I am New-Agey, and proud of it. I don't think like how paranoid religious (mostly Christian) fundies think – that New Age concepts are satanic, and I don't get anal about mind-calming stuff like, Yoga, Tai Chi, Qi Gong and Meditation. So when I stumble upon sites by religious researches claiming to study the 'rights and wrongs' of how a true believer of a certain One-True-God only should behave, I react quite badly towards all the bashing up of the New Age movement.

However, over the years I have grown to understand that many people in the more developed (and surprisingly, unexposed) western, 'I am better than you are' regions of the world consider thousand-year-old practices like Zen Buddhism and Yoga Meditation 'New Age', padahal the concepts within these teachings have been around far longer than both Jesus and Muhammad.

My peeve about the anti-Yoga conscience especially, is how their argument about 'why you cannot do Yoga' can get ridiculously illogical, as if when considering whether to redeem or not redeem these ancient practices, they've grown a mushroom in place of their neural cells. I don't know about you, but I have personally received many concerned e-mails about how yoga is crazy dangerous because it 'invokes the snake at the bottom of your spine', and the bible says the devil comes in the form of a serpent.

Or the other concern that, Yoga has this particular pose called the cobra, and you mimick the actions of a spine, and 'Why Christians must be careful not to pretend to be serpents like the cobra.'

Also the part where Christians who like Yoga anyway, and try to be apologetic about their choices, start writing about what they do during their yoga practice: 'I get a bit worried when the yoga teacher tells me to empty my mind. We cannot empty our minds as Christians, so I choose to think about Jesus when the teacher tells us to empty our minds. I thinks its better that way.'

All these apologizing and blaming doesn't seem in anyway spiritual or bible-loving, IMHO. I don't know about you, but I am hardly evangelized into a faith purely because I see miraculous actions, experience massive floods that kill millions, attend funerals and suddenly get worried over where I will go to after I die. I don't watch David Blaine levitate and get converted into Blainism, you know? Religion is pure man-made, God is in the realm of the spiritual, and I doubt that the currently available man-recorded conceptual understandings of yoga (or tai chi, or qi gong) will even bring us close to who God, or what God really is. Whether He is One or Three or Many, I'm of the belief that most of us have already made up our minds about that, or, that by the time we die, we'll have some sort of concept about who God is like. And that belief will take us to where we belong, and we'll have to just live with (or die with) whatever and where ever we end up.

I wonder what will the fundamentalists think when they realize at the end that reincarnation is the real deal? Will they struggle like mad, or will they be insistent that they now belong in hell?I

I really wonder.