ANE: Twisted Gnostic Christianity

Chapter 1: Part 4, The Arising New Consciousness

Tolle is making the same mistakes over and over again. In this first paragraph he set out by saying;

In Hindu teachings (and sometimes in Buddhism also), this transformation is called enlightenment. In the teachings of Jesus, it is salvation, and in Buddhism, it is the end of suffering.

It bugs me that he's redefining the meanings of these words to fit his agenda. It bugs me even more that people are falling for it. These concepts are not the same. I would like to point out in Christianity, that we see suffering as necessary. It is not necessary to salvation, but if someone is a Christian and doesn't suffer, then something is wrong. Even Jesus suffered on the cross. "We also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us." Romans 5:3-5. I want Christians to see that suffering is normal, even expected in some cases. The end of suffering will either mean, 1) you're dead, 2) Jesus has returned or 3) you're too worldly and not Godly.

Tolle claims that "the world was not ready for them," that "their teachings... became distorted and misinterpreted, in some case even as they were recorded in writing by their disciples." He says "some of the teachers... came to be worshipped as gods." Tolle's God is not powerful. And I am amazed again, that Christians are swallowing this and still being called Christians, for they are not followers of Jesus anymore once believing this. Romans 5:6 says that "at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly." God does not make mistakes with timing. He is omniscient and his timing is perfect, even though sometimes I do not understand it. Jesus admits that he is God's only Son, demons admit it and are terrified of him, just go here to see all the references to it and read for yourself. Furthermore, Jesus is also called "The Word" and "The Word of God." He was with God in the beginning and oversaw creation; John, chapter 1. Jesus is worshipped as God because he is. If Jesus were merely a perfect human, then his sacrifice on the cross can only count for one human (one lamb per person, re: Old Testament sacrificial system). As God, his sacrifice is infinite as so can count for the sins of the whole world. But then, Tolle's version of salvation is completely different, so why would Jesus be God under Tolle?

I'll skip a few underlined bits in this book because I've already touched on them earlier. I want to pick up at,

Man created "God" in his own image. The eternal, the infinite, and unnamable was reduced to a mental idol that you believe in and worship as "my god" and "our god."

Can you, my dear readers, see that this is what Tolle himself is doing? Redefining God to fit his own mental idea (image) of what God is like? He claims to be revealing the true God, but has nothing to back this up except twisted references to different religions. His argument is undone by having nothing solid to base this on. Even other references he has used that would otherwise be solid, he himself has undermined!! He then says,

in some cases an intensification of the light of the original teaching [developed]. This is how Gnosticism and mysticism come into existence in the early and medieval Christianity

According to him, the truer version of Christianity is Gnosticism! I am amazed that he was so brazen here. There is nothing in Tolle that is true. How can people read this as truth? Even without the Bible, his arguments are undone.

ANE: Inherent Missing the Point

Chapter 1: Part 3, Our Inherited Dysfunction

Most religions will all agree that there's something wrong with the world and that their way is the one trying to fix it. That what Christianity is on about - God bringing justice and mercy. Tolle goes through Hindu, Buddhism and Christianity and looks at maya, dukkha and sin respectively. Honestly, I don't have much problem with that except this: Tolle doesn't get the Biblical understanding of sin at all!

to sin means to miss the mark, as an archer who misses the target, so to sin means to miss the point of human existence.

NOOOO! Do not want!! That remark is so far off the mark! I don't know what Tolle's point of human existence is, but whether we reach it or not is not sin. I think the best verse to use here would be Romans 2:23, "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." Sin is falling short of God's glory. God has a standard that everyone should be adhering to, but all of us fail at it, and that is what sin is. It is falling short of God's glory.

But really, what is the point of our existence here in earth? When God created the world, he put Adam and Eve in the garden and told them to take care of it, and God ruled over them. I think that the Bible teaches that it's to live under him, taking care of creation. God has been reconciling creation to himself ever since sin entered the world. For Christians, we are to "make it [our] ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind [our] own business, and to work with your hands, just as you were told" and to "be joyful always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus." (1 Thessalonians 4:11 and 5:16-18).

