Why are Christians against Yoga? A Wikipedia page describes Yoga as:
Yoga is a group of physical, mental, and spiritual practices or disciplines that originated with its own philosophy in ancient India, aimed at controlling body and mind to attain liberation (moksha), as practiced in the Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist traditions.
Note that Wikipedia’s description mentions spiritual practices. Well, what is that? The Google AI Overview today answers the question ‘What is spirituality?’ like this:
Spirituality is a broad human experience involving the search for meaning, purpose, and connection to something larger than oneself, such as the universe, nature, or the sacred.
That definition will be just fine to work with right here. So, you see that spirituality has several possible sources, and the I’d suggest that something is only sacred it it’s good. This may seem like a very simplified breakdown, but Christians recognize two sources of spirit or spiritual: coming from God or coming from demons. That’s it right there – light or dark, good or evil.
So, let’s take that Google AI Overview and add the Christian view to each way or source:
- Spirituality is a broad human experience involving the search for meaning: either good or evil.
- Spirituality is a broad human experience involving the search for purpose: either good or evil.
- Spirituality is a broad human experience involving the search for connection to something larger than oneself: something either good or eveil.
- Spirituality is a broad human experience involving the search for a connection to something larger than oneself, such as the universe: this replaces God with the Universe, and would be seen as a connection with evil.
- Spirituality is a broad human experience involving the search for a connection to nature: this one can be taken two ways, either seeing nature as part of God’s creation, although in the context of spirituality it would be seeing nature as a replacement of God with the nature, and would be seen as a connection with evil.
- Spirituality is a broad human experience involving the search for connection to the sacred: and the Christian separates the sacred into only good, so that would be God. There are those who seek the sacred which is not God, and that would be evil.
Again, it might seem as an oversimplification, and Christians don’t make up the definition for sources of spirituality, or spirits, its in the bible.