All right, let's get going. Today for class we'll be talking about what I call the Church of Oprah, aka neo-paganism, aka the New Age movement. So before we get started, let me open this up in prayer, and then we'll jump right in. Father, in Jesus' precious name, and by the grace and mercy of your spirit, thank you that we can come boldly before you in prayer. We ask that you would guide this time, that, above all else, Lord, you are glorified. And I pray that what we would learn today would help us to both preach your gospel and defend your faith. We ask these things in Jesus Christ's name, amen. So, This is one of those subjects where it's almost easier to explain than to define because there's so many different aspects of this Church of Oprah, the New Age movements. So really, I can't define it the same way I've defined other cults and other world religions. So what I'm going to have to do is basically add properties, explain various aspects of it until we start building up a fuller and complete picture. So the way that I realize would be the easiest and clearest definition or rather explanation of this is really just to say what are all the different components of it. So really it's what this religion is, is this amalgam, this conglomeration of all of these, it's basically like Frankenstein. It's like, oh here, here's this buddy, this person's arm, this person's leg, this person's head, and it all comes together to form this body. Well, the New Age movement is similar to that, where it takes these various aspects of these different religions and these different worldviews and puts them together. It goes back to A part of the reason why we call it Neo-Paganism is because it is a newer version of Paganism. Now, Paganism is basically, how I define it is, Paganism is the worship of anything other than the God of Christianity. So in the ancient Greeks and Romans, they were synchronistic. Well, the Romans specifically were more synchronistic, but they were pagans. And they focused their worship on these limited and finite gods that were usually focused around a city, or a location, or an attribute. So you could have, like, a god of the city of Rome. Or, like I said, attributes, you could have a god of war. So it's paganism because they're worshipping these gods, these quote-unquote gods, and obviously these false finite gods are different than the god of Christianity, therefore it is paganism. But uniquely, or not necessarily too uniquely, but one thing that's interesting to note about specifically Rome's paganism is that it was synchronistic. In that, if you were conquered by the Romans, they basically said, here's the deal. Continue to worship any gods you want. All you have to do is add Caesar to your Parthenon of gods. And that's it. So they were more than happy to allow people to worship any God that they wanted to, as long as they were like, as long as they were willing to also worship Caesar as God. Now of the whole ancient world, there was only one people group that was exempt from this, and that was the Jews. Because they were, Well, they were the only real monotheistic religion that I've ever come across in the ancient world. And not only were they strict monotheists, in fact, that was the defining characteristic of Second Temple Judaism. In fact, J.D. Kelly, he wrote this fantastic book called Earliest Christian Doctrines, and he argued that it was only because of the strict monotheism of Second Temple Judaism that allowed the first century Christians to be so dogmatic in saying that Jesus Christ alone is God. It's almost like it seems like a contradiction. because they're like, well, wait, how could they be hardcore monotheists and then say Jesus Christ is God? Well, it's because they realized that in order for Jesus' claims to be true or to make sense, he would have to be equal with God. So anyways, going back to it, Jews were the only ones that had this dispensation where they didn't have to worship Caesar as Lord because the only way Rome could really enforce this is if they slaughtered them all because they were willing to go to the grave. And it's interesting because the first century church, at first, they were seen almost as a different denomination of Judaism. And so they were granted that initial protection. But once it became evident that not only were the Jews not identical to Christians, but the Jews kind of didn't like the Christians, then it kind of became open season on them. In fact, I think it was Lucian and Emperor Trajan, two of the early first century non-Christian sources, or second century non-Christian sources, both make note of the persecution that was going on to the Christians and that it ultimately was not warranted. Whatever the case is, the first aspect we need to consider is paganism. That is one of the parts of the conglomeration or the amalgam. So we have basically paganism plus the hippie counterculture of the 70s plus eastern mysticism, which would include things like Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism, Fourth thing would be secular humanism. Fifth thing would be the occult. Now as we said before, every cult and world religion that I know of, that I've studied, eventually there are always cultic practices involved. And