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"Now in our 25th year of standing for truth!"

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Eric & Melanie Barger

 

Update June 27, 2008

Let there be no doubt. Oprah Winfrey is finally out of the spiritual closet. She has completely thrown out any previous notion that she is a "Christian." Now, television's most influential woman has become the driving force in bringing Helen Schucman's 35 year old trance-channeled book A Course in Miracles and new age author Marianne Williamson into the mainstream.

Not since Shirley MacLaine has any single person done so much to promote and normalize New Age mysticism to the public, as has Oprah. Her latest venture is promoting Eckhart Tolle, a sixty year-old German mystic who resides in Vancouver, British Columbia.

According to Tolle himself, his influences include:

* Sufism, which is a mystical form of Islam

* Zen Buddhism

* The Australian turned Hindu mystic, Barry Long whose teaching includes 20 books most of which focus in detail about sexuality between man and woman and its use to purify them both and rid them of personal, human love.

* Tolle acknowledges that his teachings are a synthesis of the teachings of Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi, one of the most famous of Hindu Yogi's and
J. Krishnamurti. (Krishnamurti was once declared the "Messiah" and was proclaimed as the new incarnation of the Maitreya Buddha by the Madame Blavatsky's Theosophical Society.)

* The aforementioned A Course in Miracles.

Perhaps most importantly, Tolle was born "Ulrich Tolle" and changed his name to "Eckhart" because of the profound influence which the 14th century occult mystic, Meister Eckhart had on him!

Oprah has spotlighted Tolle's books in her popular "book club" and on March 3, 2008, she began co-hosting a series of weekly webcasts with Tolle based on his latest book, A New Earth. During one webcast, Tolle led Oprah to follow him into an altered state of consciousness. I wonder how many of the estimated two million people logged online to the meeting did likewise?

When asked during a webcast how she has reconciled Tolle's spiritualist teachings with her previous Christian background Oprah responded as follows.

"I've reconciled it because I was able to open my mind about the, ah, absolute, indescribable hugeness of that which we call 'God.' Ah, I took God out of the box, cause, I grew up in the Baptist church and there were you know, rules and belief systems, doctrine. And, I happened to be, ah, sitting in church in my late twenties, and I was going to this church where you had to get there at eight o'clock in the morning or you couldn't get a seat and a very charismatic minister, and everybody was, you know, into the sermon. And this great minister was preaching about how great God was and how omniscient and omnipresent and God is everything. And then he said 'The Lord thy God is a jealous God.' And I was, you know, caught up in the rapture of that moment until he said 'jealous.' And, something struck me, I was I think about twenty-seven or twenty-eight, I was thinking, 'God is all. God is omnipresent and God’s also jealous? God is jealous of me?' Something about that didn't feel right in my spirit because I believe that God is love, that God is in all things. And so, that's when the search for something more than doctrine began to stir within me."

Oprah then asks her guru, Eckhart Tolle, what happens to humans at death. Tolle responds "I don't give it any thought." Oprah further pontificates that "God, in the essence of all consciousness, isn't something to believe. God is! God 'is' and God is a feeling experience not a believing experience. And if your religion is a believing experience, if God for you is still about a belief, then it's not truly God."

This last statement is exactly what drives the heretical Emerging Church Movement. It is a search for spiritual feelings - but not absolute truth. For experiences - but without foundation.

God is certainly NOT jealous of Oprah! However, in her defiance of the key passage forbidding idolatry (Exodus 20's "Ten Commandments"), she has made herself a god in the process. This is what led to the fall of mankind in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3) and to the insurgence of every cultic teaching since. The mistake of all mistakes directly from the serpent's mouth is discounting, ignoring or disagreeing with God's infallible Word... "Hath God Said?"

To really get the full impact of Oprah's statements I suggest that you actually hear and see Oprah and her guru. It is chilling to say the least. To do so, please visit this page on our website: http://www.ericbarger.com/emailers/2008/update5-8-2008.htm.
We have links to videos of both Oprah's comments and my rebuttal of her New Age ideas.

 

Oprah Update 6/27/08


Oprah Continues to Push New Age and Occult Spirituality

Some may wonder why I have bothered to discuss Oprah again in these updates. After all, for Christians isn't the issue obvious? Isn't it a done deal that Believers see what Oprah is up to and thus stay away?

I only wish it were that simple. It would appear that spotting Oprah's goofy and dangerous spiritual ideas isn't a sure bet since so many alleged "Christians" seem to have a bigger problem called Universalism.

A headline in the June 24, 2008 USA Today read: "Cultural Agenda is Set by Oprah - Not Religious Leaders." The article included many facts and poll results. Perhaps the most shocking was that of the 35,000 Americans surveyed by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life's U.S. Religious Landscape Survey 70% believe that "many religions can lead to eternal life" while only 24% state that their particular religion is the one true way.

