Christians and Yoga

On September 11 CNN did a little debate between John MacArthur and Doug Pagitt on yoga. (I would have thought the American news had more to report that day). You can view the debate on both their blogs.

Doug's blog article. Comments have been closed on his page. I did see the first 12 comments before they got removed and about 10 of them were pretty bad. They were dissing Doug pretty hard; questing if he was even a Christian and someone said this interview was even more fodder as to why they don't like the emerging church.

John's blog article has the transcripts and 94 comments, 2 of which are from someone calling themselves "Doug Pagitt"

Anyway I saw this article in my RSS feed today and I thought that someone who had it in for Doug leaked the audio to some radio station with an annoying commentator (their segment here). But from this article it seems that it was Doug who posted the behind the scenes comments which you can listen to here, (without the radio dude cutting it up and being wrong about who the women was on the tape.)

My two cents on this issue (this is a blog after all) is that if yoga is done as some spiritual Hindu thing to help you become united you with nature or something spiritual then there is a problem. But to do yoga as exercise may then make it as spiritual as doing laps in a pool or going for a run. I do think John MacArthur nailed it with this:

The idea of yoga is to fill your mind with nothing except to focus on yourself and try to find the god that is inside of you. From a Christian viewpoint, that’s a false religion. Exercise is a different issue.