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CPC Sunday School | Hinduism & Buddhist (8-27-2023)
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The transcript discusses the topic of world religions, specifically focusing on Hinduism and Buddhism. The speaker emphasizes the importance of understanding the origins and ideas of these religions, as they have influenced our everyday lives and culture. The speaker also mentions the prevalence of these religions in countries like India, China, and Japan. Additionally, the speaker raises the issue of incorporating aspects of these religions, such as yoga, into our lives and encourages a biblical perspective on these practices. The transcript concludes with statistics on the global and US populations affiliated with Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism, highlighting the significance of these religions in our world. We're going to be continuing this morning looking at world religions, this morning focusing on the East, Eastern religions. Before we do that, let's go ahead and pray. Our Father in heaven, we bow our head, we give you honor and glory for this day, for your faithfulness through this week. Our Lord, we thank you that this is your world for you revealing yourself to us in your word. We thank you for Christ, what he accomplished on the cross. We thank you for what Christ does for us at the right hand of the Father even now. And we thank you for the hope that is to come and Christ's return. We thank you for all this in Christ's name, amen. All right, so we're going to be looking at Hinduism, Buddhism as the predominant Eastern religions. By show of hands here, when I say Hinduism and Buddhism, in terms of familiarity with those two, if you are very familiar with those two, would you raise your hand? Okay. Good, good. So if I was seated where you were a week ago, two weeks ago and somebody asked me that question, I wouldn't have my hand up. So it's not something that, in terms of the content of it, we have ideas of it, but what's interesting is as you dig into it, you start to hear a lot of things that sound familiar that may not be Buddhist or Hindu in terms of what somebody would affiliate with, but in its idea, in its ideas, you would say, oh, you know, that has its origin in Hinduism and Buddhism. And so for those of us that are further along in life, for those of us that are younger, that are going to be leaving, you know, home where we are surrounded by, day in, day out, a Christian worldview, when we get out in the world and we start hearing ideas like, well, you just need to be more present, you know, the heart is going to give you what the heart is going to give you. We need to follow your heart. We need to be, your mindfulness, you know, is probably struggling and you need to focus, you know, all these Confucius sayings that we may not say, okay, follow Confucius or follow Hindu or follow Buddha, but these things that get incorporated in our everyday life, it's good for us to be aware of those and know its origins so that we can think through it rightly. Any thoughts on that before we get started? Is that your guys' experience as well, just thinking about our culture and Buddhism and Hinduism? Let's jump into this. We're going to go through this at a fairly fast clip. We're going to try and get to the end. That's our goal, of course, but at the end, there's a section that I want to tackle in terms of biblical application of some of the practical sides of this, but in way of overview, we're going to be looking at some locations. We're going to drill down at numbers. We're going to be looking again at Hinduism. Buddhism is divided into two main categories. You've got classical Buddhism and then as exported to Japan, we've got essentially Zen Buddhism. That's the type of Buddhism that we are and would be most familiar with in terms of meditation, in terms of yoga, those practices that have their roots, their tentacles right in Buddhism and the teaching of Buddhism. Then we're going to look at a biblical application, a case study. Let's together think through how do we think about one of the practices of Buddhism, which is yoga, and how do we think through applying that. That's something that I'll just give you. I'm just going to broadcast. I'm not going to say, do yoga or don't do yoga. What I'm going to do is encourage us to be thinking biblically about whatever it is, fill in the blank. How do we develop this vertical reference for just thinking through life? How do we develop a vertical reference in terms of parents, day in, day out, in terms of fighting with your siblings, in terms of how we spend our time? The habit of thinking through everything vertically isn't something that just comes intuitively. That's something as parents as we do and something as older people that we want to be training ourselves to do. Any thoughts on that before we get going? Looking at Eastern religions, we're talking about the East, the South, the Southeast. Predominantly we've got India. We've got China. We've got Japan, and then we'll talk about the numbers here in the United States, but India is 80% Hindu. It is approximately 2.3% Christians. These would be people that may not be Orthodox Christian, but people that would affiliate with Christianity that would say, okay, I affiliate with Christianity, about 2.3%. China is, in terms of Christianity, about right there, 2.5%. Japan, 1.5%. Some people call this the Japanese puzzle. If we have time later, we can talk about that, but why is, in terms of the Japanese affiliation or affinity with Christianity, why is that a struggle? That's something that we can talk about later, but that's interesting. As we look about the