Onle Have Seen It Twice (Speaking In Tongues)

[Antlerman]

After accepting Christ in 1980, I was part of a Bible study for a yr and we went to this church somewhere outside youngstown OH. All the people in the Bible study would praise this pastor sister judy. I went ONCE to this place and she asked anyone who had any issues to come down front. I went and my issue (she did not ask what the specific issues were, she placed her hand on you head and told you). She is placing her hands on all these people and telling them what they are praying for and they are praising jesus up and down. My prayer was that my wisdom teeth would be fine and she comes and lays her hand on my head and says I am praying to be a better witness. NOPE!

They key is maybe you really were, but just didn't know it.

[antix]

After accepting Christ in 1980, I was part of a Bible study for a yr and we went to this church somewhere outside youngstown OH. All the people in the Bible study would praise this pastor sister judy. I went ONCE to this place and she asked anyone who had any issues to come down front. I went and my issue (she did not ask what the specific issues were, she placed her hand on you head and told you). She is placing her hands on all these people and telling them what they are praying for and they are praising jesus up and down. My prayer was that my wisdom teeth would be fine and she comes and lays her hand on my head and says I am praying to be a better witness. NOPE!

They key is maybe you really were, but just didn't know it.

 

 

That is typical christian thought.

[Antlerman]

After accepting Christ in 1980, I was part of a Bible study for a yr and we went to this church somewhere outside youngstown OH. All the people in the Bible study would praise this pastor sister judy. I went ONCE to this place and she asked anyone who had any issues to come down front. I went and my issue (she did not ask what the specific issues were, she placed her hand on you head and told you). She is placing her hands on all these people and telling them what they are praying for and they are praising jesus up and down. My prayer was that my wisdom teeth would be fine and she comes and lays her hand on my head and says I am praying to be a better witness. NOPE!

They key is maybe you really were, but just didn't know it.

 

 

That is typical christian thought.

It's typical hucksterism. Snake oil salesmen.

[xandermac]

I know I've posted this before but it's my favorite...

[antix]

Another thing that amazes me about these churches where people speak in tongues is that the people who belong to the church let the church control their lives.

[antix]

Another thing I noticed: Some people THINK they have a disease and at the healing service they get cured.

[Antlerman]

Another thing that amazes me about these churches where people speak in tongues is that the people who belong to the church let the church control their lives.

They are looking for answers outside themselves.

[Sheldon]

Sometimes I wonder what causes this, now that I don't believe, I was raised in Assembly of God churches until about 12 years old, before switching to Southern Baptist, then giving up the faith entirely about 2 years ago.

 

I spoke in tongues once publicly, and would do so often to several years in private prayer.

 

Is it just rambling the mind creates to say because you want so bad to participate in this?

 

Someone mentioned that some of it almost sounds like Hebrew or Arabic, but doesn't make any sense in those languages, I've noticed similar sounds myself when I was part of it....

[Ouroboros]

So we have all at least seen speaking in tongues. Now the next question, how many have seen the gift of healing

Never. I spent 10+ years in a "miracle" church and went to church meetings twice a week (Thursday night and Sunday morning). And we had Monday evening prayer meetings and Saturday morning prayer and on and on... I wanted sooooo badly to see a real miracle and not just the reports of someone being "healed" from the flu (yeah, it usually takes a week, it's a miracle that it only took a week, whoopdedoo!).

 

I was even working as an usher and a "receiver" (the guy standing behind those who are prayed for and fall under the "influence of the spirit.") So I was on first-row-and-center and did not, never, ever see one single miracle... No cripple walking. No amputee growing arms and legs. Nothing. Once in a while we heard about some person with cancer where the cancer was on remission. Well... eh, unfortunately, I heard that from some unbelievers as well... it does actually happen naturally on occasion.

[Ouroboros]

Another thing I noticed: Some people THINK they have a disease and at the healing service they get cured.

And there's some support that people can "think" themselves to health. Just by wanting it, you change behavior, diet, etc.

