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Yoga still banned in Alabama.

psionl0 said:
What are you here for then? To sound like an idiot by claiming that yoga is a religion because they "hold stretches longer than necessary"?
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I like just stating what I believe and then correcting people when they incorrectly characterize it. For example, I didn't say it was a religion. I said it was insufficiently secular.

And yes, the holding stretches longer than necessary is part of it. It is like a scientology emeter. There is nothing directly religious about an E-meter or a school's decision to use E-meters and have students ask each other pseudo psychological questions while holding the cans. But the decisions to even use the device in that manner is tainted by religion.

The reason yoga is badly informed stretching is because it is tainted by religious decisions. I don't want that in a public school. But that also means there is a ton of stuff in school already I wish wasn't there. Yoga is very low on my list of priorities of things that shouldn't be in public school (the pledge of allegiance is way higher).
 
psionl0 said:
That doesn't make sense. It's just stretching and breathing with (in some versions) a few mystical sounding words thrown in as euphemisms for more ordinary expressions.
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Since yoga started as a mystical practice, it'd be close to the truth to say it's the ordinary expressions that are the euphemisms, for the original mystical jargon.
 
BobTheCoward said:
I didn't say it was a religion. I said it was insufficiently secular.
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Splitting hairs.

BobTheCoward said:
The reason yoga is badly informed stretching is because it is tainted by religious decisions.
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It sounds like you are trying to weave a whole cloth out of a single thread because you have an irrational paranoia.

Some religions involve eating wheat products as part of their ritual. That doesn't make wheat a "non-secular" substance that should be banned in schools.

Regardless of whether religions of the past included yoga and even if the words used in yoga had religious origins, most forms of yoga today are just exercises and do not involve chants or prayers. Therefore yoga is secular enough to be included as an option in school sports.
 
psionl0 said:
Splitting hairs.


It sounds like you are trying to weave a whole cloth out of a single thread because you have an irrational paranoia.

Some religions involve eating wheat products as part of their ritual. That doesn't make wheat a "non-secular" substance that should be banned in schools.

Regardless of whether religions of the past included yoga and even if the words used in yoga had religious origins, most forms of yoga today are just exercises and do not involve chants or prayers. Therefore yoga is secular enough to be included as an option in school sports.
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Wheat eating.likely existed before being a religious practice. Yoga appears to be a religious practice, first. Actual secular stretching doesn't look like yoga just as actual secular psychology doesn't look like scientology auditing.

And it isn't paranoia. There is zero consequence from having yoga in schools.but I'm not a consequentialist.
 
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psionl0 said:
Splitting hairs.


It sounds like you are trying to weave a whole cloth out of a single thread because you have an irrational paranoia.

Some religions involve eating wheat products as part of their ritual. That doesn't make wheat a "non-secular" substance that should be banned in schools.

Regardless of whether religions of the past included yoga and even if the words used in yoga had religious origins, most forms of yoga today are just exercises and do not involve chants or prayers. Therefore yoga is secular enough to be included as an option in school sports.
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Absolutely.

As I've said before: I've done hundreds and hundreds of yoga classes over many years, and I have never come out of a class with any sense of having just participated in any sort of religious (or even spiritual) event. And what's more, from the many people I know from having done yoga with them, plus the many more people I've had casual conversations with before or after classes, I don't recall a single one of them ever even alluding to them having been part of a religious (or spiritual) experience.

However, it's worryingly easy for people who don't know much about yoga (and who've probably never attended - or even witnessed - a typical yoga class) looking at the funny words, knowing that its roots were in India and Hinduism, and lazily concluding that there must be some sort of religious element to it all (whether overt or subliminal). As another example of this, I already mentioned the true story of my mother's Catholic priest forbidding a yoga class from being held in the church hall, for reasons entirely related to (perceived) non-Catholic religious practices.
 
BobTheCoward said:
Prayer is not a religion.
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But praying is religious. And prayer necessarily involves participation & belief in a religion. It doesn't have to be an organised religion per se - it may be a religion which exists solely in the experience of the individual who is praying.

Anyhow, it's moot: yoga does not involve any invitation or exhortation to pray. If some people choose to pray while they practice yoga, that's their choice. Just as it is if people choose to pray while they're out for a jog round the park.
 
LondonJohn said:
Absolutely.

As I've said before: I've done hundreds and hundreds of yoga classes over many years, and I have never come out of a class with any sense of having just participated in any sort of religious (or even spiritual) event. And what's more, from the many people I know from having done yoga with them, plus the many more people I've had casual conversations with before or after classes, I don't recall a single one of them ever even alluding to them having been part of a religious (or spiritual) experience.

However, it's worryingly easy for people who don't know much about yoga (and who've probably never attended - or even witnessed - a typical yoga class) looking at the funny words, knowing that its roots were in India and Hinduism, and lazily concluding that there must be some sort of religious element to it all (whether overt or subliminal). As another example of this, I already mentioned the true story of my mother's Catholic priest forbidding a yoga class from being held in the church hall, for reasons entirely related to (perceived) non-Catholic religious practices.
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We all agree on this. However, my threshold is crossed at having roots in a religion. That is sufficiently non secular for me to feel it should not be permitted in public school.

It also is why there are a ton of practices in school now that should be removed, and the sheer magnitude of that why I think there should be no public school.

ETA: and if it were up to me, I would be perfectly happy for my kid to go to a (private) school that was secular and had yoga like a public school would offer.
 
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BobTheCoward said:
However, my threshold is crossed at having roots in a religion.
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An awful lot of common things have their roots in religion. To pick just one example out of the air, modern Western musical notation and the diatonic scale both trace their origins directly back to liturgical and hymnal music of the Middle Ages. Is music therefore insufficiently secular for you to approve of?
 
arthwollipot said:
An awful lot of common things have their roots in religion. To pick just one example out of the air, modern Western musical notation and the diatonic scale both trace their origins directly back to liturgical and hymnal music of the Middle Ages. Is music therefore insufficiently secular for you to approve of?
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If so, then yes. But my preference is that yoga should be an option in public school, but that I shouldn't get my preference.
 
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