Posted on 09/22/2010 3:03:50 PM PDT by Willie Green
Warning to Christians: There may be churches that will bless your Blackberry, but your favorite morning workout may undermine your faith.
In a recent blog post, Dr. R. Albert Mohler, Jr. president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, examines the argument that practicing yoga may be in direct conflict with the values of Christianity. "Yoga begins and ends with an understanding of the body that is, to say the very least, at odds with the Christian understanding," Mohler writes.
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Tai Chi is more described as a “dance”, the elements of which allow the practitioner to get in touch with and conform one self with the flow of energy or Chi that flows thru creation. To my mind that is not much different from what certain types of Yoga supposedly enables the practitioner to accomplish which opens one up to the “oneness of all”. If you want to argue that the philosophical and spiritual aims of each “system “ are different go ahead...but from my perspective it all springs from the fall of man in Eden, that man bought into the notion that we were all God, but were jealously being kept from understanding and experiencing our true potential. It was not enough that we were created living souls loved and cherished by God, we wanted to enter the realm of the ever existent uncreated consciousness of almighty God and tear him from his dwelling place,,,,and that was something that could never be. “Does the pot say to the potter, why have you made me thus?”
We exist as matter and spirit and we begin to fully actualize when we understand that is what and who we are made to be. Our evil flesh shall be destroyed at the day of Resurrection and our purified spirits shall be mated with new incorruptible bodies. The ark of the covenant was an early vision of God’s hope and vision for us, mainly that as God’s shekinah glory sits between the 2 cherubim, so does God’s spirit long to sit in the seat of our consciousnes having written the image of christ into our very beings! We our living Arks!
Have i judged you? I merely pointed out that Christ in scripture never had a conversation exactly like you described and pointed out the context for the “pearls befor swine”.
As for judging lets look at the statement you cited again...the implication is that obviously a man with many faults shouldn’t be judging the one that has smaller faults. It doesn’t say however that no should never make any judgments at all! The statement is saying if you are going to judge another, make sure you are in the moral position to do so.(Take the log out of ones own eye before you can see clearly enough to take the speck out of your brother’s eye)
If you judge me for my supposed “judging” are you in fact claiming to be in the moral and spiritual position to tell me that I should not judge? How have you then concluded that I have logs in my own eye and not specks? Can you see clearly enough to help me get them out?
By the way, logs should be easier to remove then specks...easier to grab a hold of!
No I conflate them all as having the same spiritual root; at the bottom of each lies a pantheistic, solipsistic view of each man fancying himself as his own God on his own throne. Yes there are window dressing differences between the various eastern movements, but in the end there is only one central conflict and one choice that all men face. Christ or Hell!
You can disagree with such a notion if you wish and I did find dozens of sources relating to the opinions I offered. Yet the greatest path to “enlightenment” is the the one which a man takes to discover just how much like God he is NOT! The irony is that the more a man embraces the person he really is, the more like a son of God he becomes. For we are all prodigals and we must all come to a place where we discover ourselves spiritually in the gutter and hungry without resouces and spiritually empty...only then can we turn to Heaven and say...You are my God and you have created me, create in me a clean heart and take not your Spirit from me!
You mean our hearts?
1 Corinthians 6:19 Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own;
So your plan is to put up a barrier between yourself and the "flow of energy or Chi that flows thru creation." Kind of odd that you capitalize 'chi' and don't capitalize 'Creation.' Says a lot.
We exist as matter and spirit and we begin to fully actualize when we understand that is what and who we are made to be.
Careful, you might begin to feel oneness with that. /s
I think we agree that sometimes people have used and still use numbers for communicating with the gods. But when I balance my check book, I only use numbers to count how much money I have left. I would say that I am in the majority.
I think the same could be said for yoga. Some have probably used it for communicating with the gods. But the majority use it only to keep their joints supple.
It turns out that numbers and yoga are both rather mundane subjects.
But as I said, you are entitled to such misery.
That's not a bad guess for the later years of my pain. It actually began around L5 and felt like the upper arch of the ilium was another source. It is still tender there although I have very little lower back pain now.
Six months later my neck joined in the fun at about C5 and C6 as near as I can tell. That still gives me occasional problems but at least it isn't 24/7/365 like it was for the first 24 years.
But it all began several years before I was forced out of work. Forced out by that very pain.
One of the most fascinating cases I worked on was a young man, age 17 who had severe scoliosis and was scheduled for surgery. His body frame looked as though he had just come from a German concentration camp as he appeared severely malnourished and had very little muscle mass, even though he was in a healthy environment with excellent parents.
By removing the emotional trauma attached to a memory of his parents getting divorced when he was six years old, the spinal muscles relaxed as they no longer needed to be tight to block the emotional reception. This relaxed the entire spine allowing the curvature to be released. The change in his total health was astonishing. No surgery was required.
