THE NEW AGE AND OCCULT

With the abandonment of many of the traditional
religious beliefs held by a great many of the people it is
natural, considering the spiritual needs humans have,
that new ideas should emerge to take their place. The
past few centuries have witnessed a rapid proliferation
in the number of new religious movements, sects and
cults. The weakening hold that traditional religious
institutions have had over people as a direct result of
the challenge of Scientific Rationalism, has led to
opportunities for new world views and beliefs to
flourish. While from the time of the Enlightenment
onwards, many have opted for an Atheistic Secular
Humanist outlook, at the same time many others have
rejected this world view absent of spirit and devoid of
God. Instead this longing for an alternative spirituality
has led to the popularity of the New Age, the Occult and
other spiritual movements in the form of fringe cults.
There is diversity here that is myriad and would
comprise things like Theosophy, Mormonism,
Scientology, Moonies, Witchcraft, Wicca, UFO cults,
Satanism to Magic, Fairies and Crystals energies. While
benefit may be derived by some of the adherents of
these sorts of beliefs, at the same time all that glitters
isn’t gold. While religion and the spiritual outlook has
always involved a degree of suspension of disbelief, and
an openness to unexplained mysteries taken on faith,
some of the ideas making the rounds on the New Age
circuit or the world of Cults, lend credence to statement
by the writer G.K. Chesterton who famously said that,
‘When a man stops believing in God then he doesn’t
believe in nothing, he believes in anything’.
Also, a flaw in the whole New Age enterprise is that due
to its rampant commercialism and fixation on material
gain, there is a tendency for the prophets of the New
Age to tell people what they want to hear rather than
what they need to know, in order to sell more books,
workshops and merchandise. All too often New Age
gurus are less interested in freeing the Spirit, rather
more focused on liberating the contents of peoples
wallets.
Taken together these spiritual problems of the present
age, i.e the falling away from religion into Atheism, the
emergence of Religious Fundamentalism and the
degeneration of spirituality into certain aspects of the
New Age and the world of Cults, can be seen as a
general decline in World Religion. The age of reason and
the rise of Secular Humanism has brought with it an age
of spiritual darkness, as characterized by the process of
Secularization, the rise of Religious Fundamentalism,
Cults and fringe Sects; along with the superficiality, not
to mention the crass commercialism of the New Age.