timeline here, we've got 1500 BC, this idea of Hinduism. Hinduism is not from one leader. It's not one text. It's an accumulation of texts, as we're going to see, over a long period of time. It comes over to China in about 200 BC to 280 in the form of Buddhism, and then makes its way from China to Japan about 700 AD in Zen Buddhism and becomes incorporated in their Japanese identity, in terms of sovereignty, in terms of their preserving their country. It's very much ingrained in their identity of who they are, and approximately 70% would say that I'm Shinto or I'm Buddhist. What's interesting is Christian weddings, there is no Christian wedding or wedding ceremony in Japan. The influence of movies in Japan is strong, and so over 50% of people in Japan have something if you went to, would say, oh, it seems like a Christian wedding, a Christian-type wedding. That is an interesting paradigm, where a majority of people there would not really want anything to do with Christianity or have any affinity with it, but in terms of practices, there's things that they find appealing. Thoughts or questions about that? Can anybody ... Yeah, so what is folk religion? What does that mean? What is the religion that they would affiliate with that? They consider that to be like an empty bowl, so fill it. What do you want in there? A lot of people would fill it with Buddhism, some form of practical Buddhism, deny the existence of God, so atheism, agnosticism, incredibly high, but fill your bowl, kind of a buffet of this and that. We'll have a bit of that at the potluck today, and it works pretty good if you manage your plate well, but in terms of religion, then you really can't do that. Can we, anybody, quiz here, first quiz, top, we've got three images. Anybody want to take a stab at what those are, are supposed to be representative of? Pam? Miss Pam? Yeah, Buddha. Yeah, what's his name? Anybody can shout them out. Scary looking. Yeah. Yeah. That's right, very good, so you got two out of three. Anybody can get the middle one? No, no. Yes, good, very good. Shiva, and it's actually a male, but Shiva has a female consort, right, and so we'll talk about this, you'll see Indian woman wearing a bindi on their forehead, we'll talk about what that means, where that comes from, but that's right, so we got Buddha, Lord Shiva as he's called, this mythical figure, who's biblical in every way, take dominion over the world, proud of you, Dan, and so this is distracting, Lord Shiva, scary looking, and he's, yeah, I mean, not in the modern sense, he is a he, and Lord Shiva is the figure in Hinduism that when time, as it cycles on, time has no beginning, no end, will do a dance, it's not a good dance, according to Hinduism, and that will end the world. There's a little eye right there, and that's the third eye, and when the third eye opens, and that, all the energy will destroy the world, and so as you go through, as I went through these, I found it interesting, there's a lot of darkness in this, and a lot of hopelessness in it, so when we think about our posture of this, there's a sense, oh, that's silly, or, you know, that is just irrational, and some of that's true, that, you know, as Pastor Mark pointed out, the farther that, when we remove the God as he revealed himself as creator, and we remove the creator-creature distinction, then we start sliding towards irrationality, and some religions will capture more light of the creator than others, but the more you slide, the more irrational things get, and ultimately, at the end of the day, you know, that the ideas are irrational, but the people that are following these ideas, that our posture should be one of sadness for them, and also a posture of wanting to share with them the great hope that is in the God that's revealed himself in Scripture. Census by the numbers in the world, so about 31% of the world would identify, affiliate in some form of Christianity. In terms of Hinduism and Buddhism, we're talking about, of about 22%, so if we randomly picked five people in the world and just plucked them out, then statistically, it's likely that one of those people would affiliate with Buddhism and Hinduism, so not insignificant by any means. Majority of those would be in India, but they are here in maybe not their affiliation, some of their affiliation, but certainly their ideas. Let's look at the census in the United States, the numbers there. If we add up Christianity in the United States, some affiliation with Christianity, I'm not sure why this 2020, why it divides it in race, but it does, but if we add it all together, it's about 70%, and you look and you see Buddhists and Hindu, and we're looking at about 1% each, so together, in terms of percentage, would be about 2% of the United States. It doesn't seem like a lot. Go ahead. Good observation. What about here? Collin County, Allen, McKinney. What are your thoughts? There is that, and then we've also got the good observation that there is an increase in the numbers even where we live, and so when we look at percentages, we will in Collin County here, what I'm going to submit to you is that while 2% may seem low, and our, you know, kind of observations seem higher than that, the ideas, if we look at Hindu and Buddhist ideas in the United States, if we don't count people, but we count ideas, there is a lot of ideas that have their roots in Hinduism and Buddhism that are incorporated in our everyday culture and life, whether we know it or not. So, in the United States, Eastern religion, here are some, this is from a 2009 poll, I couldn't find a more recent one, a Pew Trust, I think it was, poll, this was staggering to me, 24% would affirm some form of reincarnation. You guys find