Evolution was a gradual process in which something changes into a different and usually more complex or better form.    In Biology it is the theory that groups of organisms change with passage of time, mainly as a result of natural selection, so that descendants differ morphologically and physiologically from their ancestors.    It was influenced by Hegel.

• Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882), a British naturalist who revolutionized the study of biology with his theory of evolution based on natural selection.    His most famous works include Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871).
• Henri Louis Bergson (1859-1941), a French philosopher and writer whose widely influential works, including Creative Evolution (1907) and The Creative Mind (1934), largely concern the importance of intuition as a means of attaining knowledge and the élan vital present in all living things.    He won the 1927 Nobel Prize for literature.
      Creation the act of creating or the fact or state of having been created.    The world and all things in it.    Theology.    The act of God by which the world was brought into existence.    Alfred Whitehead advocated a similar view as previously shown.    Thus the Creationist fight back.
• Sigmund Freud 1856-1939, an Austrian physician and founder of psychoanalysis who theorized that the symptoms of hysterical patients represent forgotten and unresolved infantile psycho sexual conflicts.    His psychoanalytic theories, which initially met with hostility, profoundly influenced 20th-century thought.    He laid the groundwork for permissiveness (tolerant or lenient).
      Although psychoanalysis seems to be dying we are presently experiencing the effects of permissiveness on our societies.    The breakdown in families, sexual revolution, increased violence, crime and riots, abuse, drug addiction, and lack of religious teaching is ripping our societies apart.
• Vladimir Ilich Lenin known as "Nikolai Lenin," 1870-1924, was the Russian founder of the Bolsheviks, leader of the Russian Revolution (1917), and first head of the U.S.S.R. (1917-1924).    As a communist theoretician Lenin held that workers could not develop a revolutionary consciousness without the guidance of a vanguard party and that imperialism was a particular stage of capitalist development.    Although communism has fallen as of 1989, the resulting philosophies that may evolve from the philosophers in this area could make the later seem minor.    If they accept Democracy as an influx into their Socialism it will surely make for a strange bedfellow.
• Carl Gustav Jung 1875-1961, a Swiss psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology.    Among his contributions to the understanding of the human mind are the concepts of extroversion and introversion and the notion of the collective unconscious.    Jung's works include The Psychology of the Unconscious (1912) and Psychological Types (1921).
• B(urrhus) F(rederick) Skinner 1904-1990, was an American psychologist, who was a leading behaviorist.    Skinner influenced the fields of psychology and education with his theories of stimulus-response behavior.    His books include Walden Two (1961) and Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971).    He reasoned that free will is an illusion, and planned an environment of a desired behavior for a world utopia.
• Aldous Leonard Huxley 1894-1963, a British writer.    His best-known work, Brave New World (1932), paints a grim picture of a scientifically organized utopia.    He believed that we were all on our way to an existential religion of mysticism.    We are experimenting with the power of the living symbols at present with our modern day alchemists.
  
      I am not trying to knock all philosophy but just trying to show their effects on society.    The people who follow these views are wrong also.    The general concept here is that the world system is effected through its art, music, philosophy, education, economics, and the mass media to entice us away from the truth.    This truth is God's point of view.    Jesus Christ is truth, not a concept of truth.    He is the only way and one who can set us free of the established world order.
  
      Sufi is a Moslem mystic and relates to the Sufis. [Arabic Sufiy, (man) of wool, Sufi, from suf, wool (probably from their woolen garments).]    There has been some integration of their religions in modern Christianity.    A movement of the young towards Eastern religions has puzzled and outraged ministers of the Western Churches.    Some say that this occurred because the East still nurtures experimental discovery of God.
      In Christianity the 'secret' tradition, which was once nurtured by the Hesychasts and such other Gnostic brotherhoods as the Templars (Knights Templar) and the Albigensians, was suppressed by Pope Pius III in the fourteenth century as heretics.
  
  • The Knights Templars were a group of French knights who pledged to defend the Holy Sepulcher, under Hughes de Payens of Champagne, in Jerusalem in 1119.    They fought in the Crusades, but were accused of heresy in the 1300's.    There emblem is used by the Masonic order today.    Freemason are a member of the Free and Accepted Masons, an international fraternal and charitable organization with secret rites and signs, this was a guild of skilled itinerant masons during the Middle Ages.
  • Albigenses were members of a Catharist religious sect of southern France in the 12th and 13th centuries, exterminated for heresy during the Inquisition.    They were the inhabitants of Albiga, Albi, a town of southern France where the sect was dominant.    Cathar or Cathari professed a dualistic belief emphasizing ascetic renunciation of the world.
  
      As rationalism influenced the church through Galileo, Mendel (founder of the science of genetics), and Darwin as they brought their living symbolism to erode the established view.
  
      Those Gnostic thoughts of Christianity have been brought to life again from new groups of Western mysteries imported from the East.    Thus the blending of ancient forms of occultism with the contemporary myths of science are creating a NEW AGE.
  
      There are six groups which the new religions set their goals:
  • 1.) Empirical/Scientific;
  • 2.) Magical/Occult;
  • 3.) Philosophical/Systematic;
  • 4.) Spiritualist;
  • 5.) Orientalist;
  • 6.) Eclectic/Submissive.
  
