Church of Oprah?

[Chy]

I'm clueless and this is news to me and the first time I've heard about it. I found this when researching something I'm working on and really unsure about it and don't have an opinion. Anyone else have any insight?

Church of Oprah – The Beliefs
If the church of Oprah actually does exist, then how do Oprah and Tolle envision the “awakening” of their disciples? Tolle responds:

• Minimize Your Thoughts – “You are no longer possessed by the thinking mind . . .You don’t rely on thought anymore; you go beyond thinking . . . You suddenly find there’s another dimension deeper than thought inside you . . . I call it stillness . . . an aware presence, nothing to do with past or future.”⁴
• Live for the Moment – “A continuous refocusing on what really matters . . . which is the present moment. People don’t realize that now is all there ever is; there is no past or future . . . The present moment is your life. It’s nowhere else -- never, ever.”⁵
• Let Your Consciousness Evolve – “Our ability to think more and more, so that gradually we became identified with thinking, was how we lost a deeper connectedness with life -- with Paradise. . . we are now at an evolutionary transition where far more human beings than ever before are able to go beyond ego into a new state of consciousness.”⁶

Church of Oprah – Comparison to the Bible
Eckhart Tolle’s beliefs characterize the church of Oprah which coincides with the New Age doctrine of evolutionary Godhood, as well as the union of earth and nature as “Gaia.” These ideas are contradictory to the teachings in the Bible.

Religion is man reaching out to God. Salvation, as presented in the Bible, is God’s love and mercy reaching out to imperfect man:

• Christ’s Mind – Instead of abandoning the thought-process, the Bible tells us that when we have a relationship with God, we gain understanding because we have the mind of Christ (1 Corinthians 2:14–16). Any past guilt and future fears dissolve as we place our trust in God who created our bodies as well as our minds (Isaiah 26:3; Philippians 4:6–7).
• New Hope And A Future – Each one of us has struggled with our past. But God, through His Son, Jesus Christ, not only sets us free from condemnation, but offers us a new life and future (2 Corinthians 5:16–18). We are so highly valued by God that He actually custom-designed your life (Jeremiah 29:11–13).
• A Transformed Life – We can never form a connection for ourselves to heaven (Paradise) through meditation, rituals, or philanthropic deeds. We are imperfect humans, sinful by nature. So Jesus’ perfect, sinless life was offered in our place, “giving us right standing with God and resulting in eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 3:22–24; 5:21).

In her own words, Oprah’s “religion” teaches: “There are many paths to what you call God . . . Her path might be something else and when she gets there she may call it ‘light’ . . . If her loving, kindness, and generosity bring her to the same point, it doesn’t matter if she calls it God or not.”⁷ The Scriptures say false teachers “will cleverly teach their destructive heresies about God . . . In their greed they will make up clever lies to get hold of your money. But God condemned them long ago, and their destruction is on the way” (2 Peter 2:1–3).



http://www.allaboutspirituality.org/church-of-oprah.htm