that surprising? Just like a random poll, like one in, almost one in four people, like we're going to come back, that this is not all there is to it, that would affirm some form of reincarnation. That to me was staggering, 23% of the U.S. believe in yoga as a spiritual practice, so again, one in four would practice, you know, yoga and meditation, we'll talk about transcendental meditation as a spiritual practice, so, and then we've got Hollywood, it's infiltrated Hollywood in a very interesting way, Mr. Ford here shares his thoughts as being a spiritual person in the Eastern religion kind of way, there's a lot of what he says, if you read his quote, you know, we're like, you know, that's actually true, we shouldn't find happiness in a truck or in a house, you know, that we, our culture is very much about that, we would affirm that, that there's a lot of materialism there, but really what you have to do, what he's learned from his experience and his spiritual journey, right, you hear that a lot, my spiritual journey, I've talked to a lot of people, had a lot of experiences, but what I've come to is that you just need a switch, we just need to turn that switch on, flick it in your brain towards happiness, right, and so, you know, the obvious deficiencies with that, but you know, I look just out of curiosity to see who else would say I am a Hindu or I'm a Buddhist in Hollywood as representative of, you know, pop culture as it infiltrates and, you know, is a part of our culture, people like Julia Roberts, people like Robert Downey Jr., people like, oh, who else, I don't know about, I didn't see him on the list, but maybe, but these are people that would be significant influences in Hollywood that would say, I'm a Hindu, or I'm a Buddhist. And so, you know, the problem with Mr. Ford's view of reality here is that his switch isn't connected to reality. You know, you can flip that switch on, but it's not connected to the God of the universe, and so, you know, he's sadly delusional. What are other ways in that we hear these ideas, like, how are, how do these ideas influence us? Karma. Pay it forward. You hear these things. Mindfulness. You know, these things that we, that we hear, maybe even find ourselves using in ways or, or applying to our lives that, if I just do good things, then good things are going to happen to me. Oh, I got a flat tire. Must have been something I did. Bad karma. Yeah, Dan. Walk into a Barnes & Noble. Walk into the psychology section. I'm saying this figuratively. Don't do this literally, but if you walked in, we're all walking together, and we find that section, and we at random pick a book out, and we open, and we find chapter one. Chances are you're going to find some of that in chapter one. Sit down and find a quiet place. Visualize what's wrong. What is the problem that's eating at your life? Make that problem be like a Buddha would say, or his, his, his teaching, like a goat, and put that goat around that problem like a stick, and let that goat just walk around and eat that little area, right? Mindfulness on that area of the problem, and that, that would be, you know, some of the ideas that's influenced us. Collin County, really quickly, 56% would affiliate with some form of religion. We've got 11% Baptist. Now, if you add up all those numbers, you say, oh, that doesn't add up to 100. That's correct. There, there are Methodists, and those different versions I left off, but what I wanted to highlight is 3% would affiliate with Eastern religion here in Collin County. In Dallas County, it's about 1%. So, you know, your observation, your good observation, as you look around, and in Plano, as you look around, it is high, higher than the national average, and that's not, I don't think, surprising to us as we drive around, as we see the influx of new people, and we see the race, racial diversity that we, we are having here in Collin County, but that 3% would affiliate here in Collin County with Hinduism and Buddhism. Any thoughts on that before we move on? Great question, and this would be from, I believe, the 2020, so this is a more recent one. Is there a number that jumps out at you as being low or high there? No, I just see a substantial amount of foreigners who would practice. I mean, you just look at the dashboard of their car, and they'll have a guide. Yep. I mean, just, it, it seems higher than 3%. And that might be because we're talking 2020 pre-COVID numbers, and so if we, you know, think 2025 and revisit this, that may jump up, you know, with your instincts. So, that's a, that's a good thought. California has 40% of the Buddhist population, particularly in Southern California. Hawaii, in terms of Buddhism, has about 8 to 9% of Hawaii is Buddhist, which makes sense, the large Asian population in Hawaii. Okay, and Hinduism, let's jump in. This is, again, we talked about Shiva, the Lord of the Dance. This is a dance that is done, time is cyclical, so you've got this circle. You see more than two hands, so being in different places at one time. You've got Walter Martin giving us, you know, a really good description of Hinduism as saying that it has evolved over the last 5,000 years of Indian religious history. It seeks to be a synthesis of the various religious ideas and influences from throughout the Indian subcontinent, representing hundreds of separate cultural, social, and tribal groups. Richie Goodrich, were you guys here when he spoke, maybe about three, four months ago? You remember him talking about the thousands of gods? So, we're not talking about one god. We're talking about thousands of gods and an incorporation of all good ideas. So, you know, in terms of that's a good idea, and then we're going to see that, you know, hundreds of years later, people thought that that was a bad idea, and they replaced those bad ideas with what they thought were better ideas, and those became memorialized in what it means to be Hindu texts and be a Hindu. All right, where do we get the word Hindu from? So, we've got Indus River Valley Civilization. Does that sound familiar to anyone, that phrase? Anyone that may be familiar with the timeline song? I'm going to ask anybody, anybody, anybody, and I see right there. Yeah, give me, what do we fill in there for time? We've got everyone humming in their head, some people. So, what BC? All right, I apologize ahead of time for getting this song in your head. All right, I see. Who thinks it's 3,000? Who thinks it's 1,000? 