The book progresses with examples of the human dysfunction by using examples of war and insanity and our own observations; "we only need to watch the daily news..." and then we come to my final point in this section,

You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to emerge. But it can only emerge if something fundamental changes in your state of consciousness.

I actually agree with the first and last parts of that statement, but disagree with the middle and here's why; the Bible teaches original sin and the depravity of humanity. We cannot find goodness by looking within ourselves. We can only find it by looking outwards, to Jesus. Even though some/many things people do are good, they are still not good enough to reach the heights of God's glory. In fact, in comparison

The LORD looks down from heaven
on the sons of men
to see if there are any who understand,
any who seek God.

All have turned aside,
they have together become corrupt;
there is no one who does good,
not even one. Psalm 14:2-3

For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Romans 1:21

Although I agree that "it can only emerge if something fundamental changes..." again, it's not a fundamental change that we can bring about ourselves, in our "state of consciousness." The change that brings about true goodness is the Holy Spirit that works within the heart of the Christian when they accept Christ into their hearts and love God.

You know, I don't think I was quite as dismissive of this chapter as the 2 before it. Maybe it's just because total depravity is finally some semblance of common ground. :P

ANE: Awakening Jesus!

Chapter 1, The Flowering of Human Consciouness. Part 2, The Purpose of this Book

Maybe I ought to give a more definitive purpose for my blog entries on this book, considering Tolle is kindly expressing his purpose to us.
People believe this book. Christians believe this book! I went on to the Oprah website and looked around on the forum boards for this book, and out of every 10 posts, one is about a Christian reconciling their "faith" to this book. That is not right! This book is not giving an accurate representation of Jesus, God or the Bible and it's making claims about them. Christians are falling for this pantheistic dribble and I cannot sit by and watch that happen. There ought to be a resource with evidence taken from the book and Bible about how they don't mesh and where it's gone wrong. This book sounds good and lovely, it wants people to be united and aware of everything around them and so live life to the full in this "awakened" point of view. That is certainly not Biblical. And so that is why I write this. To refute this book so that other's don't have to read such nonsense. But you can read it for yourself anyway and line it up with scripture. It just isn't true.

I really ripped into the first part, but I don't have quite so much for this bit, which is probably a good thing as I'm procrastinating from very important study here :D.

Tolle talks a bit about what it means to be awakened, but I cannot define it for you as "only by awakening can you know the true meaning of that word." So I wont tackle it until it comes up later (if it does). In the meantime, there are 2 things that I want to bring out here. The first is in the second paragraph,

The possibility of such a tranformation has been the central message of the great wisdom teachings of humankind. The messengers - Buddha, Jesus and others... were humanity's early flowers.

What? Did he just compare Buddha and Jesus? I think he did! I cannot grasp how people manage to get it into their heads that all religions are the same. They aren't. Buddhism teaches that enlightenment can come by careful meditation over many years, even lifetimes. Nirvana isn't heaven, it's a state of being, and then discontinuation of that being. There is no judgement in Buddhism, there is karma though.
The Bible on the other hand, teaches that bad things will always happen, even to good people (not karma), it teaches that God is most certainly alive and powerful and will come to judge humanity for their sins, and that salvation is achieved by trusting in Jesus - not by meditating, or doing anything really. These two religions are about as different as can be! Yet Tolle is comparing them and even saying that they share the same central message!

The central message of the Bible is reconciliation to God, which God achieved in Jesus. How many times must I repeat myself? On one hand it is good, because it's so easy to refute. Tolle misses the point of the Gospel again and again. On the other hand, I cannot believe that Christians are falling for this! I have Bible passages coming out of my ears, but here are three nice, succinct ones for you,

Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst. 1 Timothy 1:15

For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus 1 Timothy 2:5

All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. 2 Corinthians 5:18-19

Tolle would then claim that "their message became so largely misunderstood and often greatly distorted" by us humans to refute me, but I am appalled at his arrogance! Blessed is he who knows which bits of the Bible to pick and choose from and he has now been able to graciously communicate the real and true message of the Gospel that was somehow missing all this time and not even in the Bible(!) If you're not going to believe all of it, why believe even some? Some of it may be true for some of you, but don't use it to back up your argument unless you're prepared to answer to all of it.

