Update June 27, 2008
Let there be no
doubt. Oprah Winfrey is finally out of the spiritual closet. She has
completely thrown out any previous notion that she is a "Christian."
Now, television's most influential woman has become the driving force
in bringing Helen
Schucman's 35 year old
trance-channeled book A Course in Miracles and new age author
Marianne Williamson into the mainstream.
Not since Shirley MacLaine has any
single person done so much to promote and normalize New Age mysticism
to the public, as has Oprah. Her latest venture is promoting Eckhart
Tolle, a sixty year-old German mystic who resides in Vancouver,
British Columbia.
According to Tolle himself, his influences include:
*
Sufism, which is a mystical form of Islam
* Zen
Buddhism
* The
Australian turned Hindu mystic, Barry Long whose teaching includes 20
books most of which focus in detail about sexuality between man and
woman and its use to purify them both and rid them of personal, human
love.
* Tolle
acknowledges that his teachings are a synthesis of the teachings of
Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi,
one of the most famous of Hindu Yogi's
and
J. Krishnamurti. (Krishnamurti was once declared the "Messiah" and was
proclaimed as the new incarnation of the Maitreya Buddha by the Madame
Blavatsky's Theosophical Society.)
* The
aforementioned A Course in Miracles.
Perhaps most importantly,
Tolle was born "Ulrich
Tolle" and
changed his name to "Eckhart" because of the profound influence which
the 14th century occult mystic, Meister Eckhart had on him!
Oprah has spotlighted Tolle's books in
her popular "book club" and on March 3, 2008, she began co-hosting a
series of weekly webcasts with Tolle based on his latest book, A
New Earth. During one webcast, Tolle led Oprah to follow him into
an altered state of consciousness. I wonder how many of the estimated
two million people logged online to the meeting did likewise?
When asked during a webcast how she
has reconciled Tolle's spiritualist teachings with her previous
Christian background Oprah responded as follows.
"I've
reconciled it because I was able to open my mind about the, ah,
absolute, indescribable hugeness of that which we call 'God.' Ah, I
took God out of the box, cause, I grew up in the Baptist church and
there were you know, rules and belief systems, doctrine. And, I
happened to be, ah, sitting in church in my late twenties, and I was
going to this church where you had to get there at eight o'clock in
the morning or you couldn't get a seat and a very charismatic
minister, and everybody was, you know, into the sermon. And this great
minister was preaching about how great God was and how omniscient and
omnipresent and God is everything. And then he said 'The Lord thy God
is a jealous God.' And I was, you know, caught up in the rapture of
that moment until he said 'jealous.' And, something struck me, I was I
think about twenty-seven or twenty-eight, I was thinking, 'God is all.
God is omnipresent and God’s also jealous? God is jealous of me?'
Something about that didn't feel right in my spirit because I believe
that God is love, that God is in all things. And so, that's when the
search for something more than doctrine began to stir within me."
Oprah then asks
her guru, Eckhart Tolle, what happens to humans at death. Tolle
responds "I don't give it any thought."
Oprah further pontificates that "God,
in the essence of all consciousness, isn't something to believe. God
is! God 'is' and God is a feeling
experience not a believing experience. And if your religion is a
believing experience, if God for you is still about a belief, then
it's not truly God."
This last statement is exactly
what drives the heretical Emerging Church Movement. It is a
search for spiritual feelings - but not absolute truth. For
experiences - but without foundation.
God is certainly NOT
jealous of Oprah! However, in her defiance of the key passage
forbidding idolatry (Exodus 20's "Ten Commandments"), she has made
herself a god in the process. This is what led to the fall
of mankind in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3) and to the insurgence of
every cultic teaching since. The mistake of all mistakes directly from
the serpent's mouth is discounting, ignoring or disagreeing with God's
infallible Word... "Hath God Said?"
To really get the
full impact of Oprah's statements I suggest that you actually hear and
see Oprah and her guru. It is chilling to say the least. To do so,
please visit this page on our website:
http://www.ericbarger.com/emailers/2008/update5-8-2008.htm.
We have links to videos of both Oprah's comments and my rebuttal of
her New Age ideas.
Oprah Update
6/27/08
Oprah
Continues to Push New Age and Occult Spirituality
Some may wonder why I have bothered to discuss Oprah
again in these updates. After all, for Christians isn't the issue
obvious? Isn't it a done deal that Believers see what Oprah is up to and
thus stay away?
I only wish it were that simple. It would appear that
spotting Oprah's goofy and dangerous spiritual ideas isn't a sure bet
since so many alleged "Christians" seem to have a bigger problem called
Universalism.
A headline in the June 24, 2008 USA Today
read: "Cultural Agenda is Set by Oprah - Not
Religious Leaders." The article included many facts and poll
results. Perhaps the most shocking was that of the 35,000
Americans surveyed by the
Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life's U.S. Religious Landscape Survey
70% believe that "many religions can lead to eternal life"
while only 24% state that their particular religion is the one true way.
Though he doesn't nail it as "New Age," Rice University sociologist
Michael Lindsay says "The impact of Oprah is seen throughout this
survey. She uses the language of Bible and Christian traditions and yet
includes other traditions to create a hodgepodge personalized faith."
