There's no harm in any of the beliefs held by MISA students/disciples/sympathizers/what ever they are called this year.
There's no harm in them believing the things they believe since they are nice people and aren't hurting anyone.
There's no harm in them believing silly things without good basis.
Etc are heard left and right from nice old ladies in Herculane and Costineşti around the time of the MISA camps. Plus the eventual outbreak of Orthodox pride specific to Romanian Orthodox believers, especially if they are of a certain generation and of a certain age, nameley: they can do what ever they want during these gatherings because it looks inoffensive enough to me, but only if it is according to the bible. If not they can go to hell.
Well maybe they won't express it in these exact words, but something like that.
This has become the dominant attitude towards MISA in the last couple of years. Which (in my opinion also) is a huge step forward from the crazy and unsubstantiated judgments that were given out also left-and-right after the whole media scandal in 2004.
Don't get me wrong there is still plenty of things wrong with MISA as a belief system and as a group, but I'd still rather have a well documented and rationed set of objections to them instead of "I heard something along the lines of ..." (insert something that scares my insecure little ego here, and why I feel the need to defend it with vehement religious fundamentalism even though I don't really practice any of the beliefs of my religion in my day-to-day life and/or with vehement nationalism that I also don't practice if I meet a nice foreign national that is willing to talk to me nicely and/or give me money).
What the outsider usually doesn't know about the actual beliefs held by MISA students, (most of them held only after a sufficient amount of time and after the sufficient amount of brain washing teaching was done) are far from the common man's Orthodoxy.
The attitude in MISA towards religions and god is about as follows:
All religions are correct and the good yogi practices something from every religion he/she has heard of, precisely because of the fundamental MISA philosophy of never ask rational questions and never-ever criticize what you hear, and so believe every claim that comes your way.
Add to this the other ever popular MISA practice of selecting only specific things out of each tradition, namely the one's they personally like, or the one's that were deemed good by Gregorian "only a yoga teacher, but who is literally worshiped as a guru of authentic yogic tradition by his followers in no absence allowed ever-ever groups" Bivoalru.
This of course results in a plethora of crazy, and in front of which the MISA student faces two options: he/she either goes along and starts believing every silly thing that he/she ever hears from now on, without question, or (and this is usually the rout taken by the more intelligent students, with more education) he/she refines the idea of god to the level of barely existent and usually a form of vague pantheism.
Now this is far from the belief of the common Romanian citizen, but that of course is also seen as a good thing, because in the cult the common man, the common believer, is seen as someone who doesn't have the spiritual insight and good karma to have access to the more refined (or with MISA lingo subtle) aspects of god.
So in the end the concept of god is reduced to a vague idea and feeling and that the believers think is beyond scrutiny. Well it's still not.
Sorry but no matter how strongly you believe in it, no matter how strongly you feel [sic!] all the wonderful spiritual states that are transmitted with simple or triple occult power by some old guy, or how abstract and un-testable you try to make your claims about this idea of god (that is still one god and hence is still perfectly compatible with the Christian religion of the yoga student, but that also includes manifestation's of god [sic!] in the form of various Hindu gods and goddesses) it still can be criticized.
Sorry but no matter how strongly you believe in it, no matter how strongly you feel [sic!] all the wonderful spiritual states that are transmitted with simple or triple occult power by some old guy, or how abstract and un-testable you try to make your claims about this idea of god (that is still one god and hence is still perfectly compatible with the Christian religion of the yoga student, but that also includes manifestation's of god [sic!] in the form of various Hindu gods and goddesses) it still can be criticized.
This especially in newage circles (of which MISA is a part of) is used in combination with the (fallacious) argument that goes something like this:
but there are scientist who believe in god as well.
Science proves that there is god.
There are questions that science can't answer (and questions that science can't even ask in the opinion of these people).
And so only spirituality (and only my version of it, not those embarrassing suicide bombers or Jehovah's witnesses or the evil Freemasonic/reptilian Catholic church) as I define it holds the answers to these questions that are (of course) much more important then silly questions science tries to answer with actual experimentation and research like: is there such a thing as a Higgs boson or how could we make a working neural net or a quantum computer or how could we use genetics to feed the starving hundreds of millions of people in the so called third world or how could we colonize the Solar System all the way to the last (eight!) planet Neptune.
Well to these type of arguments I say read this article. And don't forget to keep the exact same amount of open mind that you expect to get for your claims of the supernatural.
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