3,000 wins, and it is correct. So, 3,000 BC of Indus River Valley Civilizations. You've got this Indus River, right, still around today, one of the longest rivers, not still around, but still named that, going, separating India and Pakistan, going up north. And so, you have this, the nomads coming down about 1500 BC and merging with the Indus Valley Civilization. And the name of the Indus River in Sanskrit, there's still people today that in India speak Sanskrit, but that is a language during that time. There are, the name of that river would be Sindhu. All right, so that's the name of the river. So, how do we get from Sindhu to Hindu? Well, the ancient Persian, so these are other people looking at these people across the river. They don't like S's, and they make them into H's. And so, they turn Sindhu into Hindu. All right, so this is how we are describing these people. Those people over there across the river, they're the Hindu people. Then the Greeks come, and then they're going to describe the Hindu people to the Greeks. Well, Greeks, do they like the H, right? So, they're more of adding I-A at the end, if you think about how countries are named. Even they, I think Russia would say Germania. There's a lot of countries that end with I-A, so that Greek ending to the end to make it that noun or that formal noun. We have dropping the H. So, what do we get if we drop the H in Hindu, and we add, instead of the U at the end, the I-A to the end? And that's where we get the country of India, a population of 1.4 billion people, right, today. Who knows the population of the United States today? Yeah, that's right. It's growing. About 333 million is what I saw the latest. And so, we could essentially, let me, 333 million goes into 1.4 billion, approximately four and a half. Yeah, so four and a half the United States could fit in terms of population in India, just to give an idea of the staggering difference in the population. We could talk a lot about India. We could talk about its struggles. The literacy rate is huge. It's about 25% in India. And so, there are people that speculate that India could be the next global power. And there are people that say, yeah, maybe not because there is a significant deficiency just in terms of being able to read, write, understand, and how that affects its growth. And then, in Psalms 115, if you guys remember Richie Goodrich showing us some slides, and we'll get into this, but in terms of how we reflect our gods, right, we, all of us, not just made in the image of God, but in terms of applying the teaching of God and in terms of holding fast to God's revelation and his word, not only do our lives be sanctified, but our lives around us should be sanctified, and that you can see something about what a person believes by just looking around them. What is their life like? How do they structure their life? And in terms of being in an environment like India, what is India like? What are they struggling with? And you remember, I don't know if you remember some of the pictures of garbage in India, and we'll get into that, but really staggering to me, in Psalms 115, it says that, you know, talking about the these false gods, your gods are made of gold and silver, and at the end of that, it says they have ears but do not hear, they have mouths but do not taste, they have noses but do not smell, right? And then at the end of that, it says that you will be essentially like your gods. That's how Psalms 115 ends. Yeah, a lot of them have a lot of arms, lots going on. So these are the three main symbols of Hinduism. Before I go on, any questions before I go on? Any thoughts about any of what we've talked about? All right, time's moving. These are the three main symbols. The first one would be this symbol with a three, OM, would be understood as the first three letters of Sanskrit, and that would be the first sound in their beliefs that happened in the universe. So the sound of OM, right? Where do we know that from or hear that? That's right. And so, you know, people unknowingly chanting OM, channeling, you know, the Hindu belief in how the universe got started. How do we believe the universe got started? Well, God revealed how that happened, and that's a pretty big difference there. And I'm going to go to the swastika. In Sanskrit, we've got the word swastika. If we separate that out, this is interesting, that you have su, and you've got asti, and su means good, asti means it really is. Ka makes everything a noun, so what that phrase is, is everything is good. The use of that has obviously changed significantly. Nazis took it, I think flipped it. Am I right about that? I think the Nazi symbol is flipped, but obviously when you look at that, you don't think everything is good. And the third symbol, probably the most important symbol, and you'll see this, has anybody seen this in Collin County, but the bindi. So this is, if we go back to Shiva, this is supposed to be the eye, a third eye, and