The Errors of Esoteric Religions

[Ilya Shambat]

One common New Age claim is that people shape their reality with their consciousness, and that there are no innocent victims. When I talked about this with a New Age guru, a counterpoint I made was the fate of Jews during the Second World War. He responded that they caused it by having a victim consciousness. This is unbelievably offensive, as well as very obviously wrong. Besides 6 million Jews – as well as any number of Russians, Poles, Gypsies, Serbs and others – who died in that war, there were also 500,000 American soldiers. They did not have a victim consciousness, and it is an insult to these heroic men to claim that they had caused their deaths.

In Buddhism there is the claim that suffering is based in desire. This is wrong as well. Suffering can be caused by any number of things. Some of these are going to be your fault, and some of them won’t be. And even when it is your fault, it can be based on any number of things besides desire. Wrong beliefs, ignorance, meanness, hatred, you name it.

Then there is the Taoist claim that conceiving of beauty also creates ugliness. Totally wrong. Both beauty and ugliness exist regardless of whether people conceive of them. Both beauty and ugliness existed long before you or I existed; they will both continue existing long after you and I are gone. And while you can convince yourself – and any number of others – to deny the obvious, it is only a matter of time before someone says that the king has no clothes.

All of these beliefs have some truth to them, and it is wrong that they be regarded as nonsense, craziness or evil. However blatantly wrong attitudes discredit even the belief systems that have merit. The false claims such as the above have to go. That being done, there will be a stronger case for these belief systems, and more people will view them with interest.