it seems like the more influential a given cult or world religion is, the stronger its occultic origins, i.e. Mormonism and Islam. I mean, both of them basically, I argue that they were founded by a demon influencing a man. So obviously if you have demons influencing men to start religions, that's a huge aspect of the occult. And same thing with Eastern mysticism. Any religion or any belief that tells you that the goal of their belief system is to empty your mind or free your mind, you need to run immediately. Dr. Fernandez has a great sermon slash lecture on the subject called The Cult of Anti-Intellectualism, and some of that content I'm using today is what Doc used. He's mostly talking about Christian denominations that stay away from aspects of truth, and there's a little bit of parallel from what I'm talking about today, but same thing, if you have any Christian denominations that say, well, you know, truth isn't very important, or true things aren't very important, you need to turn the other way and run. I remember one time, I don't remember what the whole context of this conversation I had with someone was, but he was like slamming, oh, what it was is he was slamming people who were wanting to go to seminary and to study the scriptures to a further degree. And so I went up to him later and I was like, hey, I have this guy who is, he's making fun of people for loving people with all of their heart. Do you think that, what do you think about that? And he's like, that's horrible. Who was this? And I was like, it was you. And he was like, what? And I said, well, listen, greatest commandment is to love the Lord with your heart and your mind and your will. If you're making fun of people for loving the Lord with their mind? How is that any different than someone making fun of people for loving people and loving the Lord with all of their heart? So anyways, any either denomination of Christianity or any worldview apart from Christianity, the more they diminish the intellect, the use of the mind, further out to lunch they are. Okay so we have paganism plus hippie counterculture plus Eastern mystery religions plus secular humanism plus the occult plus just basically snippets of Christianity. Kind of like like Gnostics. Like Gnostics use a lot of similar, they try to add or kind of surf on the coattails of Christianity. Like we said before too, every single cult we study will either say they correspond with Christianity or they're basically Christianity. And so the New Age movement, the Church of Oprah, Neo-Paganism, it's no different. They will all, um, they will all do all of these things, put all these things together. So let's specifically, I want to talk about the New Age movement or specifically postmodernism, because everything that is true of the New Age movement or everything that is true of postmodernism is in neopaganism, is in this Church of Oprah. So while the Church of Oprah is not necessarily identical to the New Age movement. The New Age movement, all of its components are here. So I want to talk about this. Now again, the reason why the New Age movement is so difficult to define is because one of the driving principles behind the New Age movement is a diminished view of truth or propositional truth. But if you have a diminished view of truth, It's very hard to define something. Like, so, Danny, if I were to ask you, I want you to describe that chair over there without using propositional truth. Well, do that. Describe that chair over there without using propositional truth. Do you know what I mean by propositional truth? Facts. Yeah, basically it's green, it has four legs. Yeah, but those are propositions. So basically propositional truth is anything that has a truth value to it. Anything that is verifiable. So I want you to describe that chair over there without using propositional truth. It's a place you sit in. But that's propositional truth. And it's impossible. Yeah, it's basically impossible. Would saying it's an object on this planet Even saying an object on a planet is a proposition. Yeah, it's absurd. In fact, it's very difficult, it's impossible to even say a coherent sentence free of propositional truth. I mean, here's a sentence free of propositional truth. With two boinks and a zoink, I jump over Tuesday. I mean, that makes, it doesn't make any sense because it doesn't have any propositions. Propositions allow certain things to make sense. In fact, everything we know is based on propositional truth. It goes back to laws of logics. I mean, the law of excluded middle. Something can't be both true and false at the same sense and the same time. All of our knowledge is basically predicated on that. Anyways, but we're getting off on that. So it's very difficult to define because of the moving away of propositional truth. That's why I have to just kind of describe these certain aspects to it. Now, when it comes to the hippie culture, what they brought to the table was, well, one of the things is, have you heard the, I don't even know what song it is, but okay, I'm gonna sing, everybody, so just prepare yourselves. So if you're listening to this online, turn it down a little bit. But what's that song from the 60s? You're probably, Danny, you're probably not old enough