[Akheia]

@Sheldon: Frankly, I think it's the power of suggestion. NOBODY comes up with tongues without having been exposed to it, usually at length, by others doing it. That it sounds vaguely Hebrew/Arabic is likely due to the people doing it thinking that those are languages that God likes (since he concentrated on that area) and having heard their models doing it that way. Just as furries almost never choose "fursonas" based on the less-glamorous dung beetles and fruitflies of the world, tongues-speakers rarely come out with stuff that sounds like French, Finnish, or Early English. And despite tongues in Acts being actual languages used to actually communicate with the foreigners who were in town at the time, you're right--it's also never real language and usually it's done around the same crowd of regulars every week.

 

Put that power of suggestion into a box made of euphoric catharsis, and look what happens.

 

Many times, dozens of times at least, I have felt the exact same "bubbling up of the spirit" that I felt the one time I spoke in tongues, but all of these were in circumstances that were diametrically opposed to anything Christian. I can say categorically that there was no way in hell Jesus was involved.

 

The language part of glossolalia is fake, through and through. The emotion behind it is real but not certainly not intrinsically or specifically Christian.

[Antlerman]

@Sheldon: Frankly, I think it's the power of suggestion. NOBODY comes up with tongues without having been exposed to it, usually at length, by others doing it.

Going back in history before all these modern churches, and even before Christianity itself, tongues was and is still around in religions around the world. If it's all 100% suggestion, how did the first instance of it occur for others to them imitate? If that occurred spontaneously, which I think is a fair bet to assume, then what is the cause of it? And if that cause exists for them, cannot that same cause exist for others?

 

I'm not of course suggesting anything like the mythologies suggest of possession from external spirits that take over your tongue, be those dead ancestors or the Holy Ghost. I don't believe that myself. However, I do believe that it's not just only the power of suggestion, that it's not just imitation that is going on in the phenomena of glossolalia. I'll accept that in group settings having others around you doing it 'teaches' others who haven't don't it how to do it, in a sense. Now none of it is just one thing, and certainty you have those who mimic it to fit into the group. But what it really is is sort of learning to let yourself fall into these states of consciousness that non-linguistic vocalizations occur.

 

They actually serve a purpose within religious experience as part of those altered states of consciousness. Of course they aren't 'miracle' tongues, but at the same time they aren't necessarily 'fake' either. They are a thing in themselves, as part of ecstatic experience. Why do we see them in religions around the world? What function do they serve for them?

 

And despite tongues in Acts being actual languages used to actually communicate with the foreigners who were in town at the time, you're right--it's also never real language and usually it's done around the same crowd of regulars every week.

When I read Acts story of people hearing their own languages being spoken, I hear Luke creating a myth that speaks of a real phenomena that was occurring in Christian churches and tries to place it in a sort of origin myth on the day of Pentecost. Perhaps there was a group of earlier Christians that loosely resembled what Luke described in Acts 2, but that they were understood as real languages I doubt. It is clear though that early Christians in fact did use glossolalia at least in various areas.

 

Many times, dozens of times at least, I have felt the exact same "bubbling up of the spirit" that I felt the one time I spoke in tongues, but all of these were in circumstances that were diametrically opposed to anything Christian.

Bingo. What is that? What is that 'bubbling up'? I completely agree that that phenomenon is definitely not a Christian only thing. It is part of religious ecstatic experience which deepens altered states of consciousness. It serves the same function as chanting mantras, the same words over and over and over and over again, which moves the mind away from the linguist centers of reason and concrete forms in the brain, into the non-linguistic centers where images appear in flashes and impressions and senses. It moves the practitioner into the subconscious mind where they are able to experience themselves freed from the mundane, into the parts of the mind that sees and experiences the world in less concrete forms.

 

Glossolalia is allowing the physical body something to do vocally that allows the mind to move into these states. That's its function and role. It's not a miracle language of angels. Those are myths to talk about what is in fact a real experience of the practitioner. That people 'imitate' it, or that there is a power of suggestion going on, I'd say has some validity, but more in the sense that by example it shows other 'how to do it'. In other words, it's like instructing others how to enter altered states through a guided meditation. "You are moving into an open field and your mind is still and calm as water...". These are tools, means, aides, to guide individuals into these states of consciousness. The real thing however is not the means or tools, such as tongues, but what is encountered in themselves in those states. That's the real question.

 

Make sense?

