But new thought isn't any lovey dovey happy go lucky belief...
What always surprises me is New Thought is founded on so many axioms that you normally dismiss. Miraculous cures of unspecified illnesses seem
de rigueur. But then you say you're a Christian, and then dismiss so much of Christianity, what's left looks to me like vapour, LOL! But hey-ho ... let's not walk this again, the trench we've created so far means we're almost subterranean!
Knowing that you create your life... You have a personal responsibility for what happens to you... good or bad.. you create your future... that ain't for everyone...
Sorry, Will, but that's so everyone it's universal. It's a given. It's not New Thought, it's common to any system of moral values.
I think the distinction for me between Tradition and the new liberal denominations is that the latter are examples of the Tradition reworked to fit the contemporary cultural mileau – as I've said often, it's religion for a consumer culture, easily seen by its easy spirituality unburdened by any authentic spiritual – ascetic – practices, the most notable being detachment from the world, and in the case of the Western psychology of the autonomous self, whilst humility, a virtue praised across the centuries, is tossed on the scrap-heap to be replaced by an 'according to me' priority. So what you get in America, for example, is Christianity according to the principles of The American Dream.
What I meant by 'old Europe' in regard to 'New Thought' (and that title surely, by now, is well passed its shelf-life?) was the formative influence of Mesmerism and German Idealism. On the other hand, the Power of Positive Thinking was, in that sense, a fore-runner of NLP, and NLP was developed from watching histrionic preachers (again of the American variety) whipping their audiences up into a frenzy! The Power of Positive Thinking is a very American dogma!
Take the Jefferson's Bible:
In extracting the pure principles which he taught, we should have to strip off the artificial vestments in which they have been muffled by priests ... We must dismiss the Platonists and Plotinists, the Stagyrites and Gamalielites, the Eclectics, the Gnostics and Scholastics (in effect – all philosophical reasoning)...
We must reduce our volume to the simple evangelists, select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus (in who's opinion> hmmm? ...
There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man. I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter which is evidently his, and which is as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill. The result is an octavo of forty-six pages, of pure and unsophisticated doctrines. (Letter to John Adams. Italics my comment, bold for emphasis)
So what you get is a humanist/materialist moral tract.
