I think it must be practically universal… that folks either shake their heads and say “I don’t make resolutions anymore; I only break them” or they make them and break them just days afterwards. Some possibly do make them and keep them, but it is often a very hard thing to do. We are creatures of habit, I guess.

We often know what we need to do - eat healthy, exercise more, not be so grumpy, be more generous, or whatever it is. But when it comes to actually doing it, well, you know what I mean… human nature, I guess. Other things get in the way. There’s all kind of reasons… er, excuses. Just knowledge alone does not prove to be enough.

Recently I was conversing with a New Ager on a forum, and with one other we were trying to debunk for him the myth he had swallowed “hook, line and sinker” that he was divine, that he himself was God.
New Agism is rife these days, and it is very tricky stuff. It appeals to one’s vanity and it makes use of self-centredness and pride, quirks of human nature shared by all. When someone believes he is divine, then he knows he is far more enlightened than those of us who simply don’t see it yet. There is a massive arrogance that prevents these folks from recognizing a fundamental truth of human nature… not that we are God, but that we are flawed creatures of His creation. It was pointed out to this particular New Ager by a third person how his conversation was full of sarcasm and disdain. He refused to answer genuine questions, as though they mattered nothing, but instead made unfounded judgements upon us personally, and eventually left abruptly with an unwarranted and most unloving condemnation. He was God, he said, and that was that - we would find out he was right in the end. His huge pride had blinded him to the truth of human nature, his very own imperfect nature.

New Agism teaches that we have forgotten who we are, that we are really divine, and that there is no real evil - just ignorance. It teaches that as soon as we realize that we are divine, sharing the God spirit of all things in our universe, and we become aware of this unity with all existence, then we will begin to treat each other with kindness and charity. Knowledge of our divinity brings about our redemption, and redemption is dissolution into the universal spirit of God that pervades all things. This is pantheism, no less.

However, the credibility test of a worldview is that it must stack up with reality.

If it is just knowledge that empowers us to do the right thing, then why is it that all those New Year resolutions are so jolly hard to keep? We know we should eat healthy and not be so grumpy, but something still breaks down in the process and the outcome is not quite as simple as that. The enlightenment of New Agism which would have us all believe we are so much one with God that we are God, have us believe ourselves to be divine, does not quite stack up with reality.

The Apostle Paul had a tussle with exactly the same thing. This is what he had to say about it:

Romans 7: 15 I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. 16 And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. 17 As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. 18 I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. 19 For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing.

Paul was firmly convinced that our natures are not basically divine. Indeed, our natures are flawed; they are full of bad habits and various shortcomings. In fact, most of us if honest know that we are far from perfect. Worldviews that teach to the contrary have all failed, many having resulted in tyranny and destruction. Marxism and Neo-Marxism are recent examples.
I rather like William Golding’s Lord of the Flies as a novel that explores the depths of human nature and what happens when the normal sanctions of society are disrupted.

To my way of thinking, we cannot be both divine and flawed at the same time, not unless our God is both good and evil which is, as I see it, an implausible contradiction. The New Ager, those who use Christian terminology and literary images, is not truthfully referring to the Christian God who is righteous and holy and in whom there is no sin. He may believe that this is the same God to whom he is referring, but there are grave errors, irrationalities and oversights in his representation. He has overshot the boundaries of orthodox theology and constructed a god in his own image - he is his own deity, having succumbed to the primal temptation to put himself on the throne and worship himself.

Right, time to get started on those New Year goals that I made for myself. I know I will fail at them many times over, but I’m sure somebody said somewhere that God loves a trier.