Obviously, yoga is going to teach those poor kids to be socialist vegetarians. Time to home school them so they'll be ignorant sociopaths like good Americans are supposed to be.

where their thinking is whether they recognize it or deny it.

My favorite passage in the Bible was how Jesus kicked that homeless guy in the nuts with Pinkberry in-hand before going back to his job as head CEO of Monsanto.

of Yoga class back in New York because they thought it would be against their religion. Sigh..

Oh, I use to live in Encinitas, CA, too.. quite the health oriented town.. but there always has to be somebody afraid of "religious freedoms"!

I bet it's helping the kids.

Mahalo Judi

Why are so many Christians so utterly moronic that they take their childish fears of...yoga?... to a court?

It literally means "I bow to you"

on edit
And here you go. Google is magic.
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/04/yoga-classes-do-not-violate-students-religious-rights-californian-court-rules

can meditate and calm down a bit. Maybe even meet some really nice people outside their regular church going friends. Who knows, it could possibly expand their horizons a tad.

be offered also? Something like Coloseum sprinting or pew kneebends and squats? ?

Of course, the tricky part is to determine what "make no law" means, what "religion" is, what "establishment" is, what "free exercise" is, etc. It keeps the lawyers and judges busy!

There is a series and probably has been updated; that went they the church talking about yoga and meditation being a gateway to Hinduism and then would show writhing people in India and say it's a direct path to hell and demonic possession. It was nutso! And they show these videoed to kids middle school and up to adult in bible studies and youth groups... It's not everywhere by now, but I remeber the videos from the 90's and wanting to either throw up or laugh.

The Pastor would say you need to meditate on the words and scripture and find your place; and because of those videos, half of the kids were freaking out because he used meditate... That's when I realized how indoctrination works on sheep.

Last edited Sat Apr 4, 2015, 10:53 AM - Edit history (1)

Which I should add on edit, I disagree with and have my yoga mat rolled up all nicely at home.. LOL

Catholic Church in "tradition".

Most people in this country are entirely too sheltered from life outside of their little corner of the world. Its not hard to get them to fear what they don't know... Add a couple of scantily clad brown Indian men writhing on the floor, flash a picture or two of Ghandi and his demonstrations as "church worship, have another picture of some man in a "yoga pose" twisted up like a pretzel, and then throw in some old footage of the Beatles... LOL. AND this was a video series we had to watch. It was crazy towns. I guess this was an effort of a church to show that this is the only "true" religion. I wouldn't doubt since 2001, there isn't a whole new series that makes Islam the devils spawn as well.

You know where I went to church, just a small town in Vermont. So, if the videos and other religious materials made their way to that small church, they made it around to many others. Oh, you would have really gotten a hoot out of the whole "science in the bible" series I was sitting through. I zoned out when the man started explaining how "The Great Flood" occurred and they were on the "cusp of finding Noah's ark".... I started doing my homework and real science studying, and I didn't attend anymore "science lectures". This is how these people believe the shit they are saying.

Where are you from??

My wife has gotten thoroughly into Kundalini and it is bound up with religious tradition, in this case, Sikhism, to which my wife has coverted and does wear a turban now. I go to classes now and again, and the whole goal is losing one's personal identity and "yoking" one's self or identifying with the universal/infinite/divine/god. As this resonates with my Taoist tradition, I don't mind, but a very strong argument can be made for this being religious and indoctrinating.

I don't know much about other yogic practices, but I have found them thoroughly secular.

My son like doing Yoga poses with me and "showing me" how to do one's he's done in PE class... I live in FL now, there is nothing "religious" about it and if it were, these idiot holy rollers would really freak out down here. As long as its "housewife" approved.. its all good.

Sikhs, being a Hindu sect, do practice it.

But yogic traditions are fundamentally religious insofar one is attempting to "yoke" individual consciousness with universal consciousness. Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Taoism, etc are religions of one's identification with god (whatever you want that to symbolize), whereas Judeochristian and Muslim traditions are religions of one's relationship with god. So, yoga for Catholics, for example, would be experiencing the divine "out there", as God is separate from the individual, while the kundalini practitioner is seeking the divine "within", as God and the individual are one.

