, for me to make a strong recommendation: get yourself a copy and read it! Agree or disagree with what he has to say–either way, you’ll find a lot to learn in it.

First Things has published Anthony Sacramone’s review of Vox Day’s book, The Irrational Atheist: Dissecting the Unholy Trinity of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens. It includes:

To take just one of many examples, a common trope among atheists is that religion is the No. 1 cause of wars in history. “If religion were an important element of warmaking, one would expect to find a great deal of text commenting upon it,” Day writes. But you don’t. After reading the great war theorists, from Sun Tzu to Von Clausewitz, Day found pages and pages about perseverance, spies, geometry, inspirational music—but virtually nothing about religion.

As for the nature of the wars themselves, talk about specific: Day found 123 wars that could validly be claimed to have religion at their heart—a grand total of 6.98 percent of all wars fought. “It’s also interesting to note that more than half of these religious wars, sixty-six in all, were waged by Islamic nations,” Day offers as an aside.

About 7% of identifiable wars in history war fought for religious reasons. Most of those were initiated by Muslims. This does not justify any war fought for the purpose of advancing Christianity. But it certainly puts the lie to beliefs that Christianity bears the blame for a large part of the violence in world history.

We might as well add this current item to the point, too: 150 million murdered in the 20th century–by whom?

Hat Tip: One Eternal Day

Robert Spencer writes of religion and slavery in world history, including:

[T]he pressure to end [slavery] moved from Christendom into Islam, not the other way around. There was no Muslim Clarkson, Wilberforce, or Garrison. In fact, when the British government in the nineteenth century adopted the view of Wilberforce and the other abolitionists as its own and thereupon began to put pressure on pro-slavery regimes, the Sultan of Morocco was incredulous precisely because of the audacity of the innovation that the British were proposing: “The traffic in slaves,” he noted, “is a matter on which all sects and nations have agreed from the time of the sons of Adam . . . up to this day.”

…

There is evidence that slavery still continues beneath the surface in some majority-Muslim countries as well—notably Saudi Arabia, which only abolished slavery in 1962, Yemen and Oman, both of which ended legal slavery in 1970, and Niger, which didn’t abolish slavery until 2004. In Niger, the ban is widely ignored, and as many as one million people remain in bondage. Slaves are bred, often raped, and generally treated like animals.

Some of the evidence that Islamic slavery still goes on consists of a spate of slavery cases involving Muslims in the United States.

[From FIRST THINGS: On the Square » Blog Archive » Slavery, Christianity, and Islam]
The entire article provides important historical and religious perspective on a practice that most tragically has not yet ended.