religion

Yoga Makes Flexible Demons for Satan


Heard of Mark Driscoll? He’s got himself a mega-church somewhere down south (of me). Among his other charming interpretations of the bible, he believes that women shouldn’t be allowed to hold leadership roles in any church. He probably likes the idea of banishing us to red rooms during our periods too – but I digress.

Mark recently explained the whole Satan/demonic training/hell connection of yoga to his flock during the Q&A part of their Sunday service.

Q&A, the Catholic in me giggles, consists of the flock submitting queries via their cellphones or iPads, no doubt, and Mark reading them off a screen on stage.

A stage? I’ve attended an evangelical worship thingy here and there and still can’t wrap my mind around the theatre aspect of it.

Someone asked if it was okay for Christians to do yoga.

Christianity’s apparent incompatibility with an asana practice has been much in the news lately. Personally, I believe that if yoga’s spiritual center bothers a person, he/she should do Pilates or something, but knowing that most people bring so little of themselves to their personal religions anyway – I don’t think many people are in danger of being seduced away by yoga.

Mark, like most uber-religious, totally over-estimates the average yoga student’s interest in anything other than having a yoga butt and being able to touch their toes. My students tolerate the “namaste” at the end simply out of respect for me.  I am not converting anyone to my way of thinking about the “oneness” of the universe as he puts it.

It’s interesting that he can explain the purpose of yoga and still not get it at all.

No one’s head spins round in yoga though I have witnessed some painful looking displays of near freakish flexibility and if getting in touch with yourself and by extension – everything and everyone – is evil, more of us should choose the “path of darkness”. The world would be a better place if we focused more on it and the people around us rather than wasting our energy chasing a capricious God and his conditional love.

Yoga is good for the body and one’s emotional well-being. Research backs me on both counts.

What people like Driscoll worry about is that the exposure to other ways of interpreting the world will lessen their power as people begin to question and think for themselves.

If Christianity is the be-all/end-all than people will come to that conclusion without the Driscoll’s guidance. No one leaves a faith based on their fitness choices. People who have faith aren’t swayed by a little inward reflection and perhaps are even strengthened by the opportunity.

Ultimately what we call “religion” arose from a need to explain and impose a sense of order on life. What actually guides the universe is not so simplistic which is evidenced by the fact that there are so many creeds competing for dominance.

Yoga is the last thing Driscoll should be worrying about or wasting his words on. Real life in America, riddled with real problems, would be a better focus, but what’s a dogma without tangible demons, eh?

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Americans Know Nothing About Their Own Religions


 

(Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Mohammedani...

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The latest Pew Research survey dove into religion. Specifically, researchers wanted to know just how much actual religious knowledge drives this most holy of lands.

Unsurprisingly, the answer was not so much.

Americans, who are religiously bent, are as ignorant of the tenets of their diverse faiths as they are of the Constitution’s purpose for the separation of those faiths from the workings of the state.

Who knows the most about religion in general?

Atheists.

Which makes total sense. A person has to know something about religion in order to conclude that it’s bigotry wrapped in superstition and basically a tool used to maintain some of the world’s more useful oppressions.

After the God deniers, Mormons and Jews knew more actual facts about the various religions of the world. I wonder if this isn’t because their faiths focus more attention on following the letter of their laws, as opposed to the nebulous, feel-good spirit of the rules that seem to change with each new evangelical schism.

Catholics didn’t know shit. How could they? They are apparently not being taught the most basic tenet of the religion – transubstantiation. You know, that icky sticking point with Protestants of all ilk? The fact that the wafer and wine actually become the body and blood of Christ during the consecration during mass.

41% of Catholics think the wafer and wine are … symbolic. The Pope must be breaking his own knuckles with hand-wringing over this big oops by his American clergy. Perhaps the bishops of America have been too occupied covering up the molestation thing, suppressing women and being all round tools of the man in the pointy hat to remind their parish priests about such an important topic?

Protestants fair a bit better but only if they are mainline and not evangelicals. Both groups, also unsurprisingly, gloss over the main point of Luther’s original break back in the middle-ages – “grace” can’t be earned. God gives or not. It’s a bleak outlook whose darkness varies according to the religious flavor. Evangelicals don’t bother with it at all because it’s simply too much for them and they prefer their view that everyone BUT them is a loser in the whole “God loves me better than you” grace race.

Curious about my own knowledge base, I took the quiz at the Pew Forum site.

I missed the last question on The Great Awakening. Not too strangely, this wasn’t covered in religion class at my Catholic high school.

My general distaste for the puritan streak that runs wide and uselessly through the American psyche means I haven’t spent much time trying to discover how such an atrocity happened. Frankly, I thought the whole “personal guilt” thing floated over with the Pilgrims, but it started here. We can’t blame the English for this.

The “awakening” was a clever assault on the god-fearing with the end result being that life generally sucked more than it should have for the early American colonists. Worst of all, it marked the beginning of that sing-song preaching style that’s punctuated with shrill notes and poignant silences.

At The Daily Dish, Sullivan linked to a blog that invited a bunch of scholars to apologize for the ignorant. One guy thought that the “spirit” of religion was probably more important than adherents actually knowing factual information or even, gasp, understanding what it was they professed to believe.

Seriously? If you are going to vote, persecute, impose or otherwise force your faith down the throats of those who worship, or not, then you had better know your shit.

Because it stinks.

