Paul E Hogarth <> wrote in message . > Just a quick note to ask your views on yoga. Is it bad? should i be

worried > about trying it? is it satanic?

>

> Thanks for you help..

>

> Paul

Depends which Christians you ask.

Catholics and Protestants have extreme views on it all.

You can attend ‘Christian Yoga’ workshops at some Catholic retreats in Australia; but conservative Catholics won’t have a bar of it.

Within Protestantism, if you begin with the assumption that if something’s origins lie within another religion (in this case Hinduism) it’s all false/demonic, you’re on the Fundamentalist wing of the debate. At the other end is the view that simply ‘cos some people have hooked into a meditative therapy that has religious overtones, then it may not be all bad. Simply separate the wheat from the chaff…

http://www.letusreason.org/NAM1.htm is aligned with the Dave Hunt view of the New Age movement: very conservative. It says ‘Yoga is an idolatrous practice which leads one away from the one true God and into the spiritual realm of false gods and demonic spirits’

See http://www.leaderu.com/orgs/probe/docs/hindu.html for a more informed conservative view. Briefly: it may be a Hindu plot to seduce the West, particularly those on the edges of the New Age Movement…

At the other end of the spectrum – http://www.christianyoga.com/ likes to talk about ‘Christ Consciousness’. Excerpt from their Mission Statement: ‘[We] assist individuals who have accepted personal responsibility for their rehab by resources of both ancient yoga therapy and modern physical therapy/rehabilitation. The approach is inclusive, avoiding strict dogma from any single tradition and utilizing techniques from all disciplines that seek to facilitate holistic health.

My own view is that meditation/contemplation is a gift from God. But be careful about joining anything which will lead you from one particular method backwards to a non-Christian ideology…

Rowland Croucher July 2001.