My question is this: how blatant and relentless does Winfrey have to
get before preachers and lay people wake up? It is our responsibility to
warn the world when we see people running headlong into disaster. The
saddest part is that in this case many who claim to be Christians are
running towards peril following Oprah's leading and not their Bible.
On Tuesday, August 24 Oprah aired a program focusing on the New Age
idea of Past Life Regression. Her guests
included Dr. Brian Weiss who is a noted psychotherapist and New Age
author who claims to have cured the fears and nightmares of thousands of
people through PLR. His books include, Many Live,
Many Masters, Through Time Into Healing, Only Love is Real (a
book about a couple who were in love in a past life and are now reunited
in the present), Messages From the Masters (about how to
harness the power of love according to the "Masters"...the
ascended spiritual Masters, and Mirrors of Time: Using
Regression for Physical, Emotional and Spiritual Healing which
is advertised as allowing the reader to enter the "next step in
regression."
PLR
emphasizes
reincarnation through what Bible believers understand is demonic
communications and into a maze of occultic spiritualism. As perilous as
this activity may be, unsuspecting people are brought into a false
reliance on the idea that they need not be concerned with sin or a
Savior let alone death as they erroneously believe that they will get a
chance at another life... or two or three, etc.
On Friday, August 27 Winfrey aired a program titled "The
Law of Attraction: Real Life Stories" which featured a panel of New Age
gals including Louise L. Hay, publisher (Hay House) for New Age
teachers Dr.'s Deepak Chopra and Wayne Dyer. Hay is a follower of Ernest
Holmes and is a practitioner in the Church of Religious Science. She was
profoundly influenced by the metaphysical works of author Florence
Scovel Shinn and also studied Transcendental Meditation with the
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at his university in Fairfield, Iowa. Writer Mark
Oppenheimer called her "The Queen of the New Age" in the New York
Times magazine, May 4, 2008. She is best known for the pamphlet
Heal Your Body and the book You Can Heal Your Life.
The program also included video role-ins of
Esther
Hicks, author of the book The Law of Attraction.
Oprah has featured Hicks on her XM satellite radio channel. Hicks is
an ex-Mormon turned trace-channeler known best for her claims to vocally
translate blocks of thought for a group of non-physical beings who call
themselves Abraham. She was also involved in the now famous
project known as "The Secret" which was based on The Law of
Attraction and which Winfrey heavily publicized.
Also on the August 27 program was O Magazine
columnist Martha Beck another ex-Mormon (is this a pattern?) who
after a failed 21 year marriage says she is now a homosexual and Hay House
author, life coach Cheryl Richardson.
Click here
to order Eric's complete seminar teaching "Why is There a New Age? on
DVD or CD
Since its Fourth of
July time and an election year too...
God,
Give Us Godly Leaders!
"Providence has given to
our people the choice of their rulers and it is our duty and privilege
to choose and prefer Christians for our leaders."
- John Jay, First Supreme Court Justice of the
United States and First U.S. Secretary of State
"The Christian religion
is the most important and one of the first things in which all children,
under a free government ought to be instructed. . . . No truth is more
evident to my mind than that the Christian religion must be the basis of
any government intended to secure the rights and privileges of a free
people."
- Noah Webster, the father of American Education
"The highest glory of
the American Revolution was this: that it connected in one indissoluble
bond the principles of civil government with the principles of
Christianity."
- President John Quincy Adams, sixth U.S.
President
"We have staked the
future of our American civilization, not upon the power of government -
far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political
institutions upon the capacity of each of us to govern ourselves, to
sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God."
- President James Madison, fourth U.S. President
"The people are
responsible for the character of their Government. If it be ignorant,
reckless, and corrupt, it is because the people tolerate ignorance,
recklessness, and corruption. If it be intelligent, brave, and pure, it
is because the people demand these high qualities... If the next
centennial does not find us a great nation... it will be because those
who represent the enterprise, the culture, and the morality of the
nation do not aid in controlling the political forces."
- President James Garfield, twentieth U.S.
President
"By removing the Bible
from schools we would be wasting so much time and money in punishing
criminals and so little pains to prevent crime. Take the Bible out of
our schools and there would be an explosion in crime."
- Dr. Benjamin Rush, Founding Father and signer of
Declaration of Independence
"When the righteous are
in authority, the people rejoice: but when the wicked beareth rule, the
people mourn."
- Proverbs 29:2
"I exhort therefore,
that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of
thanks, be made for all men; 2 For kings, and for all that are in
authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness
and honesty."
- I Tim 2:1-2
"God, please give us
godly, righteous leaders. From dog catcher to President, either save them
or remove them in Jesus' name!"
- Eric Barger, June 2008
Watch: Clip from Eric Barger's seminar DVD "The Rise, Fall and
REDEMPTION of America"
Read: "This IS a Christian Nation"
Did He
REALLY Say That?
"Syria is a moderate country, and the official government rule and position
is to not allow any extremism of any kind." -
Rick
Warren
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