The author claims the movement's supreme purpose: is to subvert our Judeo-Christian foundation and create a one-world order through a complex network of occult organizations.helped me understand the thinking behind the 'anti-new age movement' As someone who has studied 'occult science' in a quiet way for several years i was curious about exctly why fundamnetalist Christians have such a hatred of the 'new age'. This book certainly helped me answer that question and I see more clearly now how tempting it is to connect the cocnepts of illuminati, world government & new agers into one looming presence. What i've also understood from reading this is that its more comforting to imagine a satanist cult, powerful collective of occult sects, the new world order, or satan himself as running the world than to consider that a fundamnetalist interpretation of Christian scripture might be inapropriate for our times and to be failing a great many peoples' needs. What this book also showed me was how vague are the hard-line Christians view of what the 'new age' is. Essentially the definition is so all encompassing that almost all practices which are not strictly Christian (in its narrowest sense) get sucked into it. Despite not being a 'new ager' and having had very little to do with any of the new age figures Crumbey mentions I find myself lumped in there too (and my mother also for once having had holistic treatment for a bad foot). There's plenty to criticise about the sillier aspects of the so called 'new age' but much of this results from fumblings of people trying to create spirirtuality in a vacum having been cut off from their religious tradition. I myself remember my first tentative, clumsy steps outside of the materialist secularism that I had been conditioned with since childhood. Before coming to occult science I was a typical european agnostic prey to all the usual vices and addictions of such a mindset. Through 'occultism' i've come to understand the esoteric apsect of Christianity better and to have a deeper respect for the core of its message, been more loving to those close around me and had more energy and doen more purposefull work which is something that 8 years of having the bible read at me in dry sermons during my teenage years never managed. So through 'occultism' i've come back to Christiantity which I appreciate might be enough to give certain fundamnetalists nightmares but its really not so strange at all if you can step out of the fundamentalist mind set for a second. Sometimes I idealistically hope that it really is possible for people to accept that religious/spiritual pratices of all sorts are just different inflections of the same impulse to express God: but then books such as Crumbey's serve as a usefull but dis-heartening reality check that some people will happily shred themselves to bits before aknowledging this.