[Akheia]

AM - I agree that there is a tradition of myth around languages. They've always been a bit of a mystery to the ancient world, haven't they? From the Tower of Babel to the Infilling at Pentecost, people have demonstrated their sense of wonder about language. Most of the supposed "miracles" attributed to Christ were things that every god was expected to be able to do--water into wine, walking on water, being born of a virgin, etc. Speaking in tongues? I bet if you hunted for a short while you'd discover that this "miracle" wasn't particularly new or original to Christianity. I do not in any way accept that the events of Acts 2 are an accurate historical account, incidentally, so I don't actually think anybody spoke in recognizable languages at that time or any other before or since. I'm open to the extraordinary proof that'd be required to change my mind, but believe me I've looked already and haven't seen any!

 

As I began making sense of my participation in fundamentalism, you can expect I thought a lot about just what had happened when I spoke in tongues. I see absolutely positively nothing about how it is practiced in churches that suggests it's anything but mimicry leading people into that "bubbling" state. I've never once heard of anybody who just erupted into tongues without having first been exposed to it, and I never once heard anybody babbling in syllables that suggested any language outside of the Hebrew/Arabic tree.

 

I'm not sure I'd call it a trance in all cases, but definitely it's cathartic and ecstatic, a sort of performance ritual like a drum circle. And the fundies I knew used it as a yardstick to gauge how "in" they were with the Big J. If you spoke in tongues at every service, you were IN. If you didn't, people doubted your sincerity and even your salvation. To me looking back at it years later, I see that the people who managed the stunt weren't particularly devout or even more moral than the other folks. What they were however is far more suggestible and gullible. And they didn't really learn a goddamned thing from participating in this cathartic ritual. They never got any particularly amazing spiritual insight and continued on their muddled ways unchanged but for a happy fuzzy feeling that they had touched the divine. So it is difficult for me to square your kind and generous characterization of glossolalia with what I saw practiced by fundies.

 

There may be some culture or faith system that practices some similar ecstasy, and they may indeed fall closer to what you're describing as a legitimate path to awakening or understanding. But not the fundies I knew. Like you said earlier (that was you, right?), they were like little children playing dress-up with rituals trying to be like Mommy and Daddy. The feelings, that ecstasy, that bubbling up, that is perfectly legit. But I don't think fundamentalists really understand what to do with those feelings and so came up with this cathartic ritual to express them. Maybe the first fundie began at Azusa Street with a simple singsong chant and everybody else joined in, who knows. Chicken or egg, seriously.

[Antlerman]

AM - I agree that there is a tradition of myth around languages. They've always been a bit of a mystery to the ancient world, haven't they? From the Tower of Babel to the Infilling at Pentecost, people have demonstrated their sense of wonder about language.

The myth I was referring to was specifically around the phenomenon of ecstatic speech called speaking in tongues. One culture calls in the Holy Ghost filling you and taking control, another some other god, or an ancestor or something. In other words its a religious experience, and people take these sorts of experiences and try to put some context of understanding around them, and they use myth in this case.

 

Speaking in tongues? I bet if you hunted for a short while you'd discover that this "miracle" wasn't particularly new or original to Christianity.

I most definitely know this. That's what I was talking about. Plato who lived 400 BC mentions it. Just a quick search reveals this anti-tongues preacher blathering on ignorantly about it in his mythic context, but he does reference the known occurrences of it prior to and outside Christianity: http://www.dividedby...g/FD/sitnnc.htm

 

As I began making sense of my participation in fundamentalism, you can expect I thought a lot about just what had happened when I spoke in tongues. I see absolutely positively nothing about how it is practiced in churches that suggests it's anything but mimicry leading people into that "bubbling" state. I've never once heard of anybody who just erupted into tongues without having first been exposed to it

I have. I know one woman who practiced meditation and was not part of any Charismatic church where everyone does this in the congregation. She was some average mainstream Lutheran woman who started practicing meditation for pain issues, which practice of contemplation led to her having very direct spiritual experiences for her. To her own astonishment, one day it just started happening. She had never done that before, nor was it part of any group hypnosis or group suggestion thing. It just came out of her in that altered state of consciousness within meditation.

