From: sunder@grusin.crhc.uiuc.edu (Srinivas Sunder)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.usa,soc.culture.indian
Subject: Re: Why is Yoga considered an occult practise?
Date: 21 Dec 1992 18:15:07 GMT
Organization: Center for Reliable and High-Performance Computing, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: grusin.crhc.uiuc.edu

In article <1992Dec21.172629.20974@news2.cis.umn.edu>, prabhak@giga.cs.umn.edu (Satya Prabhakar) writes:
|> On a recent trip to Knoxville, Tennessee, I turned on the TV in the
|> hotel at about midnight. What I saw on the Christian network struck
|> me as interesting.
|> 
|> The program was dedicated to exposing how anti-Christian forces
|> have taken American schools hostage. The program backed this assertion 
|> up by quoting several instances where occult and satanic material 
|> is taught to children. And the program cited Yoga as an example of
|> occult devil worship which left me a little amazed.

This has been going on for some time. I recall that two years back, in
some remote town in Texas, some councilman wanted to pass some law 
banning the teaching of yoga in schools because it was a religion,
though his later comments proved that he was less interested in separation
of church and state than he was in bashing non-Christianity. He said
something about this being a demonic practice, with some crap about 
having been to Calcutta and seeing the poor souls wandering the streets
with their eye glazed over (the result of demonic possession of their
souls). I guess it was probably a waste of time to tell him that most
people in Calcutta wouldn't know yoga from diddly.

There was some more of this this year in the Washington State GOP convention
this year. It has been completely taken over by the Religious & Loony Right
who wanted to ban, among other things, Yoga and a practice called channeling
(whatever that is). There was also some stuff about withdrawing from the
UN, and given a little more time, they would probably also have gotten
some judicious bashing of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral
Commission (incidentally, also a bugaboo of the loony Left).


|> My question is as follows: Is the branding of Yoga as a form of
|> devil worship chiefly out of ignorance or is it me that is missing
|> a part of this picture?

The operative words are intolerance and paranoid ignorance. If you see
those religious channels, you might, on occasion, come across ads touting
books that give you the "Truth About <...>" on topics from Islam, Hinduism
in America, Rock Music ("Is it really Satanic?"), Mormonism etc. And there
is this book by a guy called George Otis Jr. called "The Last of the Giants:
Lifting the Veil of Islam and the End Times", in which he identifies the
enemies of Christianity as Islamic and Hindu fundamentalism (which is the
word you apply to adherents of a religion u don't like). Islam is enemy #1.
The areas he identifies as territories where other "offensive religions"
are predominant are most of North Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Indian 
sub-continent. The book is pretty nutty, from what I gather, but the best
part is that he identifies both San Francisco and the Scottish Highlands
as "enemy strongholds in Christian territory". Those Celts are real baa..ad
dudes, you know. (:-:) 

I haven't read the book myself [was told of this by an American friend], 
but it tells you something of the ignorance and intolerance that pervades 
the minds of some on the far-right.


|> 
|> Satya Prabhakar
|> --
|> ______________________________________________________________
|> Tell me what you pay attention to and I will tell you who you are!
|> 					-Ortega Y' Gasset

-- 
Srinivas Sunder                                         sunder@crhc.uiuc.edu

If my employer shares these views, I'd be most surprised.
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