What is the conflict between Christianity vs New Age teaching techniques or methods? What is old-time religion, and how does it relate to Christianity and the new age movement? Are these philosophies as far apart as many led us to believe? Come and find the answers to these and other interesting questions.
The influence of science has increased in the last 100 years. More people are challenging the validity of traditional teachings like Christianity. Rejecting old-time religion in America is a trend. This way of thinking falls under the umbrella of new-age thought. But when we examine Christianity and New Age thought, we find they share a common genesis. We also see the contrast between New Age teaching methods and Christianity.
What is The New Age Movement
Let’s start by breaking down some terms. The word “new” means something that has not existed before. It is something created, introduced, or discovered recently or now for the first time.
The term “age” is a period defined by significant historical markers. For example, the Bronze Age is the period in the 3rd century BC.
The word “age” can also apply to religious or philosophical movements. For example, the dark ages began in the mid-1300s to the mid-1600s. It is the period when the Church exerted its force. It used the Holy Inquisition to solidify its power in society.
The term “new age movement” was first used to describe the human potential movement of the 1970s. It now includes all methods of science and Eastern philosophy. So, everything that comes from outside the Church is considered new age.
New Age Teaching Techniques
A technique is a skill, method, or procedure for doing something. The terms new age and teaching methods or techniques are used in several disciplines.
In education and business, “new age” denotes a culture that encourages creativity. It consciously provides people with different opportunities to create new ideas. They frequently use brainstorming exercises to spark creative problem-solving.
In the New Age Movement, we are talking about self-development processes. These are practices that come from diverse cultures and eras. It includes techniques like seated and moving meditation, energy work, and mindfulness practices.
New Age teaching techniques integrate ancient wisdom with contemporary understanding. It is an inclusive approach to spirituality that transcends traditional religious institutions. Rather than subscribing to a singular doctrine, it recognizes the individual’s autonomy. This inspires the exploration of practices that resonate with their personal truth. It creates a holistic framework fit for modern life, cultivating spiritual growth and self-discovery.
New Age Teaching Methods Focus
These processes encompass a broad spectrum of spiritual practices rooted in traditional wisdom. At the same time, they embrace esoteric teachings and modern innovations. These novel approaches aim to uplift the human consciousness. These tools harmonize the mind-body-spirit connection and promote personal transformation. They move humankind toward wholeness and spiritual enlightenment.
At its core, the New Age Movement seeks to redefine spirituality. It promotes individual autonomy to create your own path. It rejects the idea we should submit to the authority of others in spiritual matters. It believes people are capable of making their own decisions. And people should be free to seek their personal spiritual truths. This path emphasizes personal responsibility, self-improvement, and ensuring harmony with the surrounding world.
1. Spiritual Healing. New Age teaching techniques promote alternative healing methods such as energy healing and Reiki. These practices assist in the restoration of one’s physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being.
2. Meditation and Mindfulness. Meditation plays a significant role in the New Age Movement. It is a proven way to connect with our inner selves, cultivate peace, and achieve spiritual growth. Mindfulness techniques focus our attention on living in the present moment. All forms of meditation are good for your health.
3. Spiritual Exploration. Another notable aspect of the New Age Movement involves using the Shamanic journey. Here travel imaginary landscape to uncover hidden mysteries of their psyche. This New Age teaching method is one of the first tools ever devised to explore consciousness. The enneagram personality profile is another tool with ancient roots. Many believe it is the father of modern psychiatry. It uses a questionnaire to unmask the mechanisms of personality and instinct.
4. Awareness Expansion. It uses a variety of tools to expand self and external awareness. For example, you’ll find methods from creating a memory palace to lucid dreaming and automatic handwriting. These methods expand the capability of the mind.
What is the Strategy Behind Them?
But is the strategy behind the new age movement a new idea? No. The design behind this philosophy isn’t new at all. There’s a well-known strategy at its core. It combines ideas with a common theme to create something new. You can find evidence of this strategy in several ancient religions. It’s reflected in the stories of Zoroaster (1), Mithra (2), and even Christianity (3), to modern-day Sages like George Gurdjieff (4).
Gurdjieff traveled throughout Europe to research spiritual systems and practices. Then he created his own system by combining and renaming these practices. He set up schools to test and teach his processes. This type of rebranding effort isn’t new. Modern religions use a similar strategy but with a different goal and focus. The human potential movement focuses on self-development, not mythology.
What is Old-Time Religion?
The term comes from a traditional gospel song by the same name dating from 1873. The Fundamentalist Christian Church uses this term to describe its beliefs. But rejecting old-time religion in America isn’t easy in some places. It seems the Inquisition has not ended. Today, the battlefield is being fought in the courts for the personal autonomy rights of the female gender.
