Martial Arts and Yoga

Welcome to another edition of Theology Throwdown. This is episode number 35. We have had 35 throwdowns and nobody has died yet, so that's a good thing. We must be showing some love and charity in our disagreements here at the Christian Podcast Community.

Now, tonight's topic is martial arts and yoga. Well, this might be controversial for some, we'll see, but we have a lighter crew. This is the second time we've tried to do this, and last time we couldn't get too many folks to.

Show up. We have a number of people. A bunch of pacifists out there.

We're going to see, you know, some folks said they were going to come in, we hope they will, and so we're going to get started and see if they join us. But right now, I'll let the podcasters who are currently here introduce themselves and their podcast.

Start with Mr. Brewster. Go for it. And actually, in this case, we should do one other. For this episode, we should do this. Introduce yourself and your podcast, and then if you have a background in martial arts, what are those arts?

Which styles do you have a background in? So, we'll start with Mr. Brewster and then Keith Foskey. Keith. We were just talking Keith Foskey.

Before we went live. Keith. Go ahead, Aaron. All right. Well, for the totality of this episode, it must be Master Brewster, you know, the official accurate title. Is that what the N stands for? An AM Brewster?

That's right. Yes. Aaron, the Master Brewster. My name is Aaron, and I have two podcasts. One of them is called The Celebration of God, and Celebration of God is about the personal as well as corporate worship.

What does that look like? And how do we do it better this year than we did the previous year? We focus on the holidays and the everydays. We can worship God better and be more intentional on that. Then my other podcast, which I've come back to, actually having to take a short little break, really excited.

We are currently discussing biblical conflict resolution in my podcast Truth, Love, Parent, which is all about family and parenting primarily. And like I said, we have over 500 episodes there. So, really excited to continue on that ministry.

And those are both parts of a broader ministry that is called Evermind Ministries. And I just want to encourage people to check out the Evermind app. They can go to evermindministries .com, and there they can find out everything about Truth, Love, Parent, the Celebration of God, our counseling ministry called Faith Tree Biblical Counseling and Discipleship.

It's all there on that page, and it's all there in the app. Now, my history in the martial arts is sorted. It's broad and vast. We were just talking before we started rolling here that I'm coming up on 30 years of teaching the martial arts, over 30 years of studying the martial arts.

My first black belt was in Tang Sudo, and then I studied a number of different martial arts, including Kenpo and Aikido, with kickboxing, Taekwondo, and Jujitsu was in there, just a number of different styles.

Kung Fu was also in there until I landed on another martial art that I ended up getting a black belt in, and that was a Ninjutsu. And then I ended up studying another form, more of an Americanized, modernized Ninjutsu, where I eventually received a black belt in that and continued on in that.

And that's actually what I teach. I'm a fifth degree, technically that's a master level, fifth degree black belt in Tiger Ryu Ninjutsu. That is the one I've been doing now for quite a while and teaching in that.

And I've graduated, I think, close to 15 black belts since this most recent style. All right. So you're officially a ninja, just for the record. That is correct. Yes. By definition, I am technically a ninja.

Yes.

So, Keith Heltz, if you wouldn't mind introducing yourself and your podcast,.

And any background you have in martial arts. Yeah, this is Keith Heltz, lead, co-host of Quest for Truth. My co-host, Anthony Caldwell, usually can't make these. He's got a family life which draws him away.

But yeah, Quest for Truth, we like to dive into the Bible. Once a month, dig really deep and take our time going through scripture. Usually, though, we just kind of pick a topic. Sometimes we do something like a Sunday school lesson or devotional that we dig into and share ideas, what's truth in the Bible, because what's true in the Bible is also true in reality around us.

And that's kind of what we do there. We also do some other side things like audio dramas and that kind of thing. But that's getting to be a little more rare these days. It's harder to find people to respond to the casting calls that Nathan puts out.

But that's part of that. It gets more complicated. But when it comes to my background in karate, when I was a young teenager, I studied Muda Kwan Teng Sudo. And then later, I don't remember. I think it's I want to say Kempo, but it's more of like an Americanized version of karate.

Now, what level was I ever? Well, I don't remember about the second time I took karate. But in the Teng Sudo, you have 10 degrees from white belt to black. And black belt, you have 10 degrees of advancement there.

Well, I was up to about the third degree on the white belt. Okay, so there we go. This is my exciting high advancement in karate. But I have to say I always enjoyed it. I always got a lot out of the physical discipline of it.

