Many people who are so-called new agers consider themselves to be Christians. There are many Christianities, Hinduisms, Buddhisms, Judaisms, etc. In religious studies, the convention is to pluralize religions, like Christianities, Judaisms, Hinduisms, etc. When you have multiple people, who call themselves Christians, but say that other Christians are not Christians, then you have multiple Christianities. IMO, we are all wrong, because of the indexicality of language.

The term "evolutionist" has mostly been promoted by creationists, presumably in their attempt to create a level playing field between their silly pseudoscience and hard natural science. No biologist, paleontologist, or physical anthropologist I know would use the term "evolutionist."

When I say "doubt," I mean something like a universal agnosticism, i.e., the impossibility of achieving absolute knowledge.

I would say that God can, if he choose, draw anyone to himself. He is not bound by our own views of who is "saved." The problem with both exclusivism and universalism is that they impose limitations on God's sovereignty.

Given the principle of parsimony, or Ockham's razor, the simplest explanations for observed phenomena should be preferred over more complicated ones. The indigo and crystal children constructs clearly violate this widely accepted scientific rule. There are much more basic explanations for Asperger's autism and for ADHD which do not require any metaphysical leaps of faith.

The new age movement has developed into a hybrid of pop psychology and pop occultism.

What I personally use is a combination of prayer with silent or spoken dhikr (Islam), simran (Sikhism), or japa (Hinduism), i.e., mantra meditation. After I am in a state of spiritual receptivity, I reflect on various subjects.

To those who argue for "traditional" Judaism, my question is, Were the prophets of the Tanakh traditional? Assuming they existed, I would say, "no." They were revolutionaries.

I am not saying that the experiences are a social construct. There are experiential, or phenomenal, differences between people. However, how those differences are categorized is a social construction.

My neurodiversity, in the 1960s, was called childhood schizophrenia. It was not a misdiagnosis. I was, given the DSM-I, diagnosed correctly. Now, since autism has been removed from the child schizophrenia construct and placed into new categories, I have been rediagnosed with Asperger's.

The experiences of aspies are genuine. However, Asperger's itself is only a social construction - a human category. It may be changed in the DSM-V, and then again in future versions of the DSM.

In sociology, on the basis of an absence of evidence, we reject the idea of an innate self. Many people claim that there is such an innate self, but, to my knowledge, there is no empirical, peer-reviewed evidence supporting the idea. Self, to my understanding, is a construct. Societies define what constitutes a self, and then parents raise their children in such a way that they conform to those social definitions.

Neurology can provide an individual with predispositions to developing in a certain way, but the fact that there are so many aspies on the Internet, and, despite some similarities in traits, we are very different from one another, would indicate, IMO, that "nurture" (socialization) superimposes itself upon "nature" (biology, genetics, and neurology), not the other way around. However, self is a social construction of both nature and nurture.

It depends on which academic literature. In sociology, individual selves are generally viewed as a the products of socialization and social construction. Even biological/sexual differences are constructed, as I suggested before in relation to intersexuals.

Some animals may have awareness, but I think it would a gross exaggeration to say "the same self-awareness." Humans can think symbolically and abstractly, develop sciences, arts, etc.

IMO, both NT mind and aspie mind are purely social constructions.

Neurological predispositions are different from the sociological definitions of self. Whatever each person develops as "self," mostly through her or his parents, is imposed upon neurology. From my standpoint, we are not our neurologies, even if neurology can influence self-development.

Most Christians, globally, do not view the Genesis accounts as a discussion of origins. They treat them as parables or as "morality plays" of a sort.

I use narrative approaches in my own religion. For instance, I would ask about the message being conveyed by a text, not whether the text is factually accurate. "Factual accuracy" imposes modern ideas of history and the scientific method onto religious literature.

Fundamentalist Christians, IMO, confuse sacred history with modern concepts of history. There was no such thing as history, in a modern sense, in the ancient world. At that time, people made little or no distinction between parables, morality stories, metaphors, and chronologies. They freely used all of them in their narratives.

Here is a basic definition of sacred history:

Sacred history

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A sacred history is a retelling of history, in either a literary or oral format, with less emphasis on historical fact and more upon instilling faith, defining a group of believers, and/or explaining natural phenomenon.

Sacred histories have meaning and context for a specific group regardless of their historic verifiability; they may or may not be founded on historical fact, which is often a source of contention between believers and non-believers. Such types of accounts may include the Creation, Fall, and Exodus in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), the Book of Mormon, and the Yakub. Some have conjectured that the Flood account in the Bible may have historical roots in a localized flood in antiquity.

Sacred history commentary

Rabbi Neil Gillman, professor of Jewish philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, states

"I prefer to understand the plagues and the broader narrative of the Exodus from Egypt as redemptive or sacred history. There is a historical kernel to the story, as Tigay notes, but this kernel was elaborated and embellished by generations of Israelites as they told and retold the story from generation to generation, first orally as a folk tale, then later in highly crafted literary documents that even later were conflated into the biblical narrative we read today. The thrust of the entire narrative is our ancestors' conviction that Israel's Exodus from Egypt was part of God's redemptive work, the fulfillment of God's promise to our forefathers.

"Martin Buber puts it this way in his book titled "Moses." It may be impossible to reconstitute the course of the events themselves, he notes, but "it is nevertheless possible to recover much of the manner in which the participating people experienced those events. We become acquainted with the meeting between this people and a vast historical happening that overwhelmed it; we become conscious of the saga-creating ardor with which the people received the tremendous event and transmitted it to a moulding memory."

"Not "the events themselves," then, but "the manner in which the participating people experienced those events" is what we are reading in these Torah portions from the Book of Shemot. And it is this version that continues to have such an impact on us when we recite the story annually at our Passover seders, dipping our fingers into our wine in tribute to the suffering caused by the plagues".[1]

References

The Jewish Week Jan 27, 2006

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_history

I am not a Christian. However, speaking as a sociologist of religion, the vast majority of self-identified Christians do not use the historical hermeneutics of Christian fundamentalism.

Fundamentalist Christianity is, globally, a very rare belief system. It is mostly found in the U.S. (where it began) and, to a lesser degree, in Australia.

If I say that there is no absolute truth, that is, by definition, a relative statement. It is consistent, but not absolute. There is a difference. The notion of absolutism rejects contingency.

For people who are drawn to biblical explanations of origins and other subjects, I usually recommend, for what it's worth, that they consider other approaches to interpreting the biblical texts. The historical approach, preferred by all fundamentalists and most evangelicals, is not the only game in town. There is, for instance, narrative theology, also called postliberal theology:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_20_118/ai_76697232

http://www.theopedia.com/Postliberal_theology

http://www.amazon.com/Transforming-Postliberal-Theology-Pragmatism-Scripture/dp/0567030342

George Herbert Mead, who wrote that essay, is considered the founder of the symbolic interactionist school of sociology. His proposition, that self is learned through a process of role-taking (taking one's behavioral roles from significant others, such as parents), is now a standard view among most sociologists, even those who are not symbolic interactionists.

As a radical constructionist, I would go even further than Mead. IMO, even sex (the biological divisions) and gender (the learned behavior) are social constructions.

For instance, with respect to sex, it would be correct to say:

1. From the standpoint of reproduction, there are two sexes.
2. From the standpoint of genetics, we have at least five sexes. (In fact, this view is promoted by the intersex movement.)
3. Finally, from the standpoint of gestation, we have only one sex, i.e., female. (In the early weeks of gestation, all fetuses are female.)

The underlying argument, which can be seen in all the creationisms (young earth, old earth, intelligent design, progressive, gap, etc.), is that hominids (humans) are not hominoids (apes). The various creationisms differ in their particulars, and some are more extreme than others (like young-earth creationism), but they all attempt to refute that same basic postulate of physical anthropology.

The intelligent design folks are slicker in how they make their claims, as in arguing that the human intellect could not have developed through random processes. However, the objective, to discredit the idea that humans have shared descent with other apes, is still there.

My view is that issues of the supernatural are irrelevant to questions of biological origins (or any other scientific question), which makes me a "weak" theist.

All religions and belief systems are man- or woman-made - unless someone can produce evidence of a fish or bear starting a religion.

I am a socialist, but both Marxism and anarchism have failed to bring it about. In contrast, I propose a constructionist and poststructural approach to establishing socialism. Capitalism, as a construction of knowledge based on elite power and interests, needs to be challenged by the alternate construction of socialism. The key is opportunity. When the opportunity arises, and the capitalist economy is at its weakest, propose socialism. I doubt that socialism can be instituted until capitalism has thoroughly collapsed on its own. Then, it will be a constructive revolution, but by proposal, not by violence. For now, the revolution is one of logical deconstruction.

Presently, deconstructive revolution is occurring as increasing numbers of people recognize the flaws of the capitalist world system. With recession and failed economic, political, and military policies, that disenchantment may accelerate. The constructive revolution, by proposal, will take place in the aftermath.

The approach I take to sex is a Foucaultian one, i.e., that "it" does not exist. Both sex (nature) and gender (nurture) are social constructions of knowledge which reflect elite power and interests.

It is actually very easy to see auras around objects. If you stare at them long enough, and with sufficient focus and determination, they will appear. It is called the power of suggestion, expectation effects, or the self-fulfilling prophecy. Our minds can manufacture all sorts of images, as they do each night in our dreams.

Both Kirlian (loss of moisture) and aura photography (a graphical presentation of biofeedback) can be explained and studied empirically. Neither has anything to do with the imaginative seeing of auras, which, IMO, is basically a form of self-suggestion or self-hypnosis.

The universe, like planets but unlike cellular organisms, is not a real thing. It is just a linguistic convenience we use for various concepts of what is "out there." Going back to Pythagorus, and even earlier, there have been many constructions of the universe. Even today, the word "universe" is used to designate some very different, even contradictory, conceptions. An expanded version of the Gaia model is only one of them.

I don't see the sense of combining political analysis with premillennial and apocalyptic prophecies.

What is so wonderful about the system of nation states, a system which has plunged us into repeated wars and taken us the brink of nuclear devastation, that people would want to hold onto it for dear life? Personally, I would be extraordinary glad to be rid of the nation-state system and to have some sort of global governance or government.

There is no world government yet. Therefore, there is nothing to trust or distrust. It is all speculation.

People who speak against world government are doing so as a matter of principle. On the other hand, I support the idea of world government (also as a matter of principle).

My problem is when people make up all of these fantastic and conspiratorial scenarios for what a presently nonexistent world government will look like. They are objecting to the idea of world government, not to an objective social polity.

Copyright © 2002- Mark A. Foster, Ph.D. All rights reserved.