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In the early 1960’s,
spiritual matters to me seemed clearly the domain of the church.
As was the case with most young people then, the church held little
appeal to the brooding dissatisfaction of our generation.
Though my mother was
raised in a Christian congregational church going family, my father
wasn’t. At the urging of our mother, my sisters and I did
attend the local congregational church Sunday school several times
when we were little. I accepted the bible teaching with
curiosity though it would be decades later that I began a serious
investigative study of the bible.
Rather, my interest
in understanding things unseen and mysterious at the time was
directed more by science, science fiction, and fascination with the
supernatural than by things biblical.
Fueled by the
desire for answers to questions about destiny and the origin of life
as were millions of others at the time, the UFO phenomenon much in
the news in my early teenage years was the direction I sought hugely
fascinated by the possibility that beings more technologically
advanced than earthlings existed in the universe and were visiting
us.
While spending the
night with friends, we’d commonly stay up late telling ghost stories
and several times even consult the wee gee board. In our
little minds we were having or wanting to have supernatural
experiences.
UFO’s and wee gee
boards were all we knew of the spiritual world in those days of
naiveté. Later we would encounter, and many of us embrace
astrology, positive thinking, philosophy, and various
non-Christian religions.
Disparate occult practices and
religions back then were seemingly unrelated. Astrology bore
no relationship to UFO’s, positive thinking to wee gee boards, etc.
People dedicated to those camps were generally considered kooks.
When I started Moss
Hill Natural Foods, I was surprised by the support of people from
assorted and apparently widely differing religions and beliefs.
We had customers who were members of the Charismatic Catholic
Church, Scientology, UFO followers, Buddhists, Witches, Astrologers,
and many others.
Though I was a
Christian, my beliefs were not yet solidly founded on bible
knowledge. I was fascinated by an apparent common and growing connection
my customers shared. In my mind I
sought a common thread of understanding so as to embrace all of our
customers as friends.
At weekly Moss Hill
pot luck dinners, groups of people representing all manner of
beliefs would “break bread” together sharing the common desire for
natural foods. It was marvelous to entertain such a colorful
and diverse group of people enjoying fellowship around the dinner
table. This was in the early 1970’s.
The shadow of what
would come to be known as “the new age movement” was cast upon us.
Soon, the doctrines of countless occult and atheist, humanistic
religions would become amalgamated. As the coalescence of
dispersed droplets of mercury, the gathering together of virtually all of the non
Christian religions under one banner was one of the most
consequential events of our time in history.
Unified as it were, a
humanistic religion aligned in opposition to Christ and the bible,
the "new age" "dawned" upon an unsuspecting generation as an arbiter
of light. Once considered kooks, self righteous religious
leaders proudly proclaimed strange doctrines to a depraved world of
people with shallow beliefs and ears eager to hear.
Battle lines were
drawn. Ennobled by the ignorance of the masses, embodied in
celebrities, popular media, academia, and later the liberal left became the pulpit for the “new age
movement”.
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