And to me, it's all about exercise, you know, get out there sweating and having fun on the mat.

Yeah.

And the second time I took it, I also advanced about the same level about three degrees into it. So I'm not a high impact karate guy.

And Aaron, you mentioned rolling, but I don't think you meant it in the context of jiu jitsu earlier. So in karate, we would call it sparring. In jiu jitsu, we call it rolling. My name is Andrew Rapford.

I am the host of not only this podcast with all the many people from the Christian Podcast Community who join. I do recommend you to go to christianpodcastcommunity .org to check out all of our podcasts.

We have over 50. And any of them can join here. But this is smallest group we've done for a throwdown. But I do know a couple of folks that said they were going to come in. So we're hoping they will. I have two weekly podcasts.

I do Andrew Rapford's rap report. If you just search for rap with two Ps rap report, that is a weekly one hour podcast where we're dealing with biblical interpretations and applications for the Christian life.

Just finishing up a series on what is a pastor. Got a very important episode there coming out very shortly next week on how to encourage your pastor. So we got 10 episodes in that series. Very valuable.

I encourage you to check those out. My other podcast I do weekly is a two hour live stream on Thursday nights, 8 to 10 Eastern Time. You could go to apologeticslive .com to join that. But you can just follow Apologetics Live.

That is a podcast where we do training to do apologetics. Sometimes that appears because someone comes in and challenges me with a debate that I don't know I'm getting into debate. So that's always fun.

They're prepared. I'm not. I actually like that. That's kind of fun. But we do get that and you get to see how. Sometimes it's really fun when I stop someone from speaking and explain to the audience, the reason I'm asking this question is to expose that he doesn't know he's talking about.

Okay, continue. And he goes on to show that what I just said is true. Things like that is really funny. But Apologetics Live is another podcast I do. My background in martial arts, I started back in college, which was not that long ago.

Probably about 36 years ago, maybe. No, actually, probably like 38 years ago. When I started, I started in a style of karate. I then left that one ended up doing most of my karate background is in a style called Ishinryu.

It is a Okinawan style. And it is a little bit of grappling. It's called sticky hands, because you grab. The thing is that my sensei was fighting with the UFC when it was underground. When he got his second degree black belt, none of the fifth degrees wanted to spar with him.

He was a very scary individual when it came to martial arts. He was very good at what he did. But he did teach us a little bit of jujitsu defense. And I gravitated toward that. But at that time, there was no one teaching jujitsu really in America.

And then the Gracies came to New York. And so I have spent the last several years doing Brazilian jujitsu. And that's where my real love would be, given all of the martial arts. So with that, I think we've kind of given away that at least two of us have practiced recently, all three of us have practiced martial arts.

When we get to the question of do we think Christians can participate in martial arts? I think we've given away that answer. If you disagree with that answer, though, we are going to get to that. So I do ask that don't tune out because you just assume all martial arts are wrong.

If you think that all martial arts are based in an Eastern religion, I will dispel that myth very easily during the show. And that's actually going to be our first question that we're going to look to answer.

So the first question we have is, do all martial arts or is there an Eastern spiritual element to the martial arts? So Aaron, you have quite a bit of background in this. Do all martial arts have an Eastern mysticism or Eastern spirit, Eastern spirituality.

To them? And then can we separate those? So the first answer is no. We have to understand that the martial arts, okay, we use this term martial in many ways, even in English, outside of the martial arts.

It has to do with military. It has to do with armies. It has to do with hierarchy within those systems, even the title of being a martial, not like an old Western martial, but within the armed forces, things like that.

So the fighting happens everywhere that human beings have ever existed. In fact, later, I'm sure we're going to have an opportunity to talk about. That's one of the reasons that some Christians think that martial artists should not be involved in the martial arts is the fact that it does involve fighting.

Some people would even say violence and things like that. But since that is a universal thing, fighting hand-to-hand combat is not solely coming out of the East. And so the interesting thing about the martial arts, as most any martial artist can tell you, is the idea that it all primarily had to do with an empty fist.

It had to do with just fighting without a weapon. Obviously, many martial arts have weapons, but again, even that idea is not unique to Asia and to those Asian systems that came primarily out of Okinawa, China, Japan, Korea.

So no, not all of what would fall into the category of the martial arts is that. In fact, one of the ones that you mentioned, at least one of the ones you mentioned, is specifically not Eastern. It comes out of Brazil.