the only woman that would wear a bindi would be women that are not married but will be married, so younger women, and women that are married. So these would be the two people in Indian Hindu culture that would be basically representative of the god Shiva, the consort, so like helpers of the god with a woman, and so it'd be a way, you know, we talked about Shiva opening that third eye and the whole world being destroyed, but it would be a way of saying, okay, instead of destroying the world, we have good energy, you're going to destroy all the bad things, so it's just like a woman that's powerful, has been blessed in marriage, or to be blessed in marriage, is going to wear this bindi, right? So this is the meaning behind that. All right, really quickly, we're going to move here, but the seven beliefs of Hinduism, there is one universal soul, brahman, source of all reality, like an ocean, you know, we are just drops in that ocean, in and out, in and out we go, in being reincarnated. Number two, that we have an immortal individual soul, an atman, and so what we are doing in this life is we're doing the best we can with a soul in this body, and then you will experience the next life transmigration, so that you will have, depending on how you do in this life, you will move into another body, your soul will up and move into another body. It could be another human body, you could be a lion, you could be a cat, you could be, you know, all sorts of animals, and so it's not just in terms of, you know, into your same kind. Karma, so what you do, right, affects where you're going to go, so if things are really hard on you now, your last body that you're in and your last actions have consequences, and what your hard life right now is probably a consequence of bad things you did in your last life, and all you can do is try and make your next life better. Moksha is this goal of Hindu life, if you can be free from the cycle of life and keep not coming back, and then you've achieved essentially moksha. Five, the Vedas are the sacred books, again, these change, we'll get into that, and then six, there is no beginning, there is no end, we keep cycling through. Each cycle is about 4.3 million years, and we are near the end of that, is their beliefs, so we're getting towards the end of a huge reset, so the goddess, the god Shiva is going to dance and destroy and open that third eye, and this is what is coming, right, and so, you know, as we interact with these people, this is their worldview, this is what's coming in terms of where we are in the cycle of time. Here's the seventh belief, and one that I want to spend a little bit of time on, but it's called dharma, it's how we're going to act. Everybody has their own dharma, their own set of dharma, lion's dharma is to kill animals, king's dharma is to rule well, human's dharma, based on their caste, is to do certain things, so this gets us into a really fascinating area of castes, probably one of the most interesting parts that I took away from this, but you have, and we'll get into the castes here shortly, but out of the Vedas, you've got between 500 and 800 BC, people begin to doubt the Vedas, and they start to, in their doubts, talk about things like yoga, taxation, why the Vedas are problematic, and those writings become incorporated as sacred texts as well, and this formation that your soul is essentially you, everything else is unreal and temporary, and then also this position that you can no longer move between castes. It used to be that you would come back, you may be at a lower caste, you did very well, and you can rise to a higher caste. Well, after this, you couldn't do that anymore, you're in your caste, you're not moving anywhere, you may come back in a better position in that caste, but an incredible control on the population in the castes. Well, you can see that may have rubbed people the wrong way, and one of the people that it rubbed the wrong way was Buddha. Buddha did not like this idea that you were stuck in your castes, and so we'll get into the contrast, but that's one of the main contrasts between Hinduism and Buddhism, is that you're not stuck in your castes. You can move between different castes. This is that picture of the garbage that we talked about, right? If nothing is real, if everything is temporary, then why take out the garbage? You know, why take out the garbage more than that? And so a very practical implication of a very fundamental belief in your worldview for everyday life. These are the four castes, okay? So we've got the priests, academics at the top, your rulers, your warriors, your farmers, your merchants, and then at the bottom, your manual laborers. So you've got the four written castes out of the Vedas, but there were people that were cleaning toilets, working with meat. There were people that were doing these undesirable jobs, and they created a caste for them called the untouchables. Even below it all, you're not even in a caste. You are an untouchable, and created an entire class of citizens in India called the untouchables, right? And so you've got the untouchables are going to stay the untouchables, right? You've got an incredibly sad division system here that is still in existence today of your castes. I'll get to you in terms of dating, in terms of marriage. You'll have dating websites that will look for people in their own castes, and then you'll have people at the end of their dating, a little blurb. I like, you know, walks on the beach. I like tennis, and I'm willing to marry somebody outside of my caste, right? They'll throw that in there. You're seeing that a little bit more and more post-90s. Yeah, Brian? So if you didn't hear Brian's point in terms of