@@nicholasdasilva9 Please provide some examples of points that you would like to see better articulated, and feel free to do so.

Pagan cope alert

Yout just a sore loser. He showed lots of examples.

Wow how charitable of you

Refute it then

Could you explain a bit more?

This is inportant stuff and I am glad to see Catholics acknowledging these aspects of the ‘new spirituality’ more and more. It hS creeped into even some Catholic soaces.

I did not notice your other comment. Thank you for recommending him. There are a lot of awesome Catholic writers who have gone much more in depth than me here, thank you for that recommendation.

@@st.mephisto8564 I would see if you could reach out to the author of the Catholic answers article. They're a reputable and well-read group of scholars - I would doubt he made up those claims whole cloth.

American Christians are wildly into lying about the past to justify itself. Most will not face it's own history, do not know the metaphysical purposes of their own faith in relation to the fulfillment of the Jewish prophecy, and usually pretend Gnosticism is their mentally ill cousin rather than it's literal soul. Christianity was carved out of the corpse of Gnosticism because Gnosticism says the quiet part out loud. It was invented as an esoteric tool to separate out classes of people by their reaction to the story. Yaldebaoth was significantly more overtly evil, which led masses of people into the psychology of the elite. Luciferianism. Usurping. This is the reason they had to put it in a bottle with Christianity. It flips the narrative enough to be more difficult to understand it's purposes. The original canonized Bible was a gnostic Bible, and the man who wrote it said Jesus was a metaphysical being, not physically a real man. Let me say this again for those in the back... Marcionism was the FIRST CANON OF ANY BIBLICAL TEXT. It was the very suggestion of a "Canon" at this point which inspired everyone else to argue over there even BEING a canonical Bible. This began the tradition of fighting and hiding the history of those elements of Christianity they disagree with, and often genuinely came out of. It is sad to watch.

Research Thugee.

@@veronica_._._._ Where did Thugee come into this? We were talking about Yoga Gurus not the Thugee

@@st.mephisto8564 Kali Ma, Durga Shakti ... licentious evil is placated and bought off and invoked not evoked. We're not talking the money tree Western Yoga -Lite here. Plot twist, its serpent power, but its not your power Why the lolling tongued cannibal all devouring mother lover tho? Quite misogynistic. Oops

Quote and book/writing? St Hildegard. People also used to believe in spontaneous generation. The New Age movement is demonic anything skirting that is deception.

Yeah I agreed with his other points but there is a kind of weirdness to Catholicism that I think should be embraced and celebrated and the crystal issue deserves a more nuanced analysis given what Hildegard has said.

@DavidWilson-hd6iz Interesting. I posted a link here covering your points for other readers. It seems her writings about certain crystals emerged from the medieval theory of the four humors and an erroneous understanding of how crystals formed. I would still maintain my points regarding how crystals, as defined by the new age movement, assign arbitrary psycho-spiritual powers to crystals without an adequate natural-scientific justification. St Hildegard, on the other hand, wrote based on the best scientific understanding of human health during her time and was reporting prevailing medical beliefs based on an abstract philosophical approach to human health. St. Hildegard on Gemstones - Unam Sanctam Catholicam search.app/4cjRe3ERwdP9kVh36

@@historiaecclesiastica I agree the new age has an unhealthy view of the supernatural and sacred. But doesn't Aquinas have a "medieval view" of classical, pre-Christian Aristotelian philosophy? Also, what's your views on sacramentals? Isn't my Scapular "just wool", my Rosary (blessed by a Bishop) "just wood and twine", or my Miraculous Medal "just metal"? What, if anything, makes these effective sacramentals? Why should we care if a blessed Crucifix or Icon of Our Lady is trodden underfoot? Or, for that matter, if holy relics are destroyed, if they're "just bones"? There's a book I began reading recently, by Sebastian Morello, called Mysticism, Magic and Monasteries. It's subtitled, "Recovering the Sacred Mystery at the Heart of Reality". The author is Catholic. Only a couple of chapters in, but it seems quite good. I think we might be more successful in combatting the false mysticism the new age has with Catholic Mysticism and the sense of the sacred, like our Catholic ancestors did with paganism. Just a thought.

I wonder about this as well. Many ideas I thought were just pure Christianity I found out later they were Protestant errors, some other occult mumbo-jumbo, and/or something like Stoic philosophy. The modern world has boxed us into thinking they way they want us to on a lot of issues. Maybe there is room for weird crystals but it's not something I'm looking into anytime soon. I got enough on my plate trying to make sense of other crazy things. I recently started learning about Kabbalah and that's opened a can worms.

Deo Gratias from Wolverine country! Ha.

My closing statement was that the Budhist cosmology - regarding different dimensional plains of existence for deities and the entire mechanism of reincarnation - is extraordinarily speculative and not based in reality. Further, the desire for spiritual annihilation, at the heart of Buddhism, is fundamentally problematic.

@ I mean this with respect because you’re incredibly knowledgeable about the Catholic faith. You’re misunderstanding Buddhism. It’s not based on speculation it’s based on direct observation and mapping of different states of consciousness. The chakra system is not speculation. I know first hand their mapping of this system is accurate. The core problem with Buddhism as you are stating is the conclusion that we should escape suffering. The story of Gautama leaving his wife and children and responsibility as king to sit in the forest is the core issue. Christ embodied all suffering and calls us to share in that journey. It’s a fundamentally different type of consciousness one experiences by embracing their cross than by fleeing from it. But their cosmological map isn’t just some made up speculative mythicism. All people were ignorant of Truth but seeking it . Taoism was very close. We had to wait for Truth to incarnate for any of us to know it. No Jew, no Buddhist , no Mayan could have ever reached it. Truth had to be revealed to us. We can’t blame them that in all their striving they couldn’t glimpse it. They weren’t permitted to experience it. We can’t deny the aspects of truth they experienced while waiting for the revelation to incarnate. There’s no precise exoteric mapping of the planes of consciousness. However we get glimpses of the 7 heavens and the 7 hells and attempts at revealing a map that the Buddhists have already mapped in precise detail. But because they refuse to understand the incarnation they’re blinded by relative Truth

Jesus talked badly about the tradition of the pharisees, which He rejected as being man-made, but did not criticize the concept of tradition in general - in fact, he established his own traditions, such as the Our Father, the Eucharistic liturgy, and numerous moral principles and interpretations of Scripture.

It was translated to communicate what the Biblical writers, primarily God, intended, when the literal translation of Greek or Hebrew words did not communicate that intention adequately. The prime example is that the term presbyter was used as the title of a specific ministry rather than a designation of age, legitimizing the use of the English term for that same ministry rather than the English word for an old person. This manner of translation is validated in the Scriptures itself, as the Divinely approved translation of Isaiah 7:14 found in Matthew 1:22-23 translates the Hebrew term "maiden" into the Greek term for "virgin" since this was the key point of the original prophecy, and translating into the Greek word for maiden would have lost the original intention of the Biblical author.

16th century Anglicanism was mostly Calvinistic at the grassroots level and most clerics and Anglican divines subscribed to that branch of Protestantism. The distinction between Calvinism and Anglicanism as distinct Christian theological systems did not take place until the mid to late 17th century.

Agreed. Do you like Jung? I grew up Catholic and the lack of real understanding gives me religious psychosis. I'm schizophrenic, agnostic, but I see value in understanding spirituality. Do you read Jung?

@michellemauer5032 Yes I do. I think alchemy and contemplative mysticism are a missing compliment to Christianity. Dry theology alone does not suffice.

Gby and your ministry!