It appears that the masculine aspect of consciousness utilizes the spinal muscles as a defense system while the feminine aspect utilizes the cerebellum. This is based upon my observations of responses resulting from emotional trauma memory stimulation over many years. Since both genders have both aspects of consciousness, it is a matter of which aspect is dominate in the individual and does not necessarily depend upon gender.
Please note, I am not a chiropractor and do not do physical spinal adjustments. The work is done entirely in the memory field, several feet from the person's body. I do not touch the person I am working with.
Using the above methods, PTSD can be removed in minutes, even if the event took place over fifty years ago. I've done many demonstrations in front of groups where I ask a volunteer from the group to recall the most emotionally traumatic event that ever happened to them in their life. It takes less than a minute for me to remove the emotion attached to the memory after which it is not even available for recall. The removal is permanent. It's like doing surgery on the soul.
You acknowledge an agnostic out look when it comes to figuring out the differences between religion and superstition, there-fore you have lost hope in ever knowing the God who loves you or understanding of anything that is true. Therefore I think you need to question how you can judge anyone’s level of ignorance having no grasp of ultimate truth your self.
By the way, I have seen many wives die and husbands and have cared for dying children. Each still leaves in me a mark when I am there at the last moments. As an RN for 25 years and still active I have yet to lose hope in a Living God as you seem to have. I am not God, that was never to be man’s responsibility. Indeed my religious viewpoint shows me my own ignorance. Happily there is one cure for it, I go to Wisdom as described in Ecclesiastes, and dwell amongst her 7 pillars!
It all about context really and what lies in the heart. One stumbles upon a kid doing some yoga moves he learned from his gym teacher, probably not a lot of harm there, he’ probably just stretching as one poster put it! Doing yoga and incorporating TM or hindu/bhuddist chants, quite another issue again, which the pastor mentioned in the posting was trying to warn against.
Similarly with math, it helps me with my checkbook as well though I often fret as to how little my account contains after expenses and all the freaking taxes we have to pay!
Ecclesiastes chapters 1-3.
Proverbs chapter 9.
You proclaim me ignorant, look at those passages in the context of this conversation and proclaim me ignorant again.
As for paranoia, a wasted emotion for one end awaits us all; only one event awaits afterward...judgment!
As a parent especially I can tell a few tales about discernment, as an RN, I can tell you a few more things. Part of the tactical nature of God’s dealings with his children; God hasn’t just strategically set things in motion then abandoned us as the dominoes fall.
Then there are the Christians who practice numerology and have received secret messages from God about 666.
Well now to be fair, Revelation does exhort those “who have wisdom, let them calculate the number of the beast.” The operative phrase, I will emphasize,(and to meet you half way) is “have wisdom”. There have been a lot of folks that seem to have no expertise(and therefore have no business) trying to “calculate” and identify the coming malevolent one! You wouldn’t find me in that number, I have no wisdom when it comes to that sort of thing...I could barely pass 2nd level algebra and trig in high school!(The final exam of which I think my teacher awarded a few brownie points because i stayed until the bitter end of the allotted time an hour after the last person had given up and left. My teacher told me that the proctor had remarked that he admired how I just kept trying and trying until the 3 hours were up. My math teacher and I actually became friends after that!)
That is truly fascinating. Thank you for the great reply.
I didn't know that superstitions like numerology were wisdom. It must be as good a system of knowledge as reading tea leaves.
It’s also a matter of faith and belief...Revelation said to “calculate the number of the beast” if one had wisdom, not to live ones whole life doing so or to go thru life trying to figure out via math when Christ was going to come back and whip up a whole bunch of folks into a frenzy in doing so. For me, I’ll believe in the Resurrection of Christ but the only thing I’ll calculate is my checkbook or the amount of time I have left before I go back to work again!
Now if you don’t believe the Bible or if you do but not necessarily a lot of the “end times stuff’, then obviously you’ll have a certain point of view regarding the “beast number as it were”. My belief is that only God knows the times and seasons; we are only given a few clues as to when Christ is about to reinvolve himself into our world setting again. We are to simply “occupy ourselves until he comes” with the mandates he left us.
So, if you believe that a superstition like numerology is not a superstition, then it's not really a superstition anymore.
Doing yoga exercises makes more rational sense than that nonsense.
I’m not a fan of numerology, nor was Revelation advocating it, nor has the Bible ever endorsed it. Yet I can see numerology and Yoga(depending on what tradition and the aim of the practitioner) as having the same root, one of control of body and/or enviroment, feeding one’s illusions of personal godhood! Now that would seem irrational to me!
Yes, Christians who engage in numerology are participating in an irrational superstition.
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