Correct. Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu,.

There's two styles of Jiu-Jitsu. There's Japanese Jiu-Jitsu and there's Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, which the Gracie family made very popular when they started the UFC Ultimate Fighting Championship, where they wanted to just test all the individual styles and Jiu-Jitsu, the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu won easily.

Now it's all mixed. People study all of them together.

Yeah, none of them are pure studying anything in particular. The second part of your question though is really important because we have to acknowledge the fact that yes, some martial arts from the very roots were intrinsically tied to a national belief system, a religion.

And so the question ends up being, can those things be detached? I would even ask, are they intrinsically tied? And the example that I used to use is I was in seminary and I was wearing my martial art bomber jacket from the Tang pseudo organization I had gotten my first black belt from.

And it had the name of the association on the back and it had a large red dragon as part of the emblem. And a guy tapped me on the shoulder, this was before class, and he asked me, what part does dragons and the martial arts play in the Christian's life?

And it was coming from the standpoint actually later in the conversation that these two things could not go together because from his standpoint, they grew out of Eastern mysticism. And I told him, I said, well, what's interesting is that in China, the green dragon is oftentimes used to picture Christ.

So first of all, dragons were real creatures that did in fact exist. The Bible talks about them.

And second of all We know them as dinosaurs.

Yeah, exactly. The Asian cultures don't just get the market cornered on dragons, but beyond the dragon and specifically the martial art, when you think about China, Japan, and Korea, the three main places that most of the martial arts we're familiar with have come from, let's focus in on China.

Literally everything that people group did in the ancient times was intrinsically tied to their religion. The example I love to use the most is their tea, how they grew their tea, how they steeped their tea, how they served their tea, how they enjoyed their tea was all very symbolic and very closely tied to their belief system.

Does that mean that we as humans shouldn't, sorry, as humans, as Christians in America, that we shouldn't drink tea or that we shouldn't drink Chinese teas or we shouldn't drink Chinese teas from Chinese mugs?

And the obvious answer is, I think nearly every Christian listening right now would agree that, well, no, drinking tea is not inherently the problem. So what is the difference between drinking an Asian tea that has significant roots in their belief system versus using a form of self-defense that has significant roots in a belief system?

But I'll be quiet there and let.

Someone else take over. Yeah, that's an interesting thing that I never really thought about with the tea, but yeah, you're right. There is a lot that I didn't think about. Keith, what are your thoughts?

Well, of course, the martial and martial arts means military. Broadly, it doesn't only limit itself to what we know as the Asian martial arts, because certainly the American military does train people in hand-to-hand combat, and it only vaguely resembles what we call martial arts, but it's still very effective.

But what I understood with the martial arts, especially like the karate, the open hand, the foot, or whatever, a lot of it originated not from the Asian armies, per se, is that these Buddhist priests, because they're religious or pacifists, they were always being raided, their temples destroyed, their treasures being taken, and they developed this form of movements that they could fight back without fighting back.

They would use their oversized opponent's speed of energy and strength against them, and you end up with things like judo, where you have flips, and you have different karate moves where you, as someone's trying to punch or kick, you can block in a way to use their momentum against them.

A lot of that comes from there, or that's my understanding of it. You guys maybe know.

More than that. Yeah, I mean, I think I mentioned already, the Brazilian jiu-jitsu came out of Brazil, not the East. You have the Israeli martial art, which is not from the East. There's a style, I forget what it is, in I think South America, where they use the form of dance because it was illegal to train.

The government wouldn't let people train to defend themselves, so they... You're talking about Taipawea? That's it, yes. So, it was a dance style. So, it's very pretty. That's a very, you know...

I can see how the choreography of the dance is very much like the kata that most martial arts.

Will have various forms of the kata. And for folks that don't know, kata means form, and it's putting the moves together. It's training your muscle memory so you know.

How to precisely move your body through the motions. Because perfect training means perfect in practice, or as backwards, perfect practice is perfect performance.

Yeah, the way that I always teach the students would be that practice makes permanent. Yeah. Practice makes perfect because if you will...

You need a perfect practice to make that permanent. But if you're sloppy in your practice, you're going to have a sloppy form, but you'll be no good.

Yeah. If you keep practicing bad form, you're going to...

Permanently be in bad form.

Perfectly bad.

Yes. And so, I think that as far as the separation, I think that in America, there was a lot of... I mean, there are some places still that have a lot of the Eastern spiritualism in some of the karate styles.

