Thursday, July 03, 2008
IS OBAMA THE NEW AGE DARLING ?
Clicking around the net in an attempt to answer that question, the following comments surfaced:
1. From the San Francisco Chronicle, "Is Obama an Enlightened Being?":
Many spiritually advanced people I know (not coweringly religious, mind you, but deeply spiritual) identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet, of relating and connecting and engaging with this bizarre earthly experiment. These kinds of people actually help us evolve. They are philosophers and peacemakers of a very high order, and they speak not just to reason or emotion, but to the soul.
2. From the Charleston Daily Mail, "Obama Peddles a New Age Religion":
Human beings seem to have a yearning for the transcendent - hence thousands of years of religion - but we have lately shied away from traditional approaches and old gods.
Thus, in post-Judeo-Christian America, the sports club is the new church.
Global warming is the new religion.
Vegetarianism is the new sacrament.
Hooking up, the new prayer.
Talk therapy, the new witnessing.
Tattooing and piercing, the new sacred symbols and rituals.
And apparently, Barack Obama is the new messiah.
Here's how a 20-year-old woman in Seattle described that Obama feeling: "When he was talking about hope, it actually almost made me cry. Like it really made sense, like, for the first, like, whoa . . . "
This New Age glossolalia may be more sonorous than the guttural emanations from the revival tent, but the emotion is the same. It's all religion by any other name.
3. From National Review Online, "Obama's Messianic Politics":
...take a step back, and the nature of Senator Obama’s appeal becomes a little clearer. I imagine an anthropologist, centuries hence, sifting through the ruins of our civilization and concluding something like this: “The rise of the cult of Obama, a young lawmaker from one of his people’s middle-western metropolises, suggests parallels with the earlier progress of the Egyptian cult of Osiris and the Greco-Phrygian worship of Adonis-Attis, in which civilizations which had lost their original spiritual inspirations sought rejuvenation in the figure of a beautiful young man who promised to redeem a barren time.
4. CafePress is selling "Good," "God," "New age" & "Barack obama" CDs
5. From the political blog Half Sigma:
Obama attracts new-age liberals while Hillary attracts traditional liberals. Too bad the exit polls don’t ask questions like “are you a vegetarian?”
6. From The Guardian, "New age America is entranced by Obama's electoral aura":
...not long ago, [Deepak] Chopra used the word in a new context that bears closer inspection: if Barack Obama enters the White House as president next January, he declared, "it will represent a quantum leap in American consciousness".
Chopra, it turns out, is far from alone. A curious side-story in this year's election campaign is that the new age movement in the US has embraced Obama even more fervently than most of his supporters. New agers are traditionally liberal, so it's no surprise that they're backing the Democratic candidate. But the question that's been gathering steam among them in recent weeks goes much further than that, and brings - shall we say - a whole other dimension to the race: could Obama be a "lightworker"?
7. From the New York Post, "'NEW AGE' OBAMA VS. 'RETRO' MCCAIN":
McCain senior policy adviser Randy Scheunemann has mocked Obama's greet-the-enemies vision as "New Age diplomacy."
8. From , an Obama supporters website:
Obama's New Age strategy isn't without risk.
9. From The Obama Generation, "The New Age":
The new age upon us
will return us to
the forgotten promise
that we all once knew
True to ourselves
and true to the world
from dank dusty shelves
our flag is unfurled...
At Last a light illuminates
the darkness of their deeds
and we can all seek candidates
more suited to our needs
What joy, what rapture, to believe
that change lies round the bend
our sorry plight we shall relieve
and bring war to an end
Shout ye mothers!
Cry out ye children!
Stand up all ye deprived!
For by your shouts,
your cries of pain
our nation is revived
For now that we are hurt
we see the error of our ways
We’ve had our just desserts
now we can taste a better day
Where there’s mystery there’s hope
or so the saying goes
but in the light, we gain insight
on whats before our nose
10. From the Los Angeles Times blog:
I have grown quite weary of Obama's New Age blather about transcendence and whatnot. OK, it was a nice speech -- now get real or get lost.
That is the tip of the web iceberg of 1,300,000 Google hits for the query "Obama" and "New Age".
Scary.