 

When you speak of that 'bubbling up' state, this is where pause to look a little deeper than just calling it simple mimicry. Bear with me a minute here. I'm not at all suggesting it is some sort of miracle speech. I do not believe that myself. What I will say though is that within certain states of altered consciousness, this type of phenomena may occur because of what's going on inside the person. That in your group practice, even if some just starts doing it out of some learned behavior (I can just start talking in tongues myself without being in any sort of altered state), that practice while focusing the mind in a meditative way can become an aide or a vehicle to help the mind move into those sorts of states. What you describe as, "mimicry leading people into that "bubbling" state," is exactly correct. It's like everyone practicing a certain ritual dance with drumming, or the whirling dervishes, etc. Practices like this lead them into these states where there is that 'bubbling up' that occurs, which then the practice becomes a spontaneous utterance from within that place.

 

None of that of course invalidates the experience itself in those states because you did something to 'get yourself there'. This is exactly what the practice of mediation does itself. You do certain things to help move yourself into these altered states of consciousness, where once in those, a whole world of insight and information comes to you which is otherwise obscured because of our noisy minds. People's lack of understanding of what goes on inside us like this, due in no small part to the ignorance of the West in contemplative practices since it was virtually eradicated in Christianity after the Reformation, leads to the sort of bizarre mythic views of the Pentecostal/Charismatic Christians who stumbled upon it through African religious practices found their way into parts of Christianity.

 

And the fundies I knew used it as a yardstick to gauge how "in" they were with the Big J. If you spoke in tongues at every service, you were IN. If you didn't, people doubted your sincerity and even your salvation.

Yes, and see that's exactly the sort of children playing with explosives sort of stuff that I see as the problem with their practices. They're playing at something they have no grounded traditions, and no understanding of. It leads to such dysfunctional crap like this in their hands, since they have no depth of knowledge in which to root it. They stumbled on the tools, and are doing stupid things with them, IMO. "Look at me! I can really do it!! I'm spiritual now!!".

 

To me looking back at it years later, I see that the people who managed the stunt weren't particularly devout or even more moral than the other folks. What they were however is far more suggestible and gullible. And they didn't really learn a goddamned thing from participating in this cathartic ritual. They never got any particularly amazing spiritual insight and continued on their muddled ways unchanged but for a happy fuzzy feeling that they had touched the divine. So it is difficult for me to square your kind and generous characterization of glossolalia with what I saw practiced by fundies.

Understand I'm speaking of it in general, not in the way they abuse it. I'm in complete agreement with what you say and are upset about in what they do with it. In fact, I'll share with you that one very key thing that I experienced in their churches led me to my eventual deconversion.

 

There was this man I knew and worked for briefly, who would come to the altar every Sunday for over 3 years, praying earnestly to get the Holy Spirit. Our church believed if you didn't speak in tongues, at least once, then you didn't have the Holy Spirit, and if you didn't have the Holy Spirit you weren't saved! And so poor Eli would come up there Sunday after Sunday, often times in tears, because he couldn't speak in tongues, and hence he wasn't saved by God yet! I knelt there next to him seeing the pain and desperation and fear on his face, and I thought to myself how wrong this all was! How could this possibly be a truth of God if God is as loving as I believed in my heart? How could anything be withheld from a soul as sincere as his to come again and again and again like this, and to walk away in such pain, hoping to be able to have God show him he was saved? The whole business of their 'theology' began to erode away from that point on.

 

As I said, the experience is not illegitimate in itself as it does have its place in spiritual practices. In the hands of Christians, it's like handing power tools and heavy machinery to six year olds who have no guidence other than other six year olds.

 

Like you said earlier (that was you, right?), they were like little children playing dress-up with rituals trying to be like Mommy and Daddy. The feelings, that ecstasy, that bubbling up, that is perfectly legit. But I don't think fundamentalists really understand what to do with those feelings and so came up with this cathartic ritual to express them. Maybe the first fundie began at Azusa Street with a simple singsong chant and everybody else joined in, who knows. Chicken or egg, seriously.

Exactly, yes that was my analogy, and I think it really nails it down. As I've found my ability to explore spiriutal experience within myself again now in my long-overdue post-christian life, I find that actually a lot of what I expose here and now I was actually doing back then, but the difference was it was so twisted up and knotted in this constricting, confusing mess of this externalized sky judge whom you had to try to go against what your heart told you and 'stick with the Bible', nonsense theology. That's why I say, it's not all illegitimate, just seriously f*'ed up in what happens in it