to know it. Well, I mean, I'm not old enough to live through it, but the song that says, ♪ This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius. ♪ ♪ Age of Aquarius. ♪ Yeah? No, you've never heard that song? Okay. Well, anyways, that's what the hippie culture kind of brought is that they wanted to bring in the age of Aquarius. Now in paganism, kind of the, That's another one you could add to it is the astrology. The age of Aquarius was this time of enlightenment. It was supposed to usher in this movement of peace and hope and unity and togetherness. And that's kind of the overall goal for the New Age movement, for this Church of Oprah. is to bring in this age of Aquarius. But it's interesting because how they bring it in is kind of scary. You know, I'll talk about him a little bit later, but like Ted Turner, I met the guy who's the broadcasting guy, owner of the Atlanta Braves. I met, he basically says that if you Don't think that you are God. You are slowing down humanity's collective evolution and basically you have no place in this society. And there are people who basically have said that if you are not a part of this, if you are not on board with us, then you shouldn't even be alive. And you do see, and this does go back to, and I'll talk about this a little bit later, but there are aspects of eugenics. Do you guys know what eugenics is? I'm just gonna pick on Danny, because Danny's sitting on the front row. Danny, do you know what eugenics is? Is that a science term? Somewhat. It's the idea that. Does it look kind of like master race? Yeah. It's like master race. I wasn't even going to talk about this. But basically, there's three types of eugenics. There is what I call. Kind of like Aryan race? Yeah. So basically, there is natural eugenics. And I know it's somewhat, it's what I, again, a lot of these are my definitions of stuff because I don't always, I don't always like the definitions of the way people just define it. But natural eugenics is the idea of, kind of we see that with Alexander the Great. You know, hey, there's two types of people. There are Greeks and there are uneducated barbarians. as a Greek, I need to conquer the world. And so I can basically make sure that these uneducated barbarians are not going to get in the way with the Greeks so they can do their philosophy. I mean, even Plato's Republic, he talks about that. I mean, in the Republic, he's talking about how that children should be placed in state-run schools, and it's determined by the state where they best fit in. And so the natural eugenics, I mean, you even see that basically with farming, to a degree. You know, you see certain crops that you like, and then you're like, okay, those are the crops we want to germinate. You know, some other stuff you don't like, you're like, all right, we need to pull those up. you know, Hitler, even Margaret Sanger. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, I mean, you wanna know some, you wanna read some messed up quotations? Read some of her quotations. Why did she put all of her abortion clinics in inner cities? Because she thought black people were a plague on humanity. And she noticed, she was like, well, These people are getting in the way of human evolution, so let's put a bunch of abortion clinics where are high minority populations so we can keep their numbers low because they are inferior. Who is this? Margaret Sanger. She's the one that started Planned Parenthood. The second type of eugenics is what I call occultic eugenics. Like basically occultic eugenics is what was going on pre-flood. Most people think that the reason why God flooded the world was because people were just kind of being really bad and evil. It's like, no, that's, I mean, read the Bible. What's going on is you have fallen angels mating with humans and creating these hybrid monsters. And so that is a that's basically an example of a cultic eugenics. You have this idea of so eugenics is basically the idea of man transcending to a higher level. The natural eugenics achieves this higher level by basically just weeding out undesirable attributes. It's no different than, you know, animal breeders do this. You know, I read this really fascinating article about these foxes and how this breeder basically, within a couple generations, was able to domesticate foxes to the level of dogs. And it was really simple, it was just like, Any sort of fox that had aggressive behavior or wasn't docile didn't mate because we only wanted to encourage the attributes that would make a good domestic animal, such as loyalty, docility. Is that even a word? I don't know. Somebody can Google that and let me know. But anyways, and then the third type of eugenics is technological. And I guess it'd probably be better really to refer to this as not necessarily eugenics, but transhumanism. Transhumanism is basically identical to eugenics. It's the idea of transcending humanity. That's why it's called transhumanism. So natural transhumanism, or or natural eugenics, but natural transhumanism, occultic transhumanism, and then finally technological transhumanism. And that is basically man using technology to augment humanity. Now, at first, that doesn't seem too bad. I mean, we think, hey, listen, I wore