Posted on 10/09/2010 5:03:58 AM PDT by GonzoII
Southern Baptist Seminary President Albert Mohler says yoga is not a Christian practice.
In an online essay, Dr. Mohler wrote that he's surprised at the number of Christians who embrace it and is asking Christians to avoid it.
He says the stretching and meditative discipline derived from Eastern religions is not a Christian pathway to God.
Mohler said he objects to "the idea that the body is a vehicle for reaching consciousness with the divine."
"That's just not Christianity," Mohler told The Associated Press.
CBN News spoke with psychologist and author Dr. Linda Mintle about yoga and whether its emphasis on spirituality goes against Christian beliefs. Click play for her comments, following an updated report with CBN News' Mark Martin.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbn.com ...
I do yoga to stay limber and while in the many stretches, along with the various poses, I often pray....mostly the Rosary.
Why not???
Does anyone really think the Good Lord cares if pray from while seated in a pew or in a Downward facing Dog pose???
Yep, a very wide, smooth road to oblivion.
. . .wide is the road. Narrow is the gate. . .
So you feel guilty for having impure thoughts about the flexible young woman next to you?
How "spiritual" are most gym yoga programs? Those that I have seen focus on the exercise and not any spiritual aspects, so the question "Does yoga go against Christianity?" makes as much sense as "Does running on the treadmill go against Christianity?"
Maybe he should issue a fatwa and blow up some Buddha statues, too. If Yoga threatened national security, I may be interested, but this guy’s “good Christian” nose is way out of joint.
actually there is a difference between ancient traditional yoga and what is practiced by the more modern west,as well as the westernization of buddhism
I don’t have a problem with yoga but I can see how a devout christian might.
http://www.abc-of-yoga.com/beginnersguide/yogahistory.asp
Later, around 500” class=”related_products_container” B.C., the Bhagavad-Gita or Lord’s Song was created and this is currently the oldest known Yoga scripture. It is devoted entirely to Yoga and has confirmed that it has been an old practice for some time. However, it doesn’t point to a specific time wherein Yoga could have started. The central point to the Gita is that - to be alive means to be active and in order to avoid difficulties in our lives and in others, our actions have to benign and have to exceed our egos.
yes, yoga was a form of worshiping the gods.
Most importantly, yoga meditation teaches the participant to be calm, and to block out the distractions of the outside world. Once a state of calmness has been achieved, the participant is free to think about God in a deeper way.
Some of the post are so over the top, back in the day when I was a very devout christian I would have worried about yoga, and other practices that have gone so mainstream now we don’t even give them a second thought,
I went on this spiritual journey into other religious beliefs, I wish I never had,
Somewhere during the late 1800’s and early 1900’s something went horribly wrong.
Same here and I am about as unlimber and unbalanced as they come. It helped me a bit. My wife gets more out of it.
Well, what I discovered was, you can do the same thing with prayer,duh
prayer and meditation are the same thing they all affect the same brain areas.
Each yoga stretch is symbolic of something and the average lay person doesn’t know what that something is, yoga and kundalini energy,
Even masters will tell you not to try to attain kundalini without their assistance, I know what can happen and it is terrifying.
I heard that dancing is evil too.
“Without the practice of yoga, How could knowledge Set the atman (soul) free? asks the Yogatatva Upanishad. Yoga: union with the ultimate. Carl G. Jung the eminent Swiss psychologist, described yoga as ‘one of the greatest things the human mind has ever created.’ Yoga sutra consists of two words only: yogash chitta-critti-nirodah, which may be translated: “Yoga is the cessation of agitation of the consciousness.”
The word yoga is derived from the root yuj, which means to unite or to join together. The practice of yoga may lead to the union of the human with the divine - all within the self.”
Yoga is an integral part of the Hindu religion.
There is a saying: “There is no Yoga without Hinduism and no Hinduism without Yoga.” The country of origin of Yoga is undoubtedly India, where for many hundreds of years it has been a part of man’s activities directed towards higher spiritual achievements. The Yoga Philosophy is peculiar to the Hindus, and no trace of it is found in any other nation, ancient or modern. It was the fruit of the highest intellectual and spiritual development. The history of Yoga is long and ancient. The earliest Vedic texts, the Brahmanas, bear witness to the existence of ascetic practices (tapas) and the vedic Samhitas contain some references, to ascetics, namely the Munis or Kesins and the Vratyas.
“There is no Yoga without Hinduism and no Hinduism without Yoga.”
http://www.hinduwisdom.info/Yoga_and_Hindu_Philosophy.htm
according to some Hindu literature, there are 330 million Hindu deities
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Hindu_deities
Prayer is talking to God, meditation is listening for Him.
So yes, if one wants to attain pure unadulterated Christianity, that accepts there is no other way to god but through Jesus Christ, who am I to say this man is wrong?
There are different forms of prayer, yes.
There is contemplative prayer, and yes god can be found in the silence.
But both practices affect the same ares of the brain,
scans of meditating monks and praying nuns show that the frontal lobe that area that directs the mind’s focus is especially active during prayer and mediation.
Yoga exercises are good for keeping hip flexors stretched, for stretching out lower back, for keeping tension out of the neck, for strengthening knees to enable running, etc. All the history of meditation, chanting, blah blah are not part of anything I've ever done with Yoga. It's just a great way to keep fit in my opinion.
driftdiver wrote: “It would be easier if all Christians just accepted the things of the world.”
..... There are things I can accept and there are things I can forgive. But there are also things that I will not accept or embrace, such as sophistry, demagogery, prevarication and dissimulation.
A personal character flaw on my part, I suppose.
“Each yoga stretch is symbolic of something and the average lay person doesn’t know what that something is”
In Asian I’ve been to Buddhist temples which were 2000 years old. Several of them have small stone water fountains which were historically used by visitors to get a drink.
The fountain is set up so that as you bend down to get a drink you are also bowing to a Buddha. I would never have noticed it if someone hadn’t pointed it out to me.
We all have flaws that we need to work on.
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