It gets a little confusing when I think about it too much, but isn't a downward DOG just an upward GOD?

and poses are a miniscule part of Yoga.

One goes from Yam, Niyam, Asan (poses), pranayaam (breathing techniques), dhyan, dharana and samadhi. The Kundalini chakra awakening occurs in the dharana phase which is never focused on in the West.

I rarely do the poses but do the breathing and meditation (dhyan) every day.

That people send their kids too? They don't seem to worry that the kids are going to gain a religion as well as a black belt!
Duh! People are so stupid in this country. Its mind boggling!

It's something I've heard before

An example: https://secretdangersofmartialarts.wordpress.com

Lol.

Started off intereating enough, then took a turn into crazy town.

Swear to God, I think I'm an atheist.

Live in a "bungalow"? Sanskrit.

At a time when things weren't going so well in his personal life. I joined him on a few excursions to find a yoga place he liked. At a local Jazzercise, it actually was pretty - if not Hinduist - New Age, with the instructor turning down the lights, playing zitar music, and talking about chakras. I actually fell asleep for a few moments (and probably snored). Then we actually went to a New Age church, and there was none of that, and it was treated by the instructor as a work-out. It's all in how you frame it.

The New Age church was in a repurposed strip mall that housed it, a gay bar next to it, and a Baptist church next to the gay bar, which I thought was funny since this was when I lived in Tulsa.

TlalocW

I can't stand American football. We wouldn't let our son play football (and he was always a big athletic kid who got "recruited" a lot).

However, soccer has a VERY high rate of concussions (and usually not from heading the ball either). It's the sport that produces the most concussions for girls.

will have some amount of concussions. The good thing is that processes to detect and respond to concussions are mandated in all high school sports (at least in my state). It might be hard to eliminate concussions entirely but not as hard to prevent a student from repeatedly having them.

around saying India's poor because it's polytheistic and uses integral exercises, or Pat Robertson's video of Haiti after the quake and he zooms in ominously on some Vodun implements as the cause of the misery

they also break up peasant collectives as "Commie creations of de Debbil" in the Third World

(of course there's plenty of other groups panicking about "the occult" being let in)

How far down the rabbit hold will this shit go.

"two yoga classes of 30 minutes or more per week. [and] We are seeing tremendous results..."Kids are more flexible, stronger, and have more ability to focus."

Just go back to the Physical Education programs I tool in Elementary and High School back in the fifties and sixties. You'll get the same result, because nothing improves your ability to focus, dodge and move quickly so rapidly as having your nose broke by a soccer ball smashing into your face as hard as your bully of a coach can kick it.

Other forms of yoga, e.g., raja yoga are clearly religious practices.

I think one of the deeper issues is the view of religion as a dimension to life (I don't mean that you do everything "religiously" like sitting or cooking in a "religious way&quot vs. the view of religion as a compartmentalized thing, as something "attended" an hour every week and then set aside

it's certainly reflecting a cosmogonic vision, rather than just brainless stretches--but when the fundies whine that it's a "doorway" to Hinduism they see religions as basically countries: they send out agents (believers) and can expand only at another's expense, conquering living "territory"

I was told by my hatha yoga teacher that doing hatha yoga is really a preparation for raja yoga. First you relax the body, then the mind. But hatha yoga can be taught and learned without that intent. That secularizes it, right?

or have a doctor's note https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_ban

I was just pondering the notions of "religious" and "secular" in the larger sense

See post #40 about the original 2013 ruling: http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1014&pid=1059122

Good.

meditate and satan's gates will open and swallow them hole.

It's an obvious, considering Lucifer himself, has a fork as his trademark

The thought of trial by the Internet is scary, although sometimes we seem to experience something pretty close to that.

That's so disrespectful.

In fact, I'll bet very few people who do hatha yoga (especially this modified version) go on to other forms of yoga, e.g., raja yoga.

be prayer. Or it can be just meditation.