Word: ageing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Whether leftist, rightist or none of the above, the New Age has attracted a fair amount of criticism on philosophical and ethical grounds. "A lot of it is a cop-out, an escape from reality, an anti-intellectual movement denying rationality," says Alan Dundes, a professor of anthropology and folklore at the University of California, Berkeley. "The New Age movement reflects anxieties of one sort or another -- the threat of nuclear warfare, the President running a vigilante action out of the White House, nurses accused of killing patients. People look at all this and say, 'If this is the Establishment...
...Burrows, publications editor of the evangelical Spiritual Counterfeits Project in Berkeley. "Humans are essentially religious creatures, and they don't rest until they have some sort of answer to the fundamental questions. Rationalism and secularism don't answer those questions. But you can see the rise of the New Age as a barometer of the disintegration of American culture. Dostoyevsky said anything is permissible if there is no God. But anything is also permissible if everything is God. There is no way of making any distinction between good and evil...
Douglas Groothuis, a research associate at a Christian think tank called Probe Center Northwest and author of Unmasking the New Age, raises a similar objection. "Once you've deified yourself," he says, "which is what the New Age is all about, there is no higher moral absolute. It's a recipe for ethical anarchy. I see it as a counterfeit religious claim. It's both messianic and millennial...
Though Groothuis is now writing a second book, Confronting the New Age, about the movement's inroads into business and education, it is probably wise to remember that phenomena like the New Age have to some extent been a part of the American scene ever since there was an American scene. Remember the 18th century Shaker leader, Mother Ann Lee, whose followers believed she represented the second coming of Christ. Remember Mary Baker Eddy, severely injured by a fall on the ice, who became cured while reading a passage in St. Matthew and thereafter taught the unreality of all physical...
Though it is hard to say exactly how many Americans believe in which parts of the New Age, the movement as a whole is growing steadily. Bantam Books says its New Age titles have increased tenfold in the past decade. The number of New Age bookstores has doubled in the past five years, to about 2,500. New Age radio is spreading, with such stations as WBMW in Washington and KTWV-FM in Los Angeles offering dreamy light jazz that one listener described as "like I tapped into a radio station on Mars." The Grammys now include a special prize...