I know a lot of people with a lot of different beliefs who have told me in no uncertain terms that I absolutely need to start doing yoga. I have back problems stemming from a couple of car wrecks I had in my early 20’s, and since then my day job and poor posture have only made my back issues more prominent. I should probably start doing yoga or some other stretching program, even if the president of the Southern Baptist Seminary, Albert Mohler, says that yoga is a dangerous risk for practicing Christians.
Of course, I think there’s a misunderstanding. When Americans say yoga, we mean those stretching poses we see on television done by people in sweat pants and kneeling on welcome mats, not the actual religious practice of yoga, but to Mohler, the two are one and the same. “Yoga begins and ends with an understanding of the body that is, to say the very least, at odds with the Christian understanding. Christians are not called to empty the mind or to see the human body as a means of connecting to and coming to know the divine.” That’s funny; most yoga-performing Christians I know do it because it’s great exercise and good for relieving stress.
You have to give Mohler some credit; he might be a little odd, but he’s also kind of funny. Example: “My email servers are exhausted. Messages have been coming in at a rate of about a hundred an hour. The first lesson – count the cost when you talk about yoga. These people get bent out of shape fast.”
[tags]yoga, yoga a dangerous threat to Christianity, Christian yoga, Albert Mohler, Southern Baptists, Southern Baptist Seminary, unusual religious commands, yoga is anti-Christian,
