The Seventh Day Adventists are big into health and fitness, especially vegetarianism.Ken wrote: ↑Tue Oct 05, 2021 3:58 pm Regarding physical fitness.
My HS daughter is currently writing a paper on comparative religions for her AP World History class. She is comparing and contrasting Hinduism and Buddhism.
One of the things that she pointed out to me is both religions have serious health and fitness elements to their theology which is something that she believes appears to be lacking in Christianity. Hinduism practices vegetarianism and fitness through yoga. Various forms of martial arts and fitness exercises like Tai Chi as well as fasting have emerged out of Buddhist and Taoist traditions. In fact, most eastern religions have something of a focus on the fitness of mind and body.
I have to wonder if these sorts of traditions once also existed in Christianity and have more or less been lost over the centuries. Or were never there to begin with. At least with respect to the modern European and North American versions of Christianity where things like dietary rules and fitness are largely lost or absent.
But I think your daughter is on the wrong track to assign the focus on “health and fitness” to Hinduism and Buddhism. Rather, health and fitness were the very things American and British culture was interested in from the last half of the 19th century into the 20th, just as information about eastern religions was becoming widely available in English thanks to British colonialism in India. This was the age that produced muscular Christianity (i.e. the YMCA), the Seventh Day Adventists, and the graham cracker. From what I understand, the exercises aren't even an essential part of yoga. Meanwhile, only in the last two centuries or so—and only in the most affluent societies—could vegetarianism be described as a health practice. For probably the vast majority of people who ever lived, meat was a rare rich source of essential protein. The “health and fitness” is what the west was looking for, and I think it would be a mistake to read that back into eastern religions.
It’s a bit like how the hippies of the 1960s flirted with Buddhism and Hinduism, but their version of those religions looked an awful lot like…the hippies of the 1960s. Maybe the best illustration of the western values lying underneath is that the pseudo-Buddhism has gone on to produce billions of dollars in the United States with no end in sight. Meanwhile it’s not difficult to find real expressions of Hinduism and Buddhism that don’t seem to share many values with the hippies.
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As a thought experiment, we might imagine a world where Anglophone culture had discovered Islam instead. We might be doing salah poses and losing a little weight on a ramadan diet.
Or early Christianity: “I hope the marketing meeting doesn’t go late; my stylites class is at 2:30.”