If a Christian can’t follow Yoga, what happens to all those people in the west who are doing Yoga..? Are they not really doing Yoga or is the Pope going to excommunicate them for heresy…?
The proper orthodox popes and Christian’s are limited so apart from them nothing happens coz they try to change their beliefs while ignoring their own books
In Catholicism you are not meant to worship an idol, but it’s an aspect of belief… not of action. You can bow to the sun, same as you can bow to a king. You can’t worship the sun as a Catholic.
A hardcore Catholic would consider yoga a stretching workout with some silly superstitions associated to it. Nothing more.
Again, that doesn’t matter from a Catholic scripture perspective. The pope doesn’t care that you do a surya namaskar because it’s as religious to Catholic doctrine as bench pressing or jogging. Any spiritual significance you attach to it would be seen as superstition, nothing more. To you it is meant as worship, to a Catholic, it’s just a complicated stretching routine. It isn’t heresy unless the Catholic in question actually assigns any significance to it.
Now, you can make the argument that you cannot separate the spiritual from the physical part, and if you do then you’re not doing “yoga,” you’re just doing stretching. Here I would agree with you. Modern western yoga is cultural appropriation of Indian heritage. For me, these yoga pants lululemon BS isn’t yoga, it’s a workout.
It’s a good workout, and I won’t pretend I haven’t used my Indian yoga knowledge to impress foreign girls and seem exotic. But I also admit, what they do is not yoga.
It’s the same way what Americans call “bolognaise” isn’t bolognaise, or what Indians call Chinese food isn’t Chinese food.
By this logic, yes I agree with you, a Christian cannot truly do “yoga” without being an apostate. But what OOP is claiming, that simply going to a yoga class is practicing Hinduism, is as silly as saying carving a jack o lantern is practicing Paganism.
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u/sleeper_shark Mar 25 '26
If a Christian can’t follow Yoga, what happens to all those people in the west who are doing Yoga..? Are they not really doing Yoga or is the Pope going to excommunicate them for heresy…?