The King and Queen of the New Religious Order by Jackie Alnor

When the moon is in the seventh house
And Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then peace will guide the planets
And love will steer the stars

This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius
The age of Aquarius, Aquarius

Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions
Golden living dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revelation
And the minds true liberation

From the 1960s musical production of “Hair”

When actress Shirley MacLaine wrote the book, Out on a Limb, and then turned it into a made-for-TV movie back in the 80s, much of the world thought she was out on a broken limb. She was the butt of jokes in Hollywood and fodder for late-night comedians such as David Letterman who made fun of her New Age beliefs. Who can forget the image of her standing on the beach repeating the mantra, “I am god”?

The world wasn’t quite ready for her yet. But now some three decades later, the stage has been set for a new television diva to fill MacLaine’s high-heel shoes and no one dare cross her. She did not make the claim to be god, but people insist she is a goddess. Billionaire Oprah Winfrey is a powerful force. Talk show hosts know it would be professional suicide to speak afoul of her. They don’t make jokes; they bow down before her.

Winfrey did not go away after she left her popular daytime TV program. She built the TV network OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network) after her magazine ‘O’ (named after herself) began showing up at grocery store counters with her picture gracing the cover of every issue. Her latest endeavor, in conjunction with the Discovery Channel, is her new TV series, BELIEF, for which she is promoting among the talk-show circuit. 

As many as 14,000 conference-goers at the recent gathering in Salt Lake City of the Parliament of the World’s Religions were treated to a preview of BELIEF. She was unable to attend, but via video message hyped her new show as a tool for promoting peace among all religious belief systems. Oprah’s two-page ad in the conference program promised, “Spiritual practices, traditions, and beliefs from around the world will be illuminated, followed by a discussion on how BELIEF could impact the world and help us move again from fear and divisiveness and more towards compassion and healing.”

On a recent appearance on CBS This Morning, Oprah shared a clip from BELIEF featuring a young lady going to India seeking enlightenment. The clip shows her asking a group of gurus questions. “I have a good life and a good job. But I still feel as if something is missing. How do you get such belief?” The guru responds, “It’s all given by the Goddess. When she enters your heart you will sense it. Until she dwells inside you, faith won’t come.” Oprah and the CBS hosts all reacted with a collective, “aaaaaw.”

Unlike her predecessor, Shirley MacLaine, Oprah is a bit more subtle, although both messages are the same – we are all gods and the Creator is a pantheistic impersonal force we are all a part of. A spark of the divine is in every person and we just need to come to a self-realization of how great we are.

Her message of unifying all faiths, no matter how contradictory they are, is the bedrock of New Age religion, even though in its current incarnation they prefer to call it by terms such as Spiritual Enlightenment, Unity in Diversity, One Humanity, among other euphemisms.

While Oprah was addressing the UN General Assembly, a petition to the UN for the establishment of a religious arm of their global organization was making the rounds at the Parliament, accumulating thousands of signatures.

Pope Francis’ Crusade

The UN has certainly turned its attention to religious concerns lately, so the petition has a good chance of becoming a reality. Oprah’s address to the UN was just a few weeks after Pope Francis spoke to the UN delegates in New York during his visit to America. His talking points on climate change, open borders, and income inequality from a religious point of view mimic the UN’s political aspirations for global control, such as ‘Agenda 21’ and the ‘2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.’ If they can unite the world’s religions, creating a global government will be a cinch. As the late prophet of the New Age prophesied in song, the world will then be as one. 

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace...
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one--Imagine, by John Lennon

The Parliament gave everyone who registered a card with a photo of Pope Francis on one side and his interfaith prayer on the other side. It is called “A Prayer for Our Earth” and says in part, “

“All-powerful God, you are present in the whole universe
and in the smallest of your creatures…
Bring healing to our lives,
that we may protect the world and not prey on it,
that we may sow beauty, not pollution and destruction…
Teach us to discover the worth of each thing,
to be filled with awe and contemplation,
to recognize that we are profoundly united
with every creature
as we journey towards your infinite light.”

The Jesuit pope, who rose to the “Chair of Peter” after the unprecedented retirement of his predecessor, has dazzled secular media with his audacious acts of public humility. He is one of the few religious leaders that is loved by the world and Christendom alike.

Not only has Francis won the respect of CNN and MSNBC, he has wooed many Protestant pastors and church leaders. Ecumenism with other Christian denominations is on the top of the pope’s to-do list.

Last year, with the assistance of Episcopal pastor Tony Palmer, Francis addressed a gathering at televangelist Kenneth Copeland’s Charismatic Evangelical Leadership Conference.  A personal friend of the pope’s, Palmer taped the greeting on his smart phone’s video camera to the eager crowd right in the heart of the Bible Belt. Then he used the same smart phone to deliver Copeland’s groveling response to the pope.

As a follow-up, Palmer arranged for Copeland to visit the Vatican, along with a contingent of other charismatic leaders that included John Arnott, Pastor of Catch the Fire church that is infamous for their holy laughter services known as the “Toronto Blessing” and James Robison, host of Life Today, who said when he “looks into the eyes of Pope Francis, he sees Jesus.” A picture of Robison giving the pope a high-five showed up all over social media.

Soon after Palmer announced that the protest of Luther is over, he was mysteriously killed in a motorcycle accident.

Joel Osteen, pastor of the largest church in America, has also met with the pope at the Holy See, and “America’s pastor,” Rick Warren, was a speaker at the Vatican-hosted Humanum Colloquium in Rome in November, 2014. Warren has made appearances on EWTN, the Catholic television network, showing gratitude to his Catholic host for their monastic orders that taught him about contemplative prayer and the Chaplet of Divine Mercy, that includes the rosary, that Warren said he and his wife recite regularly.

