The Republicans’ candidate for Lieutenant Governor in Virginia is a little crazier than average. He thinks that it is a big mistake to do yoga or meditate because if you empty out your mind it will allow Satan to walk right in and take control of your dead spirit.
Now, maybe if you go down to Arkansas and say something like that you will find an audience that nods in agreement. But in Northern Virginia or New Jersey or the Philly suburbs, people will start making calls for a paddy wagon. In our half of the country, talking about yoga and demonic possession isn’t a mere difference of opinion. It means you are a lunatic who needs immediate psychiatric help. You aren’t considered a conservative; you are considered insane. And there is no fucking way that people will vote for you.
This is why Rick Santorum was drubbed out of office by 18 points. Once it became known that he thought same-sex relationships would encourage bestiality, his support near Philly approached zero. It was no longer a choice between a Democrat and a Republican, but a choice between a normal functioning human being and a person who was in need of some kind of medication.
People on the right like to accuse us of being secular and not believing in God, but Blue America includes many religious people. That doesn’t mean that we will countenance obvious morons.
This isn’t an abnormal belief for people here. I mean maybe in NOVA but not in the rest of the state. Iunno about the whole devil aspect of this but plenty of evangelicals (including my mom) believe yoga to be demonic and most certainly another religion in itself.
Well, yoga may not be a religion in itself, but at its roots it’s a religious practice. Same with meditation, so in addition to the lunacy there’s religious bigotry here.
As one famous Virginian put it, “… 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.”
I guess this sort of points to the truth of the ‘liberal media’ accusation. I mean, the ‘lamestream media’ would agree with Boo (and me); worrying about demons is a sign of mental illness. But it’s a pretty mainstream idea, I guess, in some places …
It’s not Jackson who is bringing down the GOP hopes in Virginia, it’s the Cooch and his record. It’s hard to figure where Jackson thinks his support is going to come from. The folks who buy his religious line don’t necessarily vote for black candidates. And there are not a large number of religious African-Americans who buy Jackson’s extreme rhetoric. So not only does he lose NoVa, he loses Tidewater, Piedmont, Valley, Southside, Eastern Shore, and Southwest Virginia as well. Except for the party machinery that is obligated to vote for a GOP candidate. And his fellow GOP values voter grifters.
Given the way Arkansas handled Obamacare, I don’t think he would sell there either.
Now, maybe if you go down to Arkansas and say something like that you will find an audience that nods in agreement.
“Maybe”?
You’re shrill.
Keep it up.
Rachel Maddow did a great bit last night countering with video Jackson’s denials in a very recent interview that he’d ever said things about gay and lesbians and bestiality and the like.
As a lifelong Southerner, I don’t think that Jackson would get very much support here. We may have fundamentalists, but most aren’t that extreme. However, I never underestimate the ability of conservatives to vote for the Republican, no matter how obviously nuts he or she is. Otherwise, we’d not have had an Allen West or a Herman Cain or a Sharon Angle.
Hell, they teach all kinds of Yoga and meditation classes at our local YMCA. It’s not exactly a bastion of Satanic zombies. It is full of a lot of Republicans, though.
The “Homeland” episode last week was titled “The Yoga Play”. Now it all makes much more sense.
It’s not just the social issues. I was born inside the beltway and other than a stint in the military have lived here all my life.
It’s also the sequester and shutdown. NOVA is home to the Pentagon, CIA, and a metric ton of other military bases. That’s given us a thriving tech sector that provides great jobs, and a thriving economy. Outside of the “we all work for the DOD in some for or another” all the federal workers in DC tend to live outside of it, so if they aren’t working for the defense sector they might be working for the state Department, or the FBI or some other government function.
So when the Tea Party talks about slashing government and decided it was OK with defense cuts people here lost their shit. It’s not just crazy stuff like “let’s ban blow jobs and yoga is the work of satan”, it’s that they are a direct threat to peoples employment. The sequester and shutdown might as well have been the “fire all of northern Virginia” act.
Once the Republicans stopped sticking up for defense funding at all costs they lost all practical use for us. The Republicans better pray the Democrats are dumb enough to go after the defense and intelligence sectors, once people here see their jobs being taken we’d rush back into the arms of the right, blow jobs and yoga be damned.
No jobs, no yoga, no sex is not much of a platform to run off up here. More than the social issues people are seriously worried the Tea Party is going to result in the laying off of Arlington, Fairfax, Alexandria, and Loundon counties, people are scared shitless about the cuts, especially the defense cuts.
There is a rich literature in Christianity that deals with the same practices that yoga deals with. And huge portions of it (St. John of the Cross and Ignatius Loyola, for example) very much deal with the emptying of self and how to deal with the demonic things you find in that experience. Most US church members look at Christian literature like this and shrug it off with “That’s too deep for me.” Most clergy as well.
E. W. Jackson might be extreme and direct in his expression of this sort of spiritual laziness and terror of deep understanding of himself, but he is far from alone in the US.
Progressives are fortunate in that the Englightenment gives them the excuse to avoid this question altogether. Because it deals with things beyond reason.
I think you mean US Protestantism. Roman Catholics and high church Episcopalians have great respect for the mystical traditions. The “self emptying” is called kenosis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenosis
I have actually seen similar attitudes in diocesan priests and Episcopalian clergy despite the theological and juridical endorsement and encouragement of those practices. There is a general American fear of this sort of self-reflection. But it is especially true among Protestants, especially congregationalist-form Protestants, for two reasons. They broke with Catholicism before and in other countries than the Spanish Inquisition and Counter-Reformation that produced Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and Ignatius Loyola. And the congregational form tends toward dictatorship of the wealthier laity, who tend to insist on practicality and method and scorn too much self-reflection.
more than the historical date [Teresa of Avila and St John of the Cross were contemporaries of the early Reformation] it is connected with Protestant theology, Reformed theology as theology of the word in contrast to sacramental practice. Yes, some American Catholics are influenced by their context in the USofA, Anglicanism also has a longstanding mystical tradition.
If state representation in the senate was proportionate to population would Republicans ever again have a majority in that body?
And then there is a certain justice of the Supreme Court with some rather, um, idiosyncratic views on the existence of the devil . . .
Yes, this is true, but as long as he doesn’t “believe” in evolution, abortion, or gun control, he can believe anything else he wants. This is how single issue voters line up behind candidates like Santorum. It’s only willful naivete that allows voters to disregard the rest of his crazy, which gets him into the Senate in the first place.
In defense of Jackson, though, the concept of yoga has been badly Americanized just as badly as “California roll” is considered to be sushi: the term “yoga” or “yogi” is actually part of the Hindu religion; a lifestyle. It is considered in America cultural thought as simply some class you take to learn how to stretch and be healthy. If you are seriously evangelical, a component of the Hindu religion might be seen as a threat…
Anything that well educated, upper income, urban yuppies get their hands on becomes hilariously bastardized. And here in NOVA/DC those same yuppies do prattle on about how yoga is a spiritual thing and it’s the same crowd that loves to laugh at and make fun of the bible crowd.
Yoga is a cultural and class thing.
Yes, but it’s not their religion. I mean, it is their religion, but a different branch that doesn’t share some of their doctrine. In other words, y’all worship Satan, the most dangerous false god of all. Ask Ireland or Iraq how that sort of thing works.
Just to put things in proportion:
http://photoblog.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/04/05/17622234-namaste-ultra-orthodox-jews-practice-yoga-in-
israel