Though he doesn't nail it as "New Age," Rice University sociologist Michael Lindsay says "The impact of Oprah is seen throughout this survey. She uses the language of Bible and Christian traditions and yet includes other traditions to create a hodgepodge personalized faith."

My question is this: how blatant and relentless does Winfrey have to get before preachers and lay people wake up? It is our responsibility to warn the world when we see people running headlong into disaster. The saddest part is that in this case many who claim to be Christians are running towards peril following Oprah's leading and not their Bible.

On Tuesday, August 24 Oprah aired a program focusing on the New Age idea of Past Life Regression. Her guests included Dr. Brian Weiss who is a noted psychotherapist and New Age author who claims to have cured the fears and nightmares of thousands of people through PLR. His books include, Many Live, Many Masters, Through Time Into Healing, Only Love is Real (a book about a couple who were in love in a past life and are now reunited in the present), Messages From the Masters (about how to harness the power of love according to the "Masters"...the ascended spiritual Masters, and Mirrors of Time: Using Regression for Physical, Emotional and Spiritual Healing which is advertised as allowing the reader to enter the "next step in regression."

PLR emphasizes reincarnation through what Bible believers understand is demonic communications and into a maze of occultic spiritualism. As perilous as this activity may be, unsuspecting people are brought into a false reliance on the idea that they need not be concerned with sin or a Savior let alone death as they erroneously believe that they will get a chance at another life... or two or three, etc.

On Friday, August 27 Winfrey aired a program titled "The Law of Attraction: Real Life Stories" which featured a panel of New Age gals including Louise L. Hay, publisher (Hay House) for New Age teachers Dr.'s Deepak Chopra and Wayne Dyer. Hay is a follower of Ernest Holmes and is a practitioner in the Church of Religious Science. She was profoundly influenced by the metaphysical works of author Florence Scovel Shinn and also studied Transcendental Meditation with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at his university in Fairfield, Iowa. Writer Mark Oppenheimer called her "The Queen of the New Age" in the New York Times magazine, May 4, 2008. She is best known for the pamphlet Heal Your Body and the book You Can Heal Your Life.

The program also included video role-ins of Esther Hicks, author of the book The Law of Attraction. Oprah has featured Hicks on her XM satellite radio channel. Hicks is an ex-Mormon turned trace-channeler known best for her claims to vocally translate blocks of thought for a group of non-physical beings who call themselves Abraham. She was also involved in the now famous project known as "The Secret" which was based on The Law of Attraction and which Winfrey heavily publicized.

Also on the August 27 program was O Magazine columnist Martha Beck another ex-Mormon (is this a pattern?) who after a failed 21 year marriage says she is now a homosexual and Hay House author, life coach Cheryl Richardson.

 Click here to order Eric's complete seminar teaching "Why is There a New Age? on DVD or CD


Since its Fourth of July time and an election year too...


God, Give Us Godly Leaders!

"Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers and it is our duty and privilege to choose and prefer Christians for our leaders."
- John Jay, First Supreme Court Justice of the United States and First U.S. Secretary of State

"The Christian religion is the most important and one of the first things in which all children, under a free government ought to be instructed. . . . No truth is more evident to my mind than that the Christian religion must be the basis of any government intended to secure the rights and privileges of a free people."
- Noah Webster, the father of American Education

"The highest glory of the American Revolution was this: that it connected in one indissoluble bond the principles of civil government with the principles of Christianity."
- President John Quincy Adams, sixth U.S. President

"We have staked the future of our American civilization, not upon the power of government - far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of each of us to govern ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God."
- President James Madison, fourth U.S. President

"The people are responsible for the character of their Government. If it be ignorant, reckless, and corrupt, it is because the people tolerate ignorance, recklessness, and corruption. If it be intelligent, brave, and pure, it is because the people demand these high qualities... If the next centennial does not find us a great nation... it will be because those who represent the enterprise, the culture, and the morality of the nation do not aid in controlling the political forces."
- President James Garfield, twentieth U.S. President

"By removing the Bible from schools we would be wasting so much time and money in punishing criminals and so little pains to prevent crime. Take the Bible out of our schools and there would be an explosion in crime."
- Dr. Benjamin Rush, Founding Father and signer of Declaration of Independence

"When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice: but when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn."
- Proverbs 29:2

"I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men; 2 For kings, and for all that are in authority; that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty."
- I Tim 2:1-2

"God, please give us godly, righteous leaders. From dog catcher to President, either save them or remove them in Jesus' name!"
- Eric Barger, June 2008

Watch: Clip from Eric Barger's seminar DVD "The Rise, Fall and REDEMPTION of America"

Read: "This IS a Christian Nation"


Did He REALLY Say That?

"Syria is a moderate country, and the official government rule and position is to not allow any extremism of any kind." - Rick Warren


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