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stitious Far Eastern culture were usually western materialists. The
Judeo-Christian community on the other hand, remained distant to Far

Eastern religion and never missed an opportunity to criticize them.
The “hippie” culture of the 1960’s and 1970’s lost its appeal and
disappeared from the public mind, but the Eastern cultures that gripped
the West never lost their pull on certain sections of society and devel-
oped and grew in power. Far Eastern religions then went one step fur-
ther by becoming a new heretical syncretic movement with a new name
that combined the pagan aspects of all Far Eastern religions, was atheis-

tic, yet revered man instead (Allah forbid). The New Age Movement
was driven by the dream of uniting the world under this “one single re-
ligion”, thereby pronouncing the end of all Divine religions.
The Christian researcher Wilbur Bruinsma examined the develop-
ment of this movement from the 1960’s onwards in an article titled “The
New Age Movement and Entertainment”. He points out that the youth’s
rebellion against the system and quest for peace led them to the use of
marihuana, LSD and other drugs, and then to seek supposed salvation in
Hinduism and Zen Buddhism (A movement popularized in the West by the

Japanese philosopher D. T. Suzuki, who combined Buddhism with various
Japanese beliefs. The word Zen means meditation in Chinese, and superstitious
practices such as these represent the basis of Zen Buddhism). He then proceeds
to describe the effects of this pagan trend on the present day:
In the 1960's, and perhaps even more so in the 1970's, as in no prior time in
history, there was a synthesis of Eastern and Western mysticism; the Eastern

religions of Hinduism, Zen Buddhism, and Chinese Taoism were blended to-
gether with the radical occultism of Western mysticism. Given the well-fer-
tilized seedbed of humanism, the fundamental teachings of mysticism have
taken solid root in our country and culture and even throughout the world.
This is the New Age Movement. 139

Islam And Far Eastern Religions