The second point that I want to draw out is when he says

This book's main purpose is not to add new information or beliefs to your mind or to try to convince you of anything, but to bring about a shift in consciousness, that is to say, to awaken.

Who's he kidding? He is totally adding new information in order to reconcile the religions of his choosing. He is adding new beliefs to your mind, the belief that everything is somehow connected by the spiritual realm, read: pantheism. He is trying to convince us of that in order to bring about an awakening and sell books. I do grant that he does say these are not his main reasons, but is that an acknowledgement that they are still secondary reasons? He is trying to get people to see that there is no reason to be critical of this book, because you don't need new beliefs to experience this shift (except for pantheism) and it's ok to be awakened and Christian(!) *cough*

ANE: The great pantheistic book!

Chapter 1, The Flowering of Human Consciouness. Part 1, Evocation

Alright, I intended on doing the first chapter, but there's just so much here already! I'll go through it as it's written.

Tolle starts off by bringing us imagery of the first flower ever blooming. He paints us a lovely picture of 14 million years ago just after sunrise. The flower blooms and eventually a "critical threshold was reached, and suddenly there would have been an explosion of colour and scent all over the planet." Flowers have a purpose and plants may have evolved because of that very purpose in pollination and so forth. However, a paragraph later, he is telling us that flowers are the first things humans value because they "had no utilitarian purpose for them." Except that they do have purpose! Again with the pollination purpose, we also eat them and make clothes out of them. Cotton is a from a flower right?

Tolle than makes the claim that "Jesus tells us to contemplate the flowers and learn from them how to live." He then compares Jesus' supposedly abstract lesson with the actual abstract lesson of The Buddha when he gives a silent sermon by holding up a flower and contemplating it. I mean come on, did Tolle even read Matthew 6:25-34 when Jesus gave this lesson on worrying? The point was not to reach enlightenment, as Tolle wants us to believe, but on trusting God to provide. Read for yourself right here,

"And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. 29Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. 30If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?

This trust and providence comes when we "seek first his kingdom and his righteousness." Trusting God does not bring enlightenment. In fact, the Bible is not a book on enlightenment, but on salvation.

My next few underlined bits in the book all kinda come under the same heading, and that heading is, WTF!?
Tolle suggests that "we could look upon flowers as the enlightenment of plants" and that any "life-form" can "leap to an entirely different level of Being and, most importantly, a lessening of materiality." I don't understand how this happens. I gave him the benefit of the doubt for a time, thinking that he could very well mean that our emotional responses to these objects of beauty, make them an enlightenment of plants for us. Except the next page he then says that "their special significance and the reason why humans feel such fascination for and affinity with them can be attributed to their ethereal quality." He admits that these things have ethereal qualities outside human perception of them! How is this?

He went on a little to include gems and precious stones as the enlightened form of rocks and birds as the enlightened reptiles. But all of these leads up to the great deceit of this whole book and that is here:

the one indwelling consciousness or spirit in every creature, every life-form... as one with [human's] own essence

He continues a bit more in this vein, that these enlightened forms draws us to "the realm of spirit," that they're "a window... into the formless," "a bridge between the world of the physical forms and the formless," "messengers from another realm." I think what he's getting at, is that these things attune us to the spiritual realm - whatever that is, he hasn't elaborated on yet. But this is certainly not Biblical. We know from Romans 1:20 that God's power can be known by creation. But that is knowing God is powerful because he created everything, not by being attuned to it! God is not a part of the plants or rocks. He is separate from his creation, he is entirely different from it.

I want to draw on this quote from the last paragraph.

...these "en-lightened" life-forms have played such an important part in the evolution of human consciousness since ancient times; ...a white bird, the dove, signifies the Holy Spirit in Christianity. They have been preparing ground for a more profound shift in planetary consciousness that is destined to take place... [yadda yadda]

I know I'm being very picky with wording here, but the dove is not the Holy Spirit, not does it signify Him within the Bible. I looked at multiple translations of Matthew 3:16, Mark 1:10 and Luke 3:22 and they all say that the Spirit is like a dove descending on Jesus. The Holy Spirit is also like a tongue of flame, the wind blowing over the waters, etc etc. The dove imagery is used for one time in the Bible (recorded 3 times) when Jesus was baptised! That doesn't make the Holy Spirit a bird!

