Muddling Toward Maturity Blog

DEEPAK CHOPRA

I don't know anything more about this event other than the short YouTube video below.  At the very least, Deepak Chopra looks very foolish indeed.  (HT: Wintery Knight)

HUGH HEWITT: DEEPAK CHOPRA'S HATE SPEECH

Ironic, isn't it, that the Left complains about "hate speech," but employs it repeatedly.   Hugh Hewitt writes:

President Obama signed “hate crimes” legislation last week, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued a statement praising the new law, saying that in “this country, no one should suffer persecution, discrimination or violence because of who they are, how they look or what they believe.”

Amen to that thought, and amen especially to the idea of protecting belief, including beliefs unpopular within liberal opinion elites. Perhaps the president and the speaker can find some time to let their left-wing supporters know that the accusation of hate is itself hateful, and that slanders against Christians for holding to their beliefs and the beliefs of hundreds of generations of Christians before them are as repugnant to them as the verbal attacks by bigots on people of color.

Spiritualist Deepak Chopra comes to mind as one of the Left’s loudest purveyors of hate speech. Chopra has a problem with the beliefs of mainstream Christianity and its place in America and

ECKHART TOLLE'S "A NEW EARTH" UNDER REVIEW

Steve Cable offers a review of Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth.  He titles his review, "Oprah's Spirituality: Exploring "A New Earth".  - I've not read Tolle's book, but the review looks substantive to me.

JONAH GOLDBERG - HITLER & CHRISTIANITY

In a series of posts (here and here) Jonah Goldberg has excerpted pages from his book Liberal Fascism that deal with "Hitler &  Christianity."  If you read further down this post, you will see tie-ins Goldberg makes with neo-pagan and New Age thought.  Goldberg writes:   

From pages 364-365 of my book:

Like the engineers of that proverbial railway bridge, the Nazis
worked relentlessly to replace the nuts and bolts of traditional
Christianity with a new political religion. The shrewdest way to accomplish
this was to co-opt Christianity via the Gleichschaltung
while at the same time shrinking traditional religion’s role in civil society.
To this end, Hitler was downright Bismarckian. The German
historian Götz Aly explains how Hitler purchased popularity with
lavish social welfare programs and middle-class perks, often paid for
with stolen Jewish wealth and high taxes on the rich. Hitler banned
religious charity, crippling the churches’ role as a counterweight to
the state. Clergy were put on government salary, hence subjected to
state authority. “The parsons will be made to dig their own graves,”
Hitler cackled. “They will betray their God to us. They will betray
anything for the sake of their miserable little jobs and incomes.”5
Following the Jacobin example, the Nazis replaced the traditional
Christian calendar. The new year began on January 30 with

RECENT POSTS FROM DENVER SEMINARY PROFESSOR DOUGLAS GROOTHUIS (A.K.A. "THE CONSTRUCTIVE CURMUDGEON")

-- Groothuis, as many readers know, first achieved name recognition for being one of the first out of the gate evaluating the New Age movement.  He did so with sober, reliable, scholarly, yet readable treatments in such books as  Unmasking the New Age, Confronting the New Age and Jesus in an Age of Controversy, plus his little InterVarsity booklet, Are All Religions One?

A couple of days ago he posted the entirety of his article, "The New Age Jesus," which first appeared in Areopagus Journal (Nov-Dec 2004).   The article comes with footnotes, making it all the more useful.

-- On another post, Groothuis introduces Ian R. Colle (one of Groothuis' students) who published a positive, helpful, substantial (therefore worth reading!) review of  Paul A. Boghossian's Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. vii + 139 pages, $19.95 paper.   Colle's concludes his review:

Boghossian presents the constructivist/relativist views accurately and fairly and defeats the strongest formulation of their supporting arguments in a way that is easy to follow and understandable to the non-technical reader.  This short book should be required reading for all humanities professors and all who care about presenting sound arguments for a realist epistemology.   Read the entire review.

NEW AGE GURU DEEPAK CHOPRA UNLEASHES BILE AGAINST GOV. SARAH PALIN

Ah, the sensibilities of the New Age.  How lovely.  How kind and gentle.  NOT!  New Age thinking (in the voice of Chopra) ascribes to Sarah Palin all manner of evil.  Honestly, when I read this, I felt like I, too, was  coming face to face with evil, but not in Sarah.  In Chopra's words I see a revelation of the New Age's hatred  for beauty, purity, simplicity and transparency.  There is something serpentlike in Chopra's sensibilities, a revelation of the strains of deep hatred in New Age thought. 

There exists, also, a deep naivete masquerading as wisdom. In Chopra's view, Obama represents a progressive force, Sarah Palin a regressive force, the "shadow" (in psychological terms) of Obama. 

He writes:

She is the reverse of Barack Obama, in essence his shadow, deriding his idealism and exhorting people to obey their worst impulses.

Worst impulses?  Really?  Are you serious, Deepak?  You mean such things as allowing a Down syndrome baby to be born? Such as having five children?  Such as loving and accepting her out-of-wedlock pregnant  daughter?  Yea, I guess Sarah Palin is a real danger alright.

Chopra goes on:

He [Obama] is calling for us to reach for our higher selves, and frankly, that stirs up hidden reactions of an unsavory kind.

Uh.. Did I get that right?  Sarah Palin embodies reactions of an "unsavory"kind?  Wow.  I hadn't realized that.  I guess all the excitement over her does indeed reveal our "anger, fear, revenge, violence, selfishness, and suspicion of' 'the other'" as you put it.  Thanks for pointing that out, Deepak.