“For nearly a century, the moral relativism of science has given faith-based religion — that great engine of ignorance and bigotry — a nearly uncontested claim to being the only universal framework for moral wisdom. As a result, the most powerful societies on earth spend their time debating issues like gay marriage when they should be focused on problems like nuclear proliferation, genocide, energy security, climate change, poverty, and failing schools.” — Sam Harris
Every religion has demons... Nothing like a real, live demon to give you some of that old-time religion.” — Laurell K. Hamilton
Judaism is the oldest branch of the Abrahamic tree. It dates back 4000 years to the Mesopotamian sects in Babylon. (5) Specific pages from The Code of Hammurabi or Hammurabi (1750 BCE) are found in the Tanakh, which became part of the Christian Old Testament. Hammurabi was the sixth and best-known ruler of Babylon’s 1st (Amorite) dynasty. At the core, Judaism is a cult based on ethnic heritage.
What is Christianity
At its core, Christianity revolves around the teachings of the Avatar Jesus Christ. Christian doctrine emphasizes the belief in God, who reveals Himself as the Holy Trinity. It leverages the Assyrian concept of mitigated dualism, the Good God and the Bad God, the Devil.
One of the central tenets of Christianity is the concept of salvation. Without it, you are doomed to an eternity in Hell. Christians believe that through faith, they attain salvation and eternal life. Salvation hinges on admitting one’s sinful nature and proclaiming Jesus as the Son of God and Savior. Then one must maintain good standing with the Church. The fear of losing salvation instills believers with a sense of purpose.
Christians practice various rituals to deepen their faith. Worship services, prayers, and sacraments like baptism and Holy Communion are signs of devotion. Financial and political support are also key ingredients. The conflict between Christianity vs New Age teaching methods has left room for radical extremists to take charge. Religious Right or Alt-Right Extremists are prominent in the Republican political party.
Christianity started to compile doctrine around 100 CE. The New Testament books were revised and edited into the 2nd century. And the doctrines included the dying-God cults of the Mediterranean region Circa 4000 BCE. This was where the story of the sacrificial dying God was created.
Christianity is not a new religion. It results from the first successful large-scale rebranding effort. How did they do it? They used an army to convince these religions in place to join their cause. Then they renamed everything and standardized practices. This rebranding covered all the new Roman territories of the Mediterranean region. The effort created enough cash to create a Vatican city-state.
Western theology takes doctrine and ritual from all these systems and combines them. Here, you can find doctrines and practices from Egypt, Babylon, Persia, and Assyria. They are all repackaged into a global cash flow machine.
Islam is the latter of the three Abrahamic religions beginning around 600 CE. Here, the prophet Muhammad is to have received divine inspiration for writing the Quran. This text mirrors much of the philosophy of the Tanakh.
The strategy to combine several systems provides the Church with vast cultural reach. It’s an intelligent way to get the greatest return on investment — no need to keep an army in place.
The umbrella of Christianity contains many variations. Each of the 20,000 sects claims to have the correct interpretation. But more and more people are rejecting old-time religion in America. It brings the conflict of Christianity vs New Age Teaching to the surface.
“Religion is like our appendix. It’s, a vestigial remnant from a primitive past. Perhaps in a few millennia, the god of Abraham will invoke the same curious amusem*nt as the rain and sun gods do today. Or perhaps our god will simply be shelved along with Zeus and Jupiter. Some day. But until then, we suffer the consequences of a population that believes in the absence of evidence and, more curiously, rejects an objective reality that conflicts with beliefs easily proven false.” — Jeff Schweitzer
I think there’s an awful lot of noise about the Church being persecuted, but there is a more real issue that the conventional churches face. The people who are really driving their revival and success believe in an old-time religion which, in my view, is incompatible with a modern, multi-ethnic, multicultural society.” — Trevor Phillips
The focus of Western theology is on selling the afterlife. And it is the perfect intangible product. There are never any unsatisfied customers. You only get the benefits when you are dead. If you can’t sell heaven, sell afterlife insurance against going to Hell. Nobody wants to spend eternity in torment.
You would think they would be happy to talk about the origins of these doctrines, but they do not. They don’t want the public to know their doctrines come from these mystery religions. They document the sources in some of their internal documents. The 1907 version of the Catholic Encyclopedia provides such an admission. Notice the content hidden within the following poetic language.