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The Hand of God


So the daughter and I are bonding over The Ten Commandments.

Yes, THE Ten Commandments as re-imagined  by the ever so full of his own self Cecil B. de Mille and enacted with too much gravitas by a Charlton Heston to campy effect and scene chewed with relish by Yul Brynner. Who does not love some Yul?

We were in Fargo on Easter Saturday and neither Rob nor I were up for a youth infected dip in the postage stamp pool, so we talked Dee into a “movie night” and she discovered one of my Easter rituals from days of yore – watching The Ten Commandments.

I had forgotten just how bad a film it is. Notable now for the healthy figures of its leading ladies and for the fact that Yul and Charlton were looking mighty fine, Dee was enthralled. It had everything. Princesses. Injustice. Fabulous locales and just enough religious detail to set her near-pagan mind a-tingle with the need to “know more about it”.

As it is an ungodly long flick, she only got to watch up to the part where Moses is banished to the desert. Frankly, the movie goes steadily downhill from this point. Once Seti dies and Rameses are bit players, it sinks under the weight of Heston’s attempts to make Moses a regal authority when in fact, Moses had to be poked, prodded and continually ego-stroked by God to get him to do anything.

And the fact that Brynner and Heston are mostly clothed from here on certainly doesn’t help either.

Moses is a pretty lame hero. Arron, his brother the rabbi, performed most of the plague tricks and Moses whined and doubted – a lot. I think it was the whining rather than the doubting that kept him out of the promised land in spite of what Sister told us in school.

Which brings up a curious point. Why are God’s Old Testament prophets so often cowardly and whingeing? God could have chosen Joshua. Joshua was an Old Testament warrior type. He would have latched onto Pharoah’s ankle and gnawed the guy’s foot off if God commanded it, but Moses was always questioning and moaning, “Why, Lord?”

When we got back home, Dee was still going on and on about the movie, so I stopped at the library after yoga one day and picked it up for her.

It’s three hours and 39 mins long and that is not counting from Judaism sprang the true religion that eventually begat the wonder that is democracy in the United States the greatest place on earth speech that de Mille gives before the film that prompted Dee to say,

“Just go to the menu and pick scene selection, Mom.”

As we watched the first night – and this was after a long day of training – I was reminded of all the times I must have watched this growing up because I easily recognized the bits that had been edited out for commercials when it ran on television. Usually it was Yul who got his lines cut, which is a shame because he is a hoot.

Last night we watched part two which is the boring “let my people go”. Heston is quite impressive with that one line. Unfortunately they gave him a lot of other things to angst about too that really slow the movie down and his Elvira hair distracted.

After boring us with Moses’s time in exile, it surprises me that de Mille skipped most of the plagues, but he’d chewed up over two hours by the time Moses sees the burning bush and returns to Egypt and there was still Passover and a sea to part. The music swells in awesomely in the sea sequence. Still makes me tingle a bit.

Anyway, the last plague is – of course – death to the first-born of Egypt which the Hebrews ride out in their blood stained mud huts – which in retrospect is appropriate because their God is murdering innocents in their name, so smearing them with blood fits.

The superbly cheesy effect of the smoky hand of God, green and wispy, slithering across the moonlight sky before snaking to earth prompted me to think,

“Aw fuck, I forgot about the whole hand of God killing children thing.”

Dee was horrified.

“Why does God want to kill the little boy?”

Pharoah’s son –  if you know the story skip this – is of course smited by the hand of God to teach Pharoah a lesson. A lot of innocent children bite it in the Old Testament because God was, apparently, still working on his personal enlightenment. Perhaps he should have been paying more attention to the Asians because I believe they were busy coming up with what would the be basis for the Sutras and Buddhism. Although, if they had been God’s chosen, the concept of enlightenment might not have ever been discovered by humans at all.

When I was Dee’s age, I knew the story of Moses. The idea that God killed for no other reason than to teach lessons the hard way was not foreign to me and I was Catholic enough to accept this rather bloody-minded view that it was okay because it was God.

Dee has been deliberately distanced from Christianity in general. When Will died, I allowed her to believe in heaven and angels but I kept her ignorant of the hell and damnation component. Two reasons for that. First being that if she is going to believe in God in some fashion or other, I want her to do so without the fear factor. Too many people are religious for no other reason than they are afraid not to be and this, in my opinion, is the root cause of poor Christians. Second, there is no good reason to scare the crap out of children to promote blind obedience to any creed. That kind of nonsense is why Catholic priests were able to get away with abusing children and why Catholic schools were hotbeds of physical and emotional abuse as well.

“Baby, if there is a God, do you think he would kill little children?” I asked her.

“No,” she replied wide-eyed and very serious.

“Moses is a made up story. Churches used to tell horrible stories like this to scare people into believing and being good,” I said – and that’s about as age-appropriate simple as it gets.

“Why?”

“A very good question,” I said. “But I don’t know the answer.”

“God is a good person,” she assured me. “And Daddy Will and Grandpa live with him in heaven and do good things too.”

Seriously, can you wish more for your child than believing this?

But, naturally, the green glowing hand of God came back to slap me about a half hour after I’d put Dee in bed.

“Mom?’ came a plaintive wail from upstairs which I followed and discovered a wide-awake worried child at its tail.

“Can’t sleep?”

“It’s that hand of God,” she said.

Dang-it hand of God. Curse Cecil B. De Mille.