I saw that in some of the early ones that I used to do, and that's why I steered away from them. But there were some where they tried to separate that. But really now, when we have mixed martial arts, which is what a lot of places are doing, there's not one style being taught sometimes.

They're multiple, even within the same school. I mean, at our school, we had the Brazilian jiu-jitsu, we had wrestling, we had kickboxing, all being taught at the same place. Sometimes you'll see other karate styles, and they're all being taught.

So, that mixture kind of breaks up any kind of Eastern mysticism or.

Eastern spirituality that would be involved. A lot of that, though, is just a hangover from the fact that technically the martial arts within America is a relatively new thing. Let's be honest, we're a young country as it is.

Martial arts started creeping over here as early as the late 1800s, but they didn't even become popular in mainstream really until Bruce Lee. That's just... I mean, he's the guy who really brought it to the forefront.

And so, that's not that many decades ago, all right? I think all of us were alive at some point when Bruce Lee was alive. But so, when the martial arts schools, the karate schools were popping up all over the United States, specifically in the 80s and the 90s, when we were going out, my family and I being a homeschooler, we wanted to kind of look for a PE credit, and we decided as a family to study the martial arts.

We did have to check out a number of schools to see if they were actually teaching the Eastern mysticism as part of the curriculum. And there were a number of them that and that number was starting to diminish back then.

But that was kind of the stigma, especially back then, growing up as an independent fundamental Baptist, who we were pros, champs at separating from anything and everyone. That idea of wanting to separate ourselves from the world and being very careful what influences were in there was huge.

And at that time in the martial arts history in America, that was still a big part of it. But you're right. It's actually really, really, really hard to find a martial arts studio these days in America that emphasizes the mysticism in any way, shape or form.

And I think that a lot of times for Christians who aren't in the culture, who aren't in the martial arts, they don't realize that. They kind of just assume that nothing has changed and that it's still as big of a quote unquote threat as it was before.

And so, okay, so I think we could establish that easier with martial arts. Now let's switch over with the same question for yoga. Is there Eastern spiritual elements in the yoga? And let me just read Rebecca from One Little Candle.

Couldn't be here, she's under the weather. But she said, by the way, yoga, absolutely not. Taekwondo, thumbs up. My oldest son got his black belt when he was 10. Taekwondo is really good for him as far as teaching him self-control.

But she says, yoga, bad. So let's get into yoga with the same question. Keith, I'll start with you this time.

Yeah, I think yoga definitely is something that still does have a lot of mysticism tied to it. I think it would be hard to deny that. But can you separate the physical part of it? I think it would be possible.

I'm sure people would disagree with that. But just like with karate, it's all about, like I said, self-discipline, self-control, you know, mastering your body and movements. I don't know a lot about yoga, I'll have to honestly say.

But it seems to be a lot of stretching, a lot of posing, a lot of isometric. And if you just take that, because if they say, well, it's all about the chance. Well, if I never learned the chance, I don't even know what the chance would be.

And I just look at a picture of somebody doing whatever pose they're in. If I copy the physicality of it, I don't see how that would be getting involved with the mysticism. Although, again, the mysticism, if you're into the full gamut, I can see how people would do that.

And I don't understand why somebody would want to do the mystical part.

Aaron? Okay. So we always want to disagree in love, right? We want to speak truth and love. And that's easy to do to a certain degree with individuals with whom we interact on this show. Sometimes, though, it can be a little bit easier to take potshots at people outside the show who can't defend themselves.

We may be not as charitable. But I do want to say right off from the bat that the individuals I'm about to allude to are individuals that I absolutely love. Mama Bear Apologetics is fantastic. Hilary Morgan Ferrer, who's the chief Mama Bear, she and I have a very fantastic working relationship.

I've read her books. I've promoted her on my show, Truth, Love, Parent. She has been a blessing. Again, her books are absolutely amazing. However, just recently, they had a focus on yoga. And they have a number of articles that I believe also were put in a podcast form that list out significant.

They talk about yoga in great detail. Then they also discuss, they kind of go with the format that they do as an apologetics ministry. They have a format to teach mothers in particular how to really grapple with information.

And so they try to teach them the truth. They try to teach them the lies. They talk about kind of a chewing and spit method where you're taking what's good and you're throwing out the bad. But when it comes to yoga, they really do take a stance against it.