being made in the image of God, even incorporating that in terms of certain inalienable rights in the documents that founded this country, what influence does that have in our national identity? How does that influence in terms of upward mobility? You know, a very American idea that if you put your mind to something, you work hard, that you can achieve upward mobility. I mean, this is the great idea that, you know, the worst football team on a Saturday morning can win, right? And we find that to be very exciting and very American. Yes? They were very kind because we're up there. She said in their culture, that's what she told me. She said we have our leaders, our priests, our gods, gods, and then our educators. Interesting. You're at the top. Yeah. Buddha, traditional depiction of Buddha. So we're going to transition here with the time that we have left. So unlike Hinduism started by a single person around the 5th or 6th of BC, comes along, frees people of the caste system, many similarities, some differences with Hinduism. The story of Buddha, does anybody know the story? The life of, you know, in the upper caste, very rich, goes out as the story goes and he finds, you know, leaves at 29 and he sees for the first time a sick man and he sees an ascetic. He sees, oh, all sorts of people that he had been sheltered. Somebody that's suffering, that would be the sick man. All these people that normally in his day-to-day life with servants, he didn't see and he said, oh, I've been sheltered from all of this and I'm going to take off and I'm going to try and figure out what is this world all about. And so he goes and he pursues a being, just giving up everything, giving up all desires, starts to starve himself and he sits there and he becomes very disenfranchised with Hinduism and the teachings. And then he comes to a place where he realizes that starvation is not the answer. And that really the answer is finding that middle way, always finding that middle way, not too much, not too less. I mean, and so he is pursuing this middle way, sitting in front of this tree at the 49th day of sitting in front of this tree, being tempted by, you know, bad gods above, that he is able to stand up against the last temptation and then he achieves enlightenment because he withstands that last temptation, sitting in front of this tree and he becomes the enlightened one, which is a translation of the Buddha. Sounds like, I'm sorry. Yeah, right. Yeah, Joseph Smith had some good material to pick from. Symbols of Buddhism, you'll see they incorporated some of it, didn't have the foresight to get rid of the swastika. You've got the second one, third one. You may see some of these as tattoos. Anybody? Oh, you know, I'm going to go get a tattoo. This looks cool. Well, let's figure out where they come from. And, you know, if you've got this second symbol, the Dharma, so it's an incredibly important teaching in Buddhism, giving this eight paths, the right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right concentration, right mindfulness, and all not attached to the right god. A lot of overlap. All right, compare and contrast. Both started in India. They share concepts of reincarnation, karma, proper behavior, share common symbols, practices of meditation, yoga, different mantras that you would use. Some differences that we have is that Buddhism does not believe in a creator. Hindu does. There are gods that come down from time to time to help us. They're not eternal. Again, we talked about the differences in the caste system. We talked about the most notable difference is they reject this idea of the Atman, that you have a self, a soul that you continue to carry on through. No, instead, you really just merge in Buddhism back into, you know, just an energy or into nothingness. So, you don't have a personal identity in terms of your soul. And then the difference is in actual places of worship. Any questions on that? I know we're moving quickly. All right. Yeah, in the back. Riley. Yeah. Right. Oh, good question. I don't know. I don't know. I mean, that may be a way to climb the castes, but yeah, I don't know that. I mean, but that's a good question. You have to find somebody that'd be willing, right, to marry you that's in that higher caste. But that's a good question. Anybody know? Yeah. I don't know the answer to that question. I know that as Christian missionaries, they've struggled in the past for, you know, helping out the Dalit because of other castes. But, you know, you can't build houses for these people because you're ruining their karma because they're supposed to suffer. So, you know, there's a part of that real suffering that they're supposed to go through. And you're disrupting that by trying to help them and get them something, get them a house or something. In strong contrast, you know, why the suffering servant, why Christ and what he did and why he came and on the cross is so beautiful as we reflect on that. And as we share that with people is something that would be oftentimes in such contrast, how they think about, you know, what a leader is, somebody that you would follow. Dan. It's also an interesting side note that among in India, the major inroads that Christianity has made in the last several hundred years have really been with a low caste, but the high castes don't have it. They're willing to take in the idea, like you said, that's filling the bowl. They really Christ. Yes, we have a lot of gods. He's welcome here, too. But authentic Christianity seems to be something that only the downtrodden in India are interested in. Similar to another time and in Christ's ministry. Let's look at Dalai Lama briefly a part of this. I just want to mention