braces on my teeth for a year and a half. Is that an example of transhumanism? I would say no. If somebody breaks their arm, they go to the doctor, the doctor sets the arm, and then the person can heal. Transhumanism would be like if somebody breaks their arm, and they go into the doctor, and the doctor splices their arm with like a crab, and then they come out with this Crab arm that has like this huge claw on it and it has a little bit of an armored shell so Yeah anime idea So the difference is medicine is concerned with normalcy You know your teeth are not supposed to be crooked so dental medicine puts braces on for the the normative result. Transhuman would be like, oh, let's give them all, you know, vampire teeth or something like that. So anyways, transhumanism is basically this idea of we are wanting humanity to go beyond what it should. It's interesting because Hitler, as far as I can know, as far as I can tell, he's the first person that utilized all three at the same time. He had, hey, let's get rid of the Jews. If you go and look up some of the technologies he has like the bell gun you look at the review Have you studied that before? Yeah. Yeah, I'm it Yeah, it was just and and there's the book called resurrecting the Third Reich and where it talks about all of the occultic similarities or basically all the occultic tendencies of Nazi Germany. And so I think that it's possible that the technological advances were due to occultic Practices that his advanced weapon systems and everything were due to basically demons Instructing him on what to do and then he'd use that technology. I meant to Implement various aspects of transhumanism, you know, you see him wanting the perfect Aryan and You know, using technology to make people have blue eyes and blonde hair, but not just that. I mean, there was even, I read this very strange anecdote and it was like, they even took people who were within the Nazi regime, but they didn't have, they didn't have like sought after properties. So they would send them to this room and they would say, just fill out this paperwork or whatever. and they would sit down and they would basically blast, the chair was like set up to irradiate. And so it was such a high degree that just in the few minutes it would take for these people to fill out this paperwork, they were irradiated to such a level that left them essentially sterile. So even the, technology was used even on their own Nazis. And that's the thing too, is even if you do like certain ideas of transhumanism, you know, like whales, whales don't even, don't sleep. They kind of enter a rest mode, but they have to basically keep half of a sphere of their brain functioning or else they will drown. Well, man, What if, you know, we gave our troops on the field this ability? Okay, that's cool. So now they don't have to sleep. All right, but probably need something more than that. I mean, what about like, well, elephant, you know, there's only two places on an elephant. that are, that can be pierced with a gun relatively easily. One is basically directly beneath them, which is not a good place to shoot because if it falls on you, it's dead. And the other one is right behind the ear. But what if that, by the way, here's a rabbit trail. This is a legit rabbit trail. This is a very good short story, one of my favorite short stories all time on this subject. It's called Shooting an Elephant. Brilliant short story, read it. But what if someone says they are our soldiers. Hey, let's let's give them the Let's give them the the skin of an elephant make them super strong and they can resist bullets and then you see ah, well, you know a flea can if humans could jump the Proportional distance of flea can he could jump I think it was like three football fields or something like that It was like yeah, we could create this army of super soldiers the problem is as soon as you start adding value to humans you are necessarily detracting value from those that don't partake but anytime you detract value from citizens and there will be severe consequences. Anytime you give people a title of less than human, there will be death and destruction. Two biggest examples we have is the Holocaust and unborn baby Holocaust. I mean, if somebody's in a car accident and their heart stops beating, You know, they're dead. What do you mean unborn baby? I'll explain. They're considered dead. Now, unborn babies, what is it? I don't even know what this is. I think it's something like eight weeks or something like that. The baby's heart starts beating. But you could have even babies that are viable, which means they could live outside of the mother's womb. They're viable. and yet they are still allowed to be killed because they are given the title of less than human. So, I say all that to say, transhumanism eugenics is a part of the new age movement and it's very scary. Now, that was not a planned rabbit trail. We might have to bust this one up into two segments since I've already wasted a lot of time. But we'll see, we'll see. Let's just, let's get back to it. So the age of Aquarius is meant to bring in this time of great peace, of hope, and, but a lot of the leaders who are involved with this are not afraid to say that If we deem you as less