A friend of mine has been reading and commenting on Oprah's newest book club selection, Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth. I have to admit, other than reading her thoughts I haven't been paying a lot of attention. Frankly, I haven't ever seen in Oprah what so many millions do -- the only time I watched her show with any regularity was when I was living in Scotland and it was the only thing on when my teaching partner and I got home exhausted and needed to chill for a little while. ;)

Anyway, it seems this book has garnered even more attention than the faux-memoir she chose awhile back. Apparently she's about to begin running webinars with the author, and over 500,000 folks have signed up. From the, admittedly, small amount of information I've read about this book <see this column>, it seems the book is preaching yet another New Age answer to the who am I question.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised. The enemy knows we have a deep desire for truth and he specializes in deceit. Unfortunately he's doing a bang-up job these days. Our culture has maneuvered us into feeling guilty if we hold a belief too strongly -- people don't want to be seen as narrow-minded and bigoted.

The column I linked to above quoted one of my favorite lines from C.S. Lewis in response to the whole idea of tolerance:

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a good moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great moral teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

Tolerance says that Christ was a great teacher like many others throughout history and lets all hold hands and sing kumbaya. Truth is a different matter. Truth demands that you choose a side.