“Symbolism in a greater or lesser degree is essential to every kind of external worship, and we need not shrink from the conclusion that in the matter of baptisms and washings, of genuflection’s and other acts of reverence, of lights and sweet-smelling incense, of flowers and white vestitures, of spiritual unction’s and the imposing of hands, of sacrifice and the rite of the Communion banquet, the Church has borrowed without hesitation from the common stock of significant actions known to all periods and all nations. In such matters as these, Christianity claims no monopoly or originality.” — The Catholic Encyclopedia and International Work, Vol. 14 (1907) (6)
Christianity vs New Age Teaching Methods
When you ask what is old-time religion, you are asking about a secondary label for Christianity. It is nothing more than the ancient mystery religions under a new name—an ingenious cash-flow system. You don’t want to threaten the customer base of a major religion. The result can be undesirable, like what happened during the dark ages. The Church went on a campaign we know as the Inquisition. This questioning included the use of public torture and execution. Then the Chuch confiscated their land.
The clash of Christianity vs New Age teaching techniques and methods is about two different goals. The focus of Western religion is on cash flow. The focus of the human potential movement is on self-development. They use the same strategy of combining systems but with different goals and focus.
The human potential movement of the 1970s threatened the control of all the Abrahamic religions. They could not use tactics like the Inquisition in most modern cultures. So they resorted to less violent means. Demonization still works well. It makes your competition undesirable. When people in the Church ask their leaders what is the new age movement, the common answer is it is something evil against God.
Rejecting old-time religion in America and other parts of the world is still considered a serious crime. If you reject their beliefs, you are a heretic, and they persecute heretics. Islam and Judaism have similar views on those who challenge their customer base. This is because New Age teaching methods expose the inconsistencies and hypocrisy of these religions.
Kersey Graves was a researcher of the 18th century (7). He thought exposing the truth of the origins of the Abrahamic would end the control of these religions. But he underestimated the power of religious indoctrination.
“The present custom of orthodox Christendom, in packing their sins upon the back of a God, is just the same substantially as that of various heathen nations who were in the habit of packing them upon the backs of various dumb animals.” — Kersey Graves
Rejecting Old-Time Religion in America
The religions of Abraham are the most influential institutions on the planet. Their values and beliefs dominate the cultural narrative. They control governments directly or indirectly. Sharia law of Islam controls Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, and Indonesia.
The laws of Christianity still dominate the West. Judaism is the state religion of Israel. The conflict of New Age vs. Christianity is becoming more prominent in the USA. Here laws are being enacted which erase many women’s gains in human rights.
We can measure spiritual ideologies. They run along a continuum from healthy to unhealthy. We find those that promote harmony, equality, and freethinking on the healthy side. Buddhism and most pagan belief systems are on this side.
On the unhealthy side, we find those which promote sectarian ideologies. Their systems prohibit freethinking while promoting favoritism and inequality. You can spot them easily. Western organized religion falls on the unhealthy side of the continuum. The Abrahamic faiths are significant for their promotion of harmful values. They sponsor racial, ethnic, and gender discrimination. These religions want to return humanity to iron-age beliefs.
The ancient philosophies which promote human development pre-date organized religion. They have no imaginary friends or enemies, processes for exploring consciousness. You do not need a religion to engage in spiritual exploration. All you need are processes that expand your awareness.
Contrasting Christianity and New Age Thought
While both Christianity and New Age Thought share a common method of construction. They are a rebranding of previous ideas and concepts. They differ significantly in many aspects.
1. Source of Authority. Christianity and old-time religion are grounded in religious texts of divine inspiration. They rely on divine revelations, teachings, and doctrines as guiding principles. In contrast, the New Age Movement allows for a more subjective interpretation of spirituality. It emphasizes personal experiences and individual beliefs.
2. Deity Concept. Traditional religions often focus on a singular, all-powerful deity, such as the God of Christianity. The New Age Movement, on the other hand, embraces a broader spectrum. It recognizes the existence of multiple deities, cosmic energies, and the divine within oneself. Or, no gods at all.
3. Community and Congregational Worship. Traditional religions place a strong emphasis on communal worship. They use these to create a sense of belonging. In contrast, the New Age Movement promotes individual exploration and spiritual development.
In Conclusion
Combining and rebranding practices to create a new system isn’t new. This is the same tactic used by the Abrahamic religions and the human potential movement. In this respect, they are the same. But this is the only thing they have in common. Their goals and practices are very different.
The philosophy of the new age movement is about developing human potential. Let this be your focus. Many people are rejecting old-time religion in America. Let’s join them to create a healthier world.
Do you have a different view of the subject? Please send us your comments and recommendations for further research.
References
(1) Zoroaster.
(2) Mithra.
(3) Jesus.
(4) George Gurdjieff.
(5) Judaism.
(6) The Catholic Encyclopedia and International Work, Vol. 14 (1907)
(7) Kersey Graves, The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors 1881.
(8) Joseph Campbell’s book The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
