You Can't Be Christian and Do Yoga, Apparently

From Yahoo News:

A Southern Baptist leader who is calling for Christians to avoid yoga and its spiritual attachments is getting plenty of pushback from enthusiasts who defend the ancient practice.

Southern Baptist Seminary President Albert Mohler says the stretching and meditative discipline derived from Eastern religions is not a Christian pathway to God.

Mohler said he objects to "the idea that the body is a vehicle for reaching consciousness with the divine."

"That's just not Christianity," Mohler told The Associated Press.

Mohler said feedback has come through e-mail and comments on blogs and other websites since he wrote an essay to address questions about yoga he has heard for years.

"I'm really surprised by the depth of the commitment to yoga found on the part of many who identify as Christians," Mohler said.

Yoga fans say their numbers have been growing in the U.S. A 2008 study by the Yoga Journal put the number at 15.8 million, or nearly 7 percent of adults. About 6.7 percent of American adults are Southern Baptists, according to a 2007 survey by the Pew Research Center Forum on Religion & Public Life.

It's guys like this that give all Christians a bad name. I've taken yoga classes as part of the strengthening and stretching process to heal my back. Now, granted, I've got very limited experience with it and I've only had one yoga teacher, but I've watched some yoga DVDs and have sat in on a couple of other classes when Kristi used to take yoga at the Downtown Houston YMCA. I guess the yoga classes I've ever been to are much more mainstream than the hard-core yoga mysticism that is out there. I was skeptical of yoga, too, for a long time because I thought it was all a bunch of eastern religious hokum. But actually attending yoga classes showed me that it can be about self-control and stretching, strengthening of the body and being a good steward of the amazing gift that God has given us. The yoga teacher here in Brenham even brought a Christian message into it from time to time.

I liked my yoga experience because:
1. I got to pretend I was Batman in training.
2. It helped stretch my body and made me stronger at a time when my body couldn't handle weight training.
3. It had a very calming effect on my mind - at least for the hour during the class.
4. It helped me learn to block out a lot of external stuff and really focus on the moment at hand.
5. It gave me and Kristi a shared activity that we could do together that brought us together even more.
6. It really complimented my weight training and improved my flexibility once I was able to start lifting again.
7. It helped me realize that there is a lot that I thought I couldn't do (or couldn't do anymore) that can be done, with practice.

Man is a spiritual creature, and yoga can be a very spiritual experience in itself. It can help one get inside one's own head and hear God's voice in way that we're often used to tuning out. By turning into one's self, it's not tuning out God, as this guy seems to think. It's a way of being in tune with one's self, which is a natural way of being in communication with God. It's almost like a prayer - a very silent, personal experience that has tremendous meaning and emotional attachment inside one's head. When one is in that place, whether it be in prayer or in the forest or in a yoga class, one can very easily be in communion with God. It's not a pathway to God, but a way of communication. And how can communication with God on a spiritual level not be Christian?

Albert Mohler would do well to take some yoga classes so he could learn to concentrate on how big of a misinformed dick he sounds like.