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Tempted by yoga
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So apparently, according to some individuals, yoga is dangerous.
No, they don't mean dangerous in the "you might tear your muscles or fall over" kind of way, They mean spiritually dangerous.
I like to listen to the Bible Answer Man on Bott Radio Network for kicks. As an atheist, I find listening to religious radio stations quite eye-opening. On the show, people can call in to get Biblical answers from Hank Hanegraaff, she show's host.
I was listening in when a caller called in to tell Hanegraaff that she was concerned about spiritual degradation in her daughter's school. During P.E. Class, the children were being forced to do yoga.
Rather than let the caller know that yoga in P.E. class is probably pretty divorced from it's eastern mystic origins and that it would be okay for her youngin' to participate in yoga class, he agreed with her. To him, yoga has a hidden agenda - to cause people to worship false gods. Apparently, yoga is an "unfruitful deed of darkness" that exists only to force people into body positions that worship other gods.
Seriously - how bigoted and intolorant do you have to be to decry yoga as an attempt to mislead you into worshiping flase gods? Yoga is so popular that churches have begun offering it with a slightly less Buddhist message to make it more palpable and accepable to the faithful - get closer to Jesus through stretching. Yet even some Christian groups decry this as simply masking yoga's hidden agenda - to open up your mind enough to let Satan inside. It's very hard for me to take people who think this way seriously.
For an individual to believe yoga is really a dark art leading one to believe in false gods, the world must be an incredibly scary place for them. Yoga is such a benign and gentle form of stretching and meditation coupled with a tolorant sense of spirituality that I find it hard to imagine that anyone would believe that it might be evil. Perhaps St. Louis is some sort of cave I live in, but until today I had no idea that a religious person in St. Louis might have any problem at all with yoga. I am continually surprised by the vast differences in the tolorance of theists to other faiths or people with no faith - some theists absolutely respect other belief systems, while others search for ways to decry absolutely everything they can think of that isn't in the Bible (or even that isn't in the correct version of the Bible...). It certainly speaks volumes of the variations in human thinking and the ability to be fluid and plastic or rigid and intolorant.
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