The 700 Club’s Pat Robertson also caught papal-fever last year when he co-sponsored an ecumenical gathering at his Regent University in Virginia Beach, Virginia. He gave the opening remarks at this “Pastors, Leaders and Clergy Summit” that featured an equal amount of Protestant and Roman Catholic speakers. The theme was taken from the Gospel of John 17:21, the high priestly prayer of Jesus, when He prayed to the Father:

“That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.”

The speakers seemed to be in agreement that Evangelicals who would not acknowledge the pope as the rightful head of Christianity were in sin and needed to repent and return to Rome. James Robison headed up the roster of speakers, followed by Jack Hayford, Founder of King’s University, Vinson Synan, founder of the now defunct Congress on the Holy Spirit, and Tom Phillips, VP of the Billy Graham Association.

Vatican ecumenical talks with other arms of the church have gone into high gear under this pontificate with Eastern Orthodox, Lutheran, Anglican and other mainline Protestant denominations. Unity in diversity with the Vatican at the center is step one. Step two is interfaith relations when all religions will cooperate under the supremacy of Rome.

Forerunner to the Antichrist?

For Christians who study Bible prophecy, interfaith and ecumenism are ominous signs of the nearness of the coming time of Great Tribulation spelled out in the last book of the Bible. This seven-year period will be a time of judgment on the earth when the Antichrist will rise to power allied with a global church the Apostle John identifies as the Mother of Harlots.

It is interesting that the Roman Catholic Church calls herself the “Mother Church.” The question needs to be asked, if she is a “Mother” then who are the “Harlots” she gave birth to?

The Antichrist, Bible prophecy tells us, is one Beast but the other Beast is referred to as “The False Prophet.” The Antichrist tries to counterfeit the true Christ and the False Prophet emulates the forerunner of Jesus, John the Baptist who prepared the way for His arrival and baptized Him and instructed all to follow Him.

Since that is the case, if the prophetic times are just around the corner as so many Scriptural signs of the times indicate, then the forerunner’s work should be in evidence preparing people to accept the coming world leader. S/he would show up first just as John the Baptist did who came in the spirit and power of Elijah the Old Testament prophet.

The false ideas that were evident at the Parliament create a worldview custom-made for the forerunner of the Antichrist to use to condition humanity to accept the global leader and put their faith in his campaign promises of peace, love, understanding, harmony, justice, and the end of hunger and poverty.

If people can be convinced that all religions are equal, all people are brothers and sisters, the Earth is sacred, and inclusiveness of all and any beliefs is honorable, then when the man speaking those swelling words arrives, he will be embraced. The only obstacles are Bible-believing Christians and Islamic suicide bombers. Those obstacles to progress have to go.

New Age and occult practitioners have spent decades working to create the paradigm shift needed to usher in their own man-made millennium of peace. Failed efforts in the past included Hands Across America in 1986 when “6.5 million people held hands in a human chain for fifteen minutes along a path across the continental United States.” Then in August 1987, the Harmonic Convergence began, with its theme song, “We are the World.”

These efforts were based upon a magical teaching called the “100^th Monkey,” a theory based on a man’s observance of monkeys in Japan. One monkey began to rinse his sweet potato in water before eating it. When the other monkeys saw that, they imitated him and washed their sweet potatoes before eating them too. By the time the 100^th monkey was doing the practice, it had reached critical mass and now all the monkeys around the world were doing the same ritual.

So New Age movers and shakers in the 1980s were trying that same experiment, although their critical mass of humanity thinking peace at the same time to make the rest of humanity peace-loving was going to take a much larger number than the monkeys. Obviously that was a big fail. Their efforts at creating a spiritual evolutionary leap landed in the lap of the Antichrist. A paradigm shift indeed happened, but it did not lead to peace, but to apostasy and social chaos.

The King and Queen of the Parliament, the man and woman whose names were on the lips of many participants of all the beliefs represented, were Pope Francis and Oprah Winfrey. Could one of them be the prophesied forerunner?

Although the forerunner Beast prophesied in the Bible is spoken of as a “he,” could this Beast actually possess a female? After all, it is a woman who rides the Beast. Oprah is calling for a feminine fierceness; for the feminine spirit to rise up and be heard.

During the Shirley MacLaine’s era, a woman named JZ Knight gained notoriety channeling a spirit called “Ramtha.” Her voice would be transformed into a deep male sounding snarl as the evil spirit spoke through her. So there is precedence.

One thing is for sure, Francis and Oprah are doing the work of the spirit of antichrist by convoluting the teaching of the Word of God, the Bible. Their message for change is an attack on Truth. Time will tell if Oprah is the one to set the stage or if Francis will be chosen as point man to herald the global leader, the man of sin, and cause all to follow after the Antichrist.

Jackie Alnor is a veteran Christian watchman, researcher, and journalist. She is the director of the Rapture Ready Radio network on BlogTalk Radio where she hosts a weekly show called The Scattered Sheep Report. She is the author of the book The Fleecing of Christianity that tracks the influence of the spirit of antichrist in the church via televangelism. Her years of taping Christian television and documenting deception on religious TV culminated in her 1999 video "The Great Apostasy: The Lost Sign.”

She co-founded the Christian Sentinel magazine that was in print in the 1990s and published online in the 2000s. Archives of some of her articles can be found on her "Apostasy Alert" website [www.apostasyalert.org]. Her blog is named after the title of her Blogtalk radio program, The Scattered Sheep Report, which she produces weekly on the Rapture Ready Radio network. [http://scatteredsheepreport.blogspot.com ]