The Forum > Article Comments > Tolerance > Comments
Tolerance : Comments
By Gary Brown, published 10/3/2006The key is tolerance: let them go to hell, if that’s their destiny in your view, in their own way.
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"Pantheism is the permanent natural bent of the human mind. It is the attitude into which the mind automatically falls when left to itself"- C.S.Lewis. The imaginary companions of many children can be compared to the familiar spirits of shamanism. In a rational environment the child will be socialized away from these "visions". In a primitive society, the hallucinations and imaginings will be encouraged.
The real distinction between New Age and orthodox monotheism is that New Age is based on magical thinking. I.e. the individual will is able to control fate. Immanence implies that the individual is divine, therefore can control fate. New Age is an attempt at re-enchantment, a liberation of the repressed irrational part of man. Magic comes from the tradition which is outside of the consciousness of historical time.
Secularism, thought to be the final destination of the modern world, is now seen as merely a bridge to New Age.
"The magical heritage casts a threatening and possibly permanent shadow over all of man's other creations, and could suddenly overwhelm civilized cultures."
The New Age is a reemergence of Gnosticism, a new Hellenistic age. Historically, receiving Gnosis, the individual is awakened and knows that he is divine. [at first] disenfranchised upper class Jewish intellectuals were the most common converts to Gnosticism. Later it became Hellenized. Gnosticism is individualistic. They believed that the soul of each individual has a spark of the divine. Inner illumination, spiritual elitism, libertinism, asceticism, and anti-institutionalism were typical of Gnosticism.
The Transcendentalists Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, Alcott, etc, believed that the divine exists in all persons. They favored intuition over reason. Is intuition nothing more than a reasoning too complex to be explained simply, or is it the release of deep irrational animal instincts?
New Age is as much political as religious.