that Dalai Lama is the spiritual leader of Tibet. And we won't go into that because of time, but just be aware of where he fits in it in terms of a worldview, you know, that. We've got this slide and we'll see this throughout this Sunday School series, just a good overview in terms of the structure of, you know, the main questions that everybody you talk to is going to be asking, where did I come from? You know, what's wrong? You don't have to live in this world too long to know something's wrong and then ask yourself, what's the solution? Now that I found the solution, what is my purpose? And then where are we going? I ran into somebody this week and the conversation was, you know, very Buddhist in terms of he would not affiliate himself with Buddhism, talking about, you know, continue to gather truth, continue to learn about truth. We're all just learning, learning, learning, learning. And then, you know, to share with those people, yes, but at the end there will be a resurrection. There is a resurrection coming. We have historical facts. We have the creation of the world. We have Christ coming on the cross, and there is a historical fact that is yet to come, which is a resurrection. That is coming. And the resurrection will be one of two things. It'll be to life or to judgment. Those are the two options. You're not coming back here and, you know, to share with these people our greatest truth. It is unkind to not share our greatest truth that there is going to be a resurrection of the dead and that they will have to account before a holy God, either that they are trusting in Christ or that they are trusting in themselves. And those will have two very different consequences, either to life, eternal life, or to eternal damnation, as we think back to our heaven and hell series. Thoughts, questions on this? Okay, that's with our remaining time. Not quite as successful as we hoped for in terms of time remaining. Let's just think through this. What I really want to think through, we are going to use yoga as the application, but don't get sidetracked. I want you to think about this in terms of whatever is going on in life. How do we think about things biblically? How do we think about how we spend our time biblically of what we are going to be doing? And so I would submit, you know, three good litmus questions, not mine, but as we look at the Bible, you know, just let's consider, first of all, what are we talking about? What is the origin of what we are talking about? Where did it come from? Let's define our terms. What are we talking about? And then how does it please or not please God, according to the Bible? How does it benefit our neighbor? So these are very fundamental questions. Where do we get this concept of pleasing God, pleasing our neighbor? Thou shalt love the Lord your God with all your and, right? And so we have in Matthew 22, right, this very strong admonition of what we are to do. What is sin? Sin is any lack of, right? So we think about that as this sin, right? So these are some of the questions that we are going to be thinking through together as we look at whatever it is in that underline there. In this case, yoga. So let's look at the definition of yoga. So first of all, a Hindu theistic philosophy, this is from Webster, teaching the suppression of all activity of body, mind, and will in order that the self may realize its distinction from them and attain liberation. So if I said, hey, let's go do yoga, what's that? Well, it's the suppression of all of our activity of our body, mind, and will in order that the self may realize its distinction and you can attain liberation. What are your thoughts on going to yoga with me? So that would probably be important, right? Here's a second, probably more than, there's a second definition. Read that one and what do you think? So here we have a system of physical postures. Are we against physical postures? We encourage physical postures. Are we against stretching techniques, breathing techniques? We encourage breathing constantly and, but derived from yoga. Okay. That's good to know that this is where it comes from. I often practice independently, especially in Western cultures to promote physical and emotional wellbeing. Do we want to promote those things? Yeah. So what do we mean? So this is a good place to start. This doesn't get us anywhere close to ending how we think vertically about life so that we can apply it horizontally. Look at some of the origins of it here in Walter Martin. Transcendental meditation started with a guy named Yogi, bring it to the United States. First, it was very religious. So he tried to water it down into a non-religious form in the seventies, designed to relieve stress. Like you can think about, you know, this being very appealing, bring peace to the inner man. And then I'm not quite sure how he got away with including in their astral projection, the soul, even the body and levitation, right? So you've got Johnny in the corner of yoga class, you know, really trying to knock yoga out of the park and, you know, trying to levitate and get out of his body. But, you know, in terms of just, if we look at, you know, doing the class very well, like what is doing this very well look like? How does it look like if I master this, right? So, you know, and again, you know, really the goal of yoga, according to Mr. Yogi, our founder is union with the creative intelligence. Be aware of that. You know, just let's be aware of that together. What about, well, before we get there, what about food offered to idols? Now, what do we know about that? What do we learn about that? Right? We're not allowed to eat that, right? That's not correct, right? Right. Because where did food