  
• Empirical/Scientific
  • psuedo-science (no scientific foundation),
  • paranormal (hauntings and poltergeists),
  • clairvoyance,
  • telekinesis
  • and dermoglyphics.
    Remember Uri Gellar the Israeli telekinesist and clairvoyant.
  • Dowsers and Divining Rods,
  • and also Biofeedback.
  
  
• Magical/Occult
  • Witches,
  • Sorcerers,
  • the Satanists,
  • Druid cults (Iona, Glastonbury and Stonehenge),
  • Indians,
  • Don Juan,
  • Eskimo shamans,
  • Nature worship.
  
  
• Philosophical/Systematic
  Pythagorean Society, the New Platonist (NeoPlatonism), G.I. Gurdjieff, P.D. Ouspensky, Scientology, Theosophy, and Anthroposophy, and Helen P. Blavatsky.
  
  • Pythagoreanism is a syncretistic philosophy expounded by Pythagoras, distinguished chiefly by its description of reality in terms of arithmetical relationships.
  • Neo-Platonism a philosophical system developed at Alexandria in the third century A.D. by Plotinus and his successors.    It is based on Platonism with elements of mysticism and some Judaic and Christian concepts and posits a single source from which all existence emanates and with which an individual soul can be mystically united.    A revival of Neo-Platonism or a system derived from it, as in the Middle Ages.
  • Scientology, note Ron L. Hubbard, "Dyanetics," a recent group.
        Jakob Boehme or Boehm or Bohme, born 1575-1624, was a German theosophist and mystic whose works, including Mysterium Magnum (1623), describe evil as a necessary antithesis to good.    He is considered the founder of modern theosophy.   
  • The Theosophical Society was founded by Helena P. Blavatsky (1831-1891), HPB was a major influence in the Hindu-occult world through her studies of Hinduism, Buddhism, ancient Egyptian religion and Spiritualism.    Theosophy is a religious philosophy or speculation about the nature of the soul based on mystical insight into the nature of God.    It was the beliefs of a religious sect, the Theosophical Society, founded in New York City in 1875, incorporating aspects of Buddhism and Brahmanism. [Medieval Latin theosophia, from Late Greek : Greek theo-, theo- + Greek sophia, wisdom.]
    
  • At Blavatsky's death, Annie Besant assumed the leadership and her students became the early teachers of the New Age Movement.
    
  • Anthroposophy is the doctrines and beliefs of a modern religious sect derived from theosophy and claiming to develop knowledge and realization of spiritual reality.
  
  
• Spiritualist
  • Mediums
  • and UFO buffs,
  • Spiritualism the belief that the dead communicate with the living, as through a medium.    The practices or doctrines of those holding such a belief.    A philosophy, doctrine, or religion emphasizing the spiritual aspect of being.
  
  
• Orientalist
     Those groups in the West who continue to practice an Eastern orthodoxy.
  • Maharishi a Hindu teacher (seer, sage or saint) of mysticism and spiritual knowledge.    Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was involved with the Beatles in 1960, in the Transcendental Mediatation days.   
  • Then Hatha Yoga influenced society for ways to meditate and relax.    It is presently being taught in universities, schools, institutes, business conventions, alternative lifestyle courses in law enforcement.   
  
  
• Eclectic/Submissive
     Unknown mystic groups.
  • The Rosicrucians were members of an international organization, especially the Ancient Mystic Order Rosae Crucis (Brother of the Cross of the Rose) also AMORC, who were devoted to the study of ancient mystical, philosophical, and religious doctrines and concerned with the application of these doctrines to modern life.    In the 17th and 18th centuries they concerned themselves with the study of religious mysticism and professing esoteric religious beliefs.    The Rosicrucians claim to trace their beginning to an ancient Egyptian secret occult group.    The earliest mention of them is a seventeenth-century German book of the travels of a writer who studied the mystery schools of the ancient Mediterranean world.    The present day AMORC claim that they are continuing the teachings of the Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep IV and Solomon, which contains reincarnation, karma, astrology, and divinity of humankind, but no mention of a Savior.   
  • The New Age Movement is here!
        In 1982 the organization for the TARA Center, said that the Christ, who had come from Pakistan, was then living in London and would make his appearance on radio and television no later than June 21, 1982, to usher in world peace.    He did not appear because of limited coverage.    The TARA Center's Christ, is known as Krishna to the Hindus; as the Messiah to the Jews; as the Imam Mahdi to the Muslims; and as Maitreya, the Buddha yet to come, to the Buddhists.    All these names refer to the same individual.    A church called The International Church of Ageless Wisdom (ICAW) claims that it teaches the truths taught from all ages, including the fatherhood/motherhood of God, reincarnation, karma, and spiritualism.    It also claims to be Christian.
        Some Churches are beginning to explore the New Age Movement as society is beginning to develop a church without God.
        On September 1, 1993, the Global Ethic was drawn up by 20 presidents of the Parliament of World Religions, in a historic attempt to find common values among these various religions, leaders of Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism to set up basic ethical standards.    This World Religion had its beginnings in 1893.    The New Age movement finds "truth" in all religions, but it is primarily rooted in Hindu and occult philosophy.    Its occult beliefs include astrology, spiritualism and fortune-telling.    It advocates one government and one universal religion.