And one of the main reasons that they take a stance against it is the fact that they don't believe that you can really separate yoga from Hinduism. Now, I'm obviously not going to do a fantastic job encapsulating their beliefs.

I do not agree with them. But I do want to say that if you're listening and you're interested to hear what somebody would argue on the other side of it, you could definitely go to MamaBearApologetics .com or just search Google Mama Bear Yoga and you'll find those articles very easily.

And as you're reading them, you will see things where they talk specifically about the name, like yoga having to do with a yolking between two things. And they talk about how the actual movements were supposedly integral to the actual worship in Hinduism.

Now, this is where I push back a little bit. Again, I love these women. I love the work they're doing. But sometimes I think we give Satan too much credit. All right. And what I mean by that is this. The argument that to do a downward dog or that's the one yoga position that everyone's familiar with because it's just a ridiculous name.

But to do any of these motions that you intrinsically are somehow making, you are participating in the worship of a false deity or that you are intrinsically opening yourself up to some type of demonic influence is not true.

As Christians, we know that we cannot, we have that demonic influence not in possession. It's not something that we have a concern about. Second of all, I just point to Paul's arguments for the meat offered to idols.

That meat, the reason that Christians with very sensitive consciences back then did not want to eat the meat offered to idols is the fact that that meat was used in the actual worship of these false gods.

It'd be put onto these altars and it would be cooked up, but then they would take that cooked meat and they would sell it sometimes in the temple, sometimes in the markets. And the Christians didn't want to have anything to do with it because it was part of that.

Well, what did Paul say? Paul said the gods, that those gods that they're worshiping aren't a thing. They're not real. You can feel free to eat the meat offered to idols. Now he said, yes, he also said the opposite side, you know, we don't want to make our brothers to offend, right?

We don't want to be stumbling blocks. So if somebody is going to foolishly and ignorantly see what you're doing and then go against their own conscience and to partake in this, then that would be an unloving thing to do.

And so we, all three of us here today would definitely want to say to you, don't do yoga or study the martial arts if it goes against your conscience. But the reality was, as Paul said those things, he was also saying, you can eat meat offered to idols.

It is okay. And so, you know, a yoga practitioner would take a stance that it was a bowing or a part of the worship in that religion. But the reality is, if that particular stance has good toning, isometrics, if it has a good stretching element to it, then there is nothing inherently wrong with taking that posture for the health benefits afforded by it because that supposed god doesn't exist.

And we aren't doing it for those reasons. We are doing it for the benefits of the position. So I do believe that the two things are 100 separable.

Well, I know if I was to strike a yoga pose where I had to assume a lotus position, the agony that I'll be going through as I put one foot up on the other knee might not be a chant, but there would be some awkward noises coming out of my mouth.

Yeah, religious experience for sure. I will say this. I did yoga once back when I was in college in ROTC. And we had one of the resident assistants in the dorms. He did yoga. He was also black belt in karate, second degree.

And we were military. So we were doing lots of exercising. And one of the guys, I don't know how it happened, made a challenge. He would come out and do RPT with us, which was, you know, run two miles in, I think it was 12 minutes and do 75 pushups in two minutes and do 75 sit-ups in two minutes.

And so he did that with us, but we all had to go and do a yoga class that he was going to do, that he would lead. And it was kind of funny because the biggest guy out of all of us was, you know, running out of the room, getting sick because he couldn't handle the yoga.

It is good for stretching. I will say that, but I think that there's a difference between yoga and martial arts. I think martial arts has separated that spiritual aspect of it from the art itself. And so you could do karate without having that spirituality part of it.

I think yoga is often still very closely tied to it. Now, there's some who would say that you cannot separate them. If people want to go do stretching, do stretching, call it stretching. Don't call it yoga.

But I know that there's a lot of people do yoga for the stretching element, for the health benefits, very similar to why people did karate or any of the others, whether it be for self-defense or for exercise.

And so I understand that. But I think that yoga still has too much ties to the Eastern spirituality for Christians to be able to do this. Now, let me say this. I have to be full disclosure here. There is a group called Holy Yoga, where they tried to take the yoga and replace the Eastern spirituality with Christianity and try to bring that into it and make it something of evangelism.

I'm not a big fan of that. Now, full disclosure, I went to a church where the preaching pastor was on the board at Holy Yoga. Therefore, I know that triggers people. So let me just say, I mean, he and I disagreed on it, but we could still worship together.