originate from, right? So there's this idea that, you know, this is God's world. Pastor Mark preached in Titus to the pure. What did it say? All things are pure. We still need discretion, right, in how we choose what we do. But, you know, as we make these decisions, we all have a limited amount of time. I don't know about you guys, but as we make these decisions, our calling biblically, again, as parents, what are we trying to do with our kids? Like, okay, start here, and then that's going to influence here. Hey, look, start your day off. This is the day that the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it. How do we start our day off, you know, habitually ourselves in terms of remembering that this is not our world. This is not our day. This is not our body. You know, we're to steward these things, you know, that we are to go about our day with this fundamental truth starting here, and when we do that, then we are pleasing God, right? We think about Adam and Eve in the garden. Adam and Eve were without sin, and they were holy and happy, right? Isn't that what we know from the confession? Holy and happy. They're walking around holy and happy. Their lives are happy, and their lives are perfectly in line, vertically, pleasing the Lord. Holy and happy, walking around pleasing the Lord. What did sin do in the garden? What did sin distort? Pleasing God became pleasing ourselves, you know, so that you have this sin that just subtly changed being holy and happy, and we're to be pleasing God to putting myself at the center of the world and pleasing myself. These are going to be the temptations as we think through all of this. Is its aim to please God, or is its aim to please myself? Think about working out. You know, why do we work out? You know, have we thought about why do we brush our teeth? You know, well, if we wake up in the morning, thank you, Lord. This is the day that you've made. Thank you, Lord, for, you know, being able to be a good steward of my body. If you don't brush your teeth, your teeth are going to fall out. Those are your teeth for the rest of your life. You know, you are to care for them, and you are to look after them, and it's even not just, thank you, Lord, for this body and these teeth, but then to the people around me. What happens when you don't brush your teeth? Who wants to be around you? Right? Is that loving to the people around you? So thinking through, you know, not just to God, but then also is it loving to my neighbor? Now, when we look at one, two, and three, what if it benefits our neighbor, but number three, we can check the box there, but it doesn't please God, right? So do we go ahead and do it? Just as we begin to think through, no. So just because it benefits our neighbor, you know, that is not in any way dispositive. We've got number two, as we think about first, is it pleasing to God? Does it not please God? Is it sin? And then does it benefit our neighbors? So you know, as we think about the idea of reclaiming, we think about the idea of reforming, we think about, you know, again, the example of food offered to idols. We think about entitus this verse. We think about though, you know, all things are lawful, but not all things are helpful. So even, you know, when you may be able to answer yes to some of these, you know, how do we spend our time? These are just questions to maybe get you thinking about, you know, in terms of how we think about, you know, our choices and what we do. In no way sliding towards, you know, legalism, because is there anything when you think about pleasing somebody or, you know, God's pleasure in terms of your activity as somebody that is just following rules, wrote rules, and trying to check boxes? Like we're talking about a God that had a relation, that wants a relationship with each of you and throughout the day. And as we think about, you know, what we do, that that matters. We're at our time. I want to save a little bit of time, but for any of your thoughts on that, in terms of how we think through applying that and then going back to Buddhism and Hinduism, you know, to be aware, you know, that these thoughts are out there. You know, you're young people that as you get out there, that you're going to be surrounded by this. It's good to know where it comes from. And good to know that some of it is antithetical to what the Bible teaches about, you know, where we came from and where we're going. Any thoughts, any questions at all? Yeah, Josh. A Christian worldview? What some of those patterns were that attracted them towards a biblical mindset? I think, yeah, I did not come in that specific question, but if we're thinking through this together and thinking through the people that we may know, there's often an attraction to the fruit of something. And then what follows is, you know, looking at, as the expression goes, what are those rooted in? Right. And so, you know, I would think that that would be similar. So, you know, attracted to, even if it's as broad as, you know, things in the West, you know, like Japan's got a Christian wedding ceremony, you know, so there's some sort of affirmation of the biblical principle of marriage, that it is not just between two people at the government center, but it's between you two and a creator, right, in the high view of what marriage is. So I would think that that would also be, you know, something that would be attractive. Okay. All right. Well, let's end in prayer. Father in heaven, we give you thanks, Lord, for your word. We thank you, Lord, for this day of rest, where we can learn, where we can enjoy, where we can fellowship, and where we can be renewed in our minds. We pray your blessing on this day in Christ's name. Amen.
