Cameron’s Trick Question Tricks Cameron

Here’s Banana Man’s disciple Kirk Cameron asking a trick question about the Constitution and Declaration of Independence … then flubbing the actual answer. Classic.

“The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here…” Perhaps not the world, but certainly Kirk Cameron.

Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars.

Driscoll on Yoga … Again

Thanks to Hemant, I see that Mark Driscoll is on about yoga again. After the last time he and other conservatives called yoga “demonic,” there was a spike of interest in the history of the practice. There were several articles written about the history of what we currently call yoga. One that stands out is Meera Nanda’s Not as Old as You Think. Here’s the summary:

Lately, Hindus in America have started flying the saffron flag over American-style yoga, which consists largely of yogic asanas and stretches. The leading Indo-American lobby, Hindu American Foundation (HAF), has recently started a vocal campaign to remind Americans that yoga was made in India by Hindus. Not just any ordinary Hindus, but Sanskrit-speaking, forest-dwelling Brahmin sages who learned to discipline their bodies in order to purify their atman. The purist Hindu position, articulated by the HAF, is that all yoga, including its physical or hatha yoga component, is rooted in the Hindu religion/way of life that goes all the way back to the Vedic sages and yogis.

There is only one problem with this purist history of yoga: it is false. Yogic asanas were never ‘Vedic’ to begin with. Far from being considered the crown jewel of Hinduism, yogic asanas were in fact looked down upon by Hindu intellectuals and reformers—including the great Swami Vivekananda—as fit only for sorcerers, fakirs and jogis. Moreover, what HAF calls the “rape of yoga”, referring to the separation of asanas from their spiritual underpinning, did not start in the supposedly decadent West; it began, in fact, in the akharas and gymnasiums of 19th and 20th century India run by Indian nationalists seeking to counter Western images of effete Indians. It is in this nationalistic phase that hatha yoga took on many elements of Western gymnastics and body-building, which show up in the world-renowned Iyengar and Ashtanga Vinyasa schools of yoga. Far from honestly acknowledging the Western contributions to modern yoga, we Indians simply brand all yoga as ‘Vedic,’ a smug claim that has no intellectual integrity.

In short, what we now call yoga is a mish-mash of different traditions given a nationalistic gloss during the British control of India. The modern Americanized version is even more confused, but its popularity has led many Hindus to run a “Take Back Yoga” movement. The movement is historically inaccurate. Nevertheless, it seems that Driscoll has been taking it as authoritative, and in his latest piece he draws from it to make his argument that yoga is suffused with Hindu spirituality.

In the end, both Driscoll and the “Take Back Yoga” movement are committing the same fallacy. Andrea Jain describes it in her piece, Is Downward Dog the Path to Hell?:

Both the evangelical Christian yogaphobic position and the Hindu essentialist yoga-belongs-to-Hinduism position reflect religious fundamentalist tendencies to define ideas and practices not as human constructs that are subject to change over time, but as monolithic stable products that belong in specific traditions and accordingly do not belong in others.

How Much History Do You Need?

There’s an interesting question weaving through the biblio-blogosphere. I think it starts with Brian LePort at Near Emmaus:

What events recorded in Scripture must be historical for you to affirm the truthfulness of Christianity?

Thomas Verenna picked up on it, as did Gavin at Otagosh.

Certain liberal Christians would actually be shocked and disheartened if the stories in the Gospels turned out to be “mere” historic truths. I know that as a liberal I accepted the “Easter epiphany,” the idea that some of the apostles realized that Jesus’ message could still continue despite his death, and the story of his resurrection was an allegorical creation. I was actually disheartened by Thomas Sheehan‘s theory that Peter actually had a vision; that was far too prosaic for me.

On the other end of the spectrum, there was a kerfuffle last month when Dr. Mike Licona, an evangelical NT scholar at Southern Evangelical Seminary, suggested that the “zombie verses” (Matt. 27:51-53) were allegorical. This brought out Mohler, Geisler and other conservatives to oppose him. DaGoodS has some of the story.

At minimum, what parts of the bible would have to be accurate history for you to accept Christianity?

Even Joseph Smith Talked Like a Pirate

Some folks on the Ex-mormon forum mentioned a connection between Captain William Kidd and Joseph Smith. In hindsight, it makes perfect sense: Smith was a treasure seeker, using his peep-stones as divining tools, and Kidd is the most famous pirate to have ever buried treasure.

Searching a bit, I found this bit on Wikipedia’s entry on the Angel Moroni:

Some scholars have theorized that Smith became familiar with the name “Moroni” through his study of the treasure-hunting stories of Captain William Kidd. Because Kidd was said to have buried treasure in the Comoros islands, and Moroni is the name of the capital city and largest settlement in the Comoros, it has been suggested that Smith borrowed the name of the settlement and applied it to the angel who led him to buried treasure—the golden plates. Complementing this proposal is the theory that Smith borrowed the names of the Comoros islands and applied them to the hill where he found the golden plates, which he named Cumorah.

So do we need a “Talk like a Mormon” day next?

The Christians and Thomas Jefferson

Here’s pseudo-historian David Barton explaining how the supposed confirmation that Thomas Jefferson had a child with Sally Hemming was a liberal plant to make Bill Clinton’s infidelity seem less bad:

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I don’t remember that retraction. I do know that the issue is complicated, and the DNA evidence only reveals so much. There’s a long summary of the argument at the Monticello site which reaches the provisional conclusion:

Based on the documentary, scientific, statistical, and oral history evidence, the TJF Research Committee Report on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings (January 2000) remains the most comprehensive analysis of this historical topic. Ten years later, TJF and most historians now believe that, years after his wife’s death, Thomas Jefferson was the father of the six children of Sally Hemings mentioned in Jefferson’s records, including Beverly, Harriet, Madison, and Eston Hemings.

Right Wing Watch tends to clip its videos very short, so I’m not sure what else Barton had to say. But I find it interesting that Barton would give Jefferson even a partial defense. During his life, Jefferson was seen as the enemy of religion, the Virginia Voltaire, friend of Thomas Paine, a Jacobin and an infidel.

That last word has two linked meaning in the mind of Jefferson’s detractors: religious infidelity and moral infidelity. The first was assumed to automatically lead to the second.

You probably remember Jefferson’s famous line “… it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” Well, to that the Dutch Reformed minister William Linn replied, “Let my neighbor once persuade himself that there is no God, and he will soon pick my pocket, and break not only my leg but my neck. If there be no God, there is no law.”

Naturally, when people are assumed to be morally lax, the first sins that people look for are sexual sins. Jefferson’s affair with Hemmings was seen as the inevitable consequence of his religious skepticism. Consider the following poem which ran in a Philadelphia newspaper in 1803, shortly after rumors of his affair began circulating:

Cease, cease old man, for soon you must,
Your faithless cunning, pride, and lust,
Which Death shall quickly level:
Thy cobweb’d Bible ope again;
Quit thy blaspheming crony, Paine,
And think upon the Devil.
Resume thy shells and butterflies,
Thy beetle’s heads, and lizard’s thighs,
The State no more controul:
Thy tricks, with sooty Sal give o’er:
Indulge thy body, Tom, no more;
But try to save thy soul.

But now some Christians, like David Barton, have made Jefferson one of the patron saints of their civic religion. That means they find it necessary to defend him against the charges that their forefathers laid against him.