Tuesday, September 13, 2005

While flipping through a Time magazine from a couple of weeks ago, I discovered this article (full text here; UPDATE: go here) -- from which I learned that you might burn in hell if you stroll down the primrose path and engage in the unmodified heathen practice of ... yoga:

... Susan Bordenkircher, a Methodist from Daphne, Alabama, ... discovered yoga in 2002. "I knew right away I was getting something out of it spiritually and physically, but it felt uncomfortable in that format," she says. So Bordenkircher prepared a vinyasa, or series of postures, with a biblical bent. Meditations focus on Jesus. She calls the sun salutation, a series of poses honoring the Hindu sun god, a "warm-up flow" instead; other Christians call it the "Son" salutation.

But that may not have been Satan-free enough:

At first, Bordenkircher and other yoga teachers encountered skepticism. Officials at Bordenkircher's church asked her if she could call her exercises something other than yoga, and she has had to convince potential students that meditation is not anti-Christ....

"Christian yoga is an oxymoron," agrees Laurette Willis of Tahlequah, Okla. She says yoga led her to dabble in a rootless New Age lifestyle until she became a Christian in 1987. Willis now speaks to Christian groups against yoga, offering instead a series of poses called PraiseMoves.


Oh, and it's not just Protestants:

In 1989 the Vatican issued a document saying the practice of Eastern traditions like yoga "can degenerate into a cult of the body," warning Catholics against mistaking yoga's "pleasing sensations" for "spiritual well-being."

I bet some of you can guess the punch line:

It was signed by then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger -- now Pope Benedict XVI.

The yoga mat: Satan's bedchamber.

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