I am watching an atheist YouTube called 'Best of Non Believers Amazing Arguments And Clever Comebacks'.
I do not really enjoy it. Most of the speakers do not really understand religion. Still, some of the speakers make good points, so I have watched both parts at least once. I even commented on the first of them:
I cannot even process the sheer amount of information. I will have to watch it a couple of times. My name is Yogi Darshan. I have briefly run a religious blog (www.yogidarshan.guru), yet I have to check whether some of the speeches invalidate my own beliefs. I cannot debunk them immediately. In fact I will have to probably incorporate claims made herein into my own beliefs, or change some of them. Three cheers to the authors of this compilation. I really appreciate this.
Still, I am disappointed especially with the second part, which portrays almost exclusively opponents of Christian monotheism, who probably do not understand progress in religion at all.
If you really have to criticize monotheism, why not educate yourself in a more up-to-date view, like Sikhism? Humanity's understanding of God has progressed in the last centuries! Virgin birth no longer plays a role in monotheism, at least not in all of it.
Early adopters
What I really want to talk about here is New Age.
New Age is not really well defined, and many bad things can be said about it.
New Age uses Christian metaphors to describe spiritual progress, while not necessarily being related to Christianity, just like office software uses the metaphor of scissors to describe the cut-paste functionality, which is not literally related to scissors:
I used to write many articles against New Age in my previous blog, until I realized that people who engage in New Age religions are just early adopters of new religion.
New Age works poorly, for example many New Age practitioners live in tepees in Beneficio, because they specifically refuse to live in a brick and mortar city, but for these people, the pioneers, this might be the best lifestyle they can have.
Eventually New Age may develop in a more mainstream religion, like Sikhism is today. The documentary 'Kumare' demonstrated how New Age ideas may be introduced to a modern city.
Yet development of a religion takes a thousand years, and the speakers in the compilation video I brought up at the beginning of the article do not seem to understand that.
Laggards
I think that people who still attack virgin birth, even though Sikhism and Hare Krishna demonstrated that it is simply irrelevant for monotheism, are just laggards, according to Rogers' bell curve. They haven't been following the last 500 years of development in religion, and are stuck in the old ways. They understand that the old ways are bad, they just do not seem to know that there are other ways that supersede them.
Late majority
Pentecostal Christians seem to be in the late majority on the curve. They are not secluded Christian monastic scholars, like the early Christian majority looked up to, or aspired to become. Pentecostals seem to be slightly New-Ageish, but not quite.
Innovators
I aspire to be an innovator, while I still subscribe to being a New Age early adopter.
I borrow from Sikhism and Buddhism to create a religion that is even more new than the New Age.
I can still fall back on the old tested way when I want to. I am still more focused on making good Android software than on developing new quasi-New Age ideas for the Most High knows what purpose.
Volunteering
Currently the only meaningful thing I do in my religion is volunteering at, and running, a mouse sanctuary. I think that a religion is hardly valid if it doesn't do anything tangible.
My temple is still based mostly on Buddhism.