Furthermore, the second commandment as recorded in Exodus 20:4-5 is as such, ""You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them." Why, oh why then, would God make himself into an image of a dove to be worshipped? The Holy Spirit is not a dove. He can descend like a dove, he can be like tongues of fire, but he is neither, nor should he be represented by those symbols.

The last part of the quote though, hold most beef for me. God is not preparing the way for a "profound shift in planetary consciousness." God has brought Jesus to the world to die for the sins of humanity and reconcile us to himself. He is doing this even now and people around the world come to know and love him. That is the Gospel, that is the purpose God has for humanity, to be reconciled to him. 2 Corinthians 5:18-19 says,

All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.

A New Earth

I've heard a bit of talk about this new book and had dismissed it outright and new age dribble. But as I am a little interested in new age dribble and how it presents itself, I picked up the book while in Borders this afternoon and read the first chapter. This chapter alone prompted me to buy the book, just so I could scribble all over it with my comments and criticisms.

I warn you, I am taking this book from a Biblical point of view and so I will not be very diplomatic. I find this book to be rather hilarious actually! But I am very interested in doing a series on it. Over the next long while, I will read a few pages/a chapter and publish all of my thoughts here. And so expect me to begin soon!

Dinosaurs Make No Sense!

Is it possible to draw a good and Godly conclusion on the literal nature of the first few chapters of Genesis? There are some people who are very literal, to the point of reading far too much into Genesis, and there are some people who insist that 7 day creation didn't happen at all, to the point that God didn't even have a hand in it. I don't want to go either way. I looked at a website earlier that was quite scary in it's representation, to the point of being scientifically inaccurate in the extreme and very badly researched, relying upon little more than cultural rumours (such as the kangaroo being the "Aboriginese" word for "I don't know"). How can I possibly take that seriously!?

I don't like dinosaurs. I think primarily because I don't know what to do with them. Where do they fit in the Bible? Literalists would have me believe that they walked with humans and were washed away in the Flood. Non literalists want me to believe that they happened sometime in between God creating the animals and God creating humans, and as a day doesn't equal day, that is possible.

I don't know what to do with dinosaurs! Even if I took the evolutionary side, I still wouldn't know what to do with them! Why did God (or evolution) create such massive beasts, so alien from what's around us now, only to be destroyed (and if you're an evolutionist, why didn't life now evolve into such large animals in the same way?)?

Dinosaurs make no sense!! I don't know where to put them or what to do with them. When I become a teacher, I will rely on other teachers to do dinosaurs. I will do other themes, such as the ocean, space, etc. But not dinosaurs!

Visit this entry for a heated Discussion

Hero Musings

Original Entry is as such:

I love Heroes; I think it's a great tv series. It's about people being given gifts and talents, and them raising up to find out how to deal with those gifts and what they can do to help other people in need.

It can kind of be applied to the church. God gives Christians various gifts, and he wants us to be able to use those gifts in order to help the church and give glory to him. I think I have a gift with children, so I want to be able to use that by serving children at the church I'm a part of. I'm also going into teaching, which will help me build on my gift and I can use it to make money.

Anyway, that was a digression from what I originally wanted to write about. The people with powers, are able to manipulate certain things around them. Hiro can manipulate space and time at an incredible level. But as I thought about it, so someone who is blind, we are able to manipulate our sight. To someone who is deaf, we can manipulate our hearing. etc. It made me think of all the things I have and should be thankful for. Instead of pining away for fictional powers I wish I could have, I ought to go run a race, because I'm so thankful I have legs and feet that work and that I can manipulate!

Anyway, I wasn't pining around for fictional powers, but it had me thinking how we ought to be so thankful for what we have. This show encourages me to be thankful that I can do what I can do. What a great gift I've already been given!

60 comments beats my previous record of 50 comments