But the issue, you know, I understand his perspective. He got on the board because, well, he and his wife were missionaries in India. His wife would do the yoga for stretching. She would try to use it as an evangelism.

But he discovered that many of the instructors were not Christian. In fact, many of them were homosexuals, not many, but some. And he got on the board to make it more of an evangelistic ministry. And so the purpose of it was to specifically, you know, get rid of those who weren't saved, get rid of those who are practicing sin, like homosexuality, and make it evangelistic.

Now, he did get off the board, and full disclosure here, you know, he got off the board because they were growing in the government, realized that they were making a lot of money. They were not a really functioning as a nonprofit.

And so they had to make a decision, either the nonprofit was going to be over the for-profit business, which kept the accountability and kept the board in, you know, over that, or the for-profit business would be over the nonprofit.

And therefore the for-profit, which doesn't have the same accountability as a nonprofit, would be able to do what they want there with less controls. They ended up going the latter way. He resigned immediately, along with I think most of the board, because he felt that it was no longer a ministry, it was a business.

And so I do have some familiarity with what's called holy yoga. That being said, I still don't see, I have a hard time when you have these positions that are very in tuned with Hinduism and the mantras that they have.

I think that, I personally think it's very problematic. Now, could you get to a point in many years from now where yoga is just seen as stretching and it doesn't have a spiritual aspect to it? Maybe. I'm going to.

Argue that it actually is there. I will argue that. And in part, because almost 10 years ago now, my kids and I got a game for our Wii and it was a game that involved a bunch of different exercises, tons of exercises you could do.

It was called stay fit, or I don't remember actually what it's called, but they actually had a section about yoga and you were able to do the poses following your little me character up on the screen.

And it had zero to do with anything. It was a hundred percent based off of balance because that particular, the technology used a balance board that you would do it with. And it was all about holding that balance.

And I taught at a PE curriculum. The kids did yoga for a semester or something like that. And it was all about the stretching. It was all about the balance. It was all about the control of the body. So that, again, I can't say specifically, I've not done hot yoga.

I've not done goat yoga. I've not done holy yoga. So I don't know what the majority of the yoga places are doing out there. But I, from, I think that from a cultural perspective, the vast majority of people I know who've done it and interacted with it, there, there wasn't that spiritual emphasis at all.

Yeah. And see, that's where I may change my view. If that becomes, if that becomes dominant, like it did with, with karate, for example, because karate, there was a spiritual element.

To it, to some of them. And I do want to, I do want to push back a little bit on something you said earlier, because as a, as a Christian martial artist who I actually teach all of, all of my Christian, my, my martial arts teaching has happened within the context of Christian organizations.

I taught at the Christian school I was in. There's a, there's a friend of mine that I'm going to go be seeing him in Jacksonville later this year. And his church has a karate program at a karate camp.

How did you get to meet that guy? You introduced me. I'm so glad you did. It's been life-changing for me,.

But I, for the record, I said, there's a guy that you're going to meet that you will, he's the guy you would least likely believe does karate. And you're going to get along well with him. Is it just the Peters?

No, not just the Peters. It's actually Keith Swalsky. Maybe you'll know him from his humorous.

Interdenominational videos. But he is absolutely fantastic. I love the guy to death.

You guys, you guys have the karate background. You also both have the professional magician.

Background, which I knew. We have a lot of scary things in common. I I'm pretty sure we were separated by birth. He was born a couple of months before I was, but I I'm pretty sure we were twins. His mom and my mom don't know that, but we know.

Yeah. Yeah. You're twins. Uh-huh. Pick a picture. Identical. Uh-huh. Paternal paternal. It's okay. I'm sorry. Front turtle. That's what I meant to say.

There was a podcaster of the CPC early on that wasn't crowded. Is this the guy you're talking.

About or someone else? I don't think so. I think no, no, no. Yeah. Either way I bring all that up just to say that as a Christian martial artist, I teach the martial arts from a Christian perspective.

Uh, the martial arts are very famous for like, you're memorizing things in the, in Japanese or in Chinese or in Korean, uh, different names or whatever else. But in my martial arts, where we are studying versus we are learning truths from the scriptures.

Uh, and we are applying it because the, for the longest time, one of the reasons that Christians ran away from the martial arts was they were always trying to find this way to harmonize and unify the mind the body and the spirit.

And that all just sounded very mystical to Christians. But the reality is if there are any people on the entire globe who should be unified in our mind, body, and spirit, it should be Christians. Guys, everything should be spiritual when he go.