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Old 11-15-2008, 01:36 AM   #2
Heretic
Avalon Senior Member
 
Join Date: Sep 2008
Location: Now
Posts: 371
Default Re: Are Our Religious Idea's Our Own?

The New Age Movement:

Quote:
Originally Posted by Wikipedia

The New Age Movement/New Age Spirituality is a decentralized western social and spiritual movement that seeks Universal Truth and the attainment of the highest individual human potential. It combines aspects of spirituality, cosmology, esotericism, complementary and alternative medicine, various religious practices, humanism, collectivism, nature, and environmentalism. It is characterized by an eclectic and individual approach to spirituality with a general rejection of mainstream dogma and religion. The term New Age refers to the coming Astrological Age of Aquarius.

The New Age Movement first appeared as an entity in the 1960s and 1970s, although elements can be traced back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It gained momentum in the 1980s and strengthened with the Harmonic Convergence event of 1987. New Age practices and philosophies are found among many diverse individuals from around the world and range from atheism and monotheism to classical pantheism, including naturalistic pantheism or panentheism.

The New Age Movement includes elements of older spiritual and religious traditions combined with science, particularly ecology, environmentalism, the Gaia hypothesis, and psychology. New Age practices and philosophies sometimes draw inspiration from major world religions: Buddhism, Chinese folk religion, Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, and Sufism; with particularly strong influences from East Asian religions, Gnosticism, Neopaganism, New Thought, Spiritualism, Universalism, and Western esotericism.

New Age Spirituality has led to a wide array of literature on the subject and an active niche market: books, New Age music, crafts, and services in alternative medicine are available at New Age stores, fairs, and festivals.

Additional phrases are used to describe The New Age Movement: Self Spirituality, New Spirituality, Mind-Body-Spirit, Cultural Creative, Everyone Is Equal, New Paradigm, and All Is One.

As a result of the large scale activities surrounding the Harmonic Convergence, in the mid 1980s, the term was further popularized by the American mass media to describe the alternative spiritual subculture, including activities all the way from meditation, channeling, reincarnation, crystals, psychic experience, to holistic health or environmentalism, or belief in anomalous phenomena, or for other “unsolved mysteries” such as UFOs, Earth mysteries and crop circles.
This ideology should sound familiar to some of you and at least some aspects of this New Age Spirituality is a theological improvement to many who feel we need a spiritual “upgrade”. Can it be claimed as being brought forth by honest good folk who have humanity’s best interest at heart? Could this ideology have been planted into our reality just as we see new ideologies planted in our reality today via many channeled publications, and alleged alien contacts? Is it indeed original, just being remembered (past lives), or has it been taught to us by “tutors”?

The New Age Movement seems to have first emerged in the 1960’s counter-cultural movement based on love, peace, harmony, equality, and all of the “anti” leagues which watch-dogged and denounced the warmongering and manipulative government of the times. Does this not sound familiar? Are we still in that same movement now? Did we not see people become organized in expressing the ethos, aspirations, and dreams of the “hippie” population during that era, which changed the way we looked at our industrialized world and the threats inherited from it even today?
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