than human, or less than pure, or you're getting in the way of the evolution of humanity, we have no problem with saying you shouldn't be alive. It's pretty scary. Okay, so, aspects of the new age movements, post-modernism, number one, the new tolerance. Now, the new tolerance is basically that all lifestyles are equally good, and wholesome. What's wrong with that view, Danny? Repeat the view. All lifestyles are equally good and wholesome. That's wrong because people will always think of themselves, even if everyone's equal, people will always think of themselves as better. Yeah, there will always be a notion of moral or intellectual superiority. But I think the problem with it is it's ultimately impossible to hold to. So for example, Rosie O'Donnell, when she was a host on The View, she says, there are basically two types of people. People of faith and people of fear. People of faith basically think that everyone Good and and wholesome and believes the best in people people of fear just have a very narrow view and they want everyone to think the same thing and to be alike and so she was like basically so unless you are a person of faith and you are an evil person. Now the problem with that is, by her own definition, she is a person of fear. Because she says a person of fear, someone says, you must think this way. But that's exactly what she says. You must think this way in order for it to be good or true or whatever. So the view is ultimately contradictory because even if you were to argue for it, it would result in a contradiction. The original definition of tolerance really only meant freedom of speech. That was it. So let's say before you got here, I ran into some, like, a Muslim, and we became friends, and we came in here and we started chatting, and our debate got heated, and you come in the room, And you see us yelling at each other. And I say, if you don't trust in Jesus Christ alone for salvation, you're going to hell. And he looks at me and says, if you don't submit to Allah, you're going to hell. Your response to that should be, dang, we live in a tolerant country. because tolerance means freedom of speech. That means you can yell at somebody in their face. Now, if you're threatening them, that's different. But you should be able to yell at somebody and we should look at that and be like, wow, how tolerant is our country? Now, if you think that two people shouldn't disagree to that level, you're being influenced by the new tolerance. And it shows you too, all this stuff that was going on about Bruce Jenner and abortion, Planned Parenthood stuff. I'll tell you what, I had more people when I was sharing my views that said they couldn't be friends with me or they couldn't even associate with me because of that. And I said, you know what? I would never stop loving you or stop being your friend because of something you believed. And you're trying to hold to this new tolerance, and you're saying that a friendship that I've built with you for, some of these people, 15 years, is not worth it just because I don't think that a guy who does a little snip snip is suddenly a hero? I mean, that's absurd. So really the whole idea of the new tolerance is contradictory. You cannot remain consistent with that. Also too, if we're going to use that new definition of tolerance, who then would be the most intolerant person ever to have lived? Jesus Christ was by far the most intolerant because he basically said the only possible way to salvation is through me. That is the most intolerant thing anyone could ever say. And it would be also the most arrogant thing someone could say unless it was true. Yeah, that's another thing, too. So you see, too, I almost didn't even want to say when I did that conglomeration of different religions and worldviews, I almost didn't want to throw Christianity in there because these aspects of Christianity become so perverted that it's not even Christianity. But yeah, so a lot of these guys, they They're like, oh yeah, you know. I still come across people that think Jesus was a pacifist. And I'm like, you either have no idea what pacifism is or you're biblically illiterate, but it can't be both. You know, one thing I like to say too, I was like, well, was God a pacifist? And like, no, no, God was definitely not a pacifist, but Jesus, claim to be God. So if God is not a pacifist, Jesus is God. Therefore, God is not a pacifist, or Jesus is not a pacifist. Simple modus pollens right there. Boom. Proven. So anyways, bringing it back. Where was I at? Oh yeah, so Jesus flipping over tables. People like to think, oh yeah, he's just peace-loving, hippie, and he never judged. I mean, Jesus judged? Talk about the woman caught in adultery. I mean, what did he say to her? He said to her, go and sin no more. If he's saying sin no more, obviously he is saying you are living a life of sin, stop doing it. That's judging someone. That's saying that their lifestyle is bad. So yeah, Jesus is, by our standards today, Jesus is the most intolerant person ever to have lived. All right, number two, no absolute truths. and no propositional truths as well. Now, what is wrong with the idea of, if someone says there's no such thing as truth, what's wrong? So think about it this way. I had a couple of my guys we met for our, doing our apologetics theology session. I was like, all right, I want us to find a priori necessary truths. A priori truths are basically, a priori means before the senses. It's opposite of a posteriori, which is like after the senses. So a priori truths are basically truths that are not based on sense perception. And so what I said is, suppose that we are jumping from matrix to matrix. So like we're all in all these different matrices, as in like the movie, The Hyper Skeptical World, where everything around us is false. But even when we jump from matrix to matrix, I ask them, what things do we still know as true? So for example, if let's say right now we are in a matrix. If you were to go over there, and let's say we go back to that chair, and I say, now use proposition of truth to describe that chair. You could do it, but since our whole world is being obscured through the matrix, we don't know if that's true. So I said, so I asked them, then what things do we know have to be true in all of these different scenarios even independent of sensory perception. And so we talked about the cogito, Rene Descartes saying, I think therefore I am, or cogito ergo sum, or je pense, j'en suis. All of those truths are not only necessary, but they're also a priori, they're before the senses. So I asked these guys though, I said, now I want you to tell me what things, I'm looking for four specific things about what we can know about truth that we can know about it a priori. And I'll save all the normal drama of Socratic method that takes to lead someone to that, because it can take a while, but basically it's this. If someone were to say, all right, well, truth doesn't exist. Well, is that a true statement? If yes, then you've contradicted yourself. If no, then the opposite is true, meaning basically truth exists. So the first thing that we know, even if everything around us is false, even if right now me and you are floating in that pink gooey stuff and our brains are connected to this supercomputer that has all these various stimuli going on, we still know that truth necessarily exists. Because if we say it doesn't exist, if it's true, then it's self-refuting. And then so they say, if someone says truth doesn't exist, then it's self-refuting. Or if it's false, then the opposite is true, which means it exists. So the first thing we know is that truth exists. Then someone might say, all right, well, truth exists, but we can't know it. What's wrong with that? Yeah, you're claiming to have knowledge of something you've just disavowed. So therefore, truth necessarily exists and you necessarily can know it. Then for the other two propositions are basically all I do is supplement absolute truth in there. So I'll say, all right, absolute truth exists because the claim, well, absolute truth doesn't exist. That would be an instance of an absolute truth claim So therefore it would be contradictory. Or to deny that claim, which again would result in the opposite being true, in this case the opposite being true is, absolute truth exists. And then it follows then, therefore absolute truth can be known. And what I mean by absolute truth, I mean, truth and absolute truth are essentially the same thing. What we mean by absolute truth, though, is that it's true for all people, all places, at all times. Whereas truth, like for example, if I were to say, the Beach Boys are my favorite band, Switchfoot is my favorite band. Both of those statements concerning me are truth, are true. Now it seems like a contradictory, but all you have to do is add a time index to it. So it's like when Matt was 10 years old, the Beach Boys were his favorite, band, and now Switchfoot is his favorite band. So that would be an example of a truth that's not necessarily absolute because it's based on a subjective preference. Absolute truth would be things like, like I said, axioms, the laws of logic, the cogito, certain mathematical principles, and so on. So They deny absolute truth and they deny really truth in general, which is a logical contradiction. But since they don't really care too much about logic, it's not too much of a bad thing. Now, any religion or worldview can say whatever they want about truth or logic, but the bottom line is, if you have a low view of truth, then you are not in any way similar to the Christian faith, to the biblical Christian faith, because the biblical Christian faith has a very high view of truth. Jesus refers to himself as the incarnation of truth. How is it possible that Jesus can refer to himself as the incarnation of truth, and then we say, well, but we don't have to have a high view of truth. All right, let's get through a couple more of these, and then we'll close it out, and then we'll just do, we'll finish it off next time, because I still have a ton of stuff. that I want to go through. But at least, hey, it was a shocker. I over-prepared. I don't ever, ever do that. Right, Danny? Back in youth group, recruit youth group days. OK, number three, no absolute morality. Basically, it's very similar to the absolute truth claim. But yeah, but it's more like saying oh, you can't tell somebody that they are wrong or bad or immoral for blank Yeah, oh, yeah, it's huge huge going on in America and you can't Yeah, it's just like, you know, we are becoming this, you know, go back, read some, read some, go read C.S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man. That's what we are becoming. He talks about the men without chess. We basically have become this society that has no backbone, that we are constantly offended by everything, and we are, basically, that's the whole goal of our life, is to go on about, go on about our lives without offending, with offending as few people as possible. So they would say, yeah, you can't say that it is immoral, You know, if I were to say it is wrong or it is immoral for Bruce Jenner to change his gender, they would say you are wrong for saying that. But again, that's contradictory. You can't say that all things are morally acceptable, but then a moral claim that I make is unacceptable. So basically what the, and this goes back to the new tolerance. The new tolerance, here's the best way I know how to describe it in the sense of the morality is, You are so intolerant that you will not be tolerant. You will not be tolerated. And that's basically saying if you do not accept all views as equally wholesome and good, you have no place in this society. So it's really the only thing they don't accept is the people that claim that certain things are bad. I know. And you're starting to see this now too. You have things like the NAMBLA, the North American Man Boy Love Association. After the homosexual marriage thing, now you have groups from NAMBLA. being like, hey, we deserve the same type of rights as anybody else. We are not harming these children. We love each other, and we want to have the same rights as anybody else. What is this group? NAMBLA, the North American Man-Boy Love Association. Basically, they're pedophiles, and they want the same status as homosexuals. Pedophiles have a group? NAMBLA. Yeah, kind of strange. Okay, moving on. Number four, we have the denial of the metanarrative. So what a metanarrative is, is basically this set structure of how things are supposed to be. You know, like, for example, in Christianity, we have a metanarrative of, you know, God had, God created everything and he created man to worship Him and to bring Him, to worship Him for His pleasure. And whether we eat or drink or whatever we do, we are meant to use the things that God has blessed us with for that worship to God. That would be an example of a metanarrative because since God created everything, that means there is no speck of reality that is independent from him. But if there's no aspect of reality that is independent from him, then that means that all reality is subject to him. But the New Tolerance, New Age, they don't like that idea. They don't want to be subject to a God, so they'll say, hey, I'm denying metanarratives. And I'm not gonna say that there is a set way to go about or to do anything. There is no set way for a family to function. There's no set way for anything. Now, I'm not trying to say that You know, like in the sense of families, I'm gonna try to say that like a blended family is bad. I mean, even think about it this way, Jesus was from a blended family, you know, he is, he was not the son of Joseph, and yet he was still a part of the family. I'm not trying to say anything of to that degree, but basically what I'm saying is God does have a set order of things. He does have a meta narrative that he expects all people to follow. And some have even, that's another thing it's, they have another thing. that that term has been so refuted, then they started going off into what they don't say meta narratives anymore. They say mega narratives, which is really just the same thing. And you see this happen a lot. You like some stupid, um, view comes out, gets horribly refuted, and then they just slightly change it. And it's like, no, this is what we really meant. It was like the emergent church movement, and then it was like, oh, we're not emergent, we're missional. It's like how they've redefined it. It's just so weird, but it basically described all the same things that it had before. But that was kind of the difference between the mega and metanarrative, is it was just, oh yeah, we were really refuted at that, so now we're just gonna call it meganarrative and say that's what's bad. But even that is, Very troublesome. Number five, we have an emphasis on feelings. Now, remember how I said at the beginning of this study that all cults and all, especially cults, but all cults and world religions will some area of obscurity. You know as we saw that with the devil. Devil in the garden. Has God not said? He's basically making things obscure when they're actually very quite clear. When there's a focus on feelings, with the new age movement, that is their charge for obscurity. That is their way of saying, well, you can't tell me, you know, my feelings are wrong. You know, I was going back, going back to remember we talked about with the, um, dealing with Mormons and the burning bosom. And, you know, they say, pray and if you feel this is true, then it's true. And I was able to refute that notion and totally backfire when I said, okay, I prayed and I feel that Joseph Smith is a false prophet. Is that true or false? Now, like I said before, they claimed that they weren't here about whether something was true or false. They were like, we're not here to tell you what your view is, that it's false or anything. We're not to tell you that our view is true. We just want you to pray and to see how you feel. And so I prayed and I felt that Joseph Smith was a false prophet. And then I asked them, is that true? Are my feelings true? And they wouldn't answer me. because they were attempting to use a null hypothesis, something that can't either be proven or denied, to advocate their view, but I'm pretty darn clever, and so I used their null hypothesis against them. So going back to this, the same thing. If you have a focus on feelings, and you have this, I feel this way, Well, not only is that their use of obscurity, but the problem is, is you cannot know what somebody else is feeling, so you can't refute it. But that's why I just do competing feelings then. And I say, okay, well, I feel the complete opposite of you. How do we resolve this? Well, the only way, I mean, you can't have, I mean, like having feelings fight, that would be like if lightsabers were actual light. and people tried to like swing them and they would just go through each other because there's no, there's nothing tangible. You know, they can't clash. That's what happens when you do feelings versus feelings. You say you cannot combat feelings with other feelings. I read this really interesting quotation and this guy says, when my wife says, yes, but you can't tell me that my feelings are wrong." He says, I know at that point I have both won the conversation, or won the argument, and lost the argument. Because it can't go anywhere from there. So the New Age movement, the New Tolerance, they will utilize this focusing on the feelings because of the obscurity factor and because it's ultimately a null hypothesis. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say that feelings are bad per se, but feelings are only good insofar as they push you towards what you know to be good and true. You know, I was talking to a friend of mine, I was explaining to this and I said, what if you woke up tomorrow and you thought, man, I really love my wife, I wanna serve her today. Would that be good or bad? He's like, yeah, that'd be good. And I said, okay, but what if you woke up tomorrow and said, you know what? I don't love my, I don't feel like I love my wife today and I don't feel like serving her. Should you say, okay, well, I'm gonna get a divorce? No, you say, who cares? I made a vow to love and honor and serve this woman and I'm gonna do it despite what I'm feeling. Feelings are good only insofar as they push you in the right direction. If they don't push you in the right direction, they need to be ignored. Okay, let's stop there. Yeah, because we're almost at like an hour. I didn't even get through half of it. I think I can go a lot faster next time, though, because I added the section on transhumanism. So let's close in there in prayer. And actually, let's do some Q&A real quick to see if we have any questions. Yeah, let's do that. Any questions? I'm not saying stupid or anything. I know we covered like what paganism is and the neo-paganism. How does this tie back into Oprah? Neo-paganism and the Church of Oprah are identical. They're just different names for the same thing. That's all I'm trying to say. Did she fund it? No, no, no. She just subscribes to it? I call it the Church of Oprah because she is like, if you want to know what this looks like, look at her. She is the atypical poster child neo-pagan New Ager. Now, I'm not trying to say that that means she hasn't done good. I mean, she's done some good stuff. But that doesn't mean, just because you do good things, it doesn't mean that you have good theology. There are plenty of people who have done great things and have horrible theology. She has done some good stuff. but she has horrible theology, and she ultimately is preaching a type of universalism. You know, that salvation is not in Christ alone. It's in anything, anything you want it to be, and that is completely contradictory to the New Testament. So when I say Church of Oprah, or neo-paganism, New Age movements, whatever, I'm just trying to show you that it is a beast with different titles. It is something that goes by a lot of different ways. And that's why I also, too, at the end of the section, I have this, I have a series of buzzwords that, now, just because you hear these words, it doesn't mean, ah, that person's a neo-pagan. But a lot of the time, these words are connected with Neo-paganism. So when I say Church of Oprah, I just mean that's the poster child right there. Yeah, does that make sense? Okay, anything else? Anyone? Okay, so let me close in prayer and then meet here next week and we'll, I promise we will finish this. I know I say that a lot and we don't, but I mean it this time. All right, let's pray. Father in Jesus' precious name, by the grace and mercy of your spirit, Thank you that we can come boldly before you in prayer. We ask that you would allow these things to live long in our heart and that we would use them, like I said before, to both preach your gospel and defend your faith. Pray this in Jesus Christ's name. Amen.