According to a Pew Research Center poll in 2017, there are as many adults in the U.S. who hold to at least one New Age belief as there are who believe in God (62%)! For the survey, people were asked their view of four New Age concepts:
believe spiritual energy can be located in physical things
Can one’s self-image be affected by involvement in social media? Yes, according to an unscientific study of sixty-six female freshmen at York University.
Half refrained from all social media, the other half continued. After one week, the abstainers scoredsignificantly better on questionnaires rating body image satisfaction and self-esteem than the women in the other group.
The apostle Paul identified how you can know whether someone claiming to be a Christian has gone wrong (2 Corinthians 11:4). If they have a:
Different Gospel (way to be saved);
Different Jesus;
Different spirit; or
Different authority.
In part 1 of this 3-part series, I identified the biblical Gospel (grace alone by faith alone) and discussed the deviations from this in several groups who claim to be Christian. The major departure is the unbiblical addition of human “works” to be saved.
In part 2, I want to address a “different Jesus.” This test points the way to distinguish between genuine Christian groups and those often identified as “cults.”
A Ford® Focus that wasn’t working quite right was brought into the Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, Ford service department in September. Mechanics quickly discovered they had no tools to fix it.
The following quote is from a new book, Science After Babel, by David Berlinski. The author is a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute in Seattle. It is quoted from World Magazine, October 21, 2023, p. 32.
There remains, at the heart of the universe, the profound mystery of life itself: “a kind of intelligence evident nowhere else,” whose “fantastic and controlled complexity, its brilliant inventiveness and diversity, its sheer difference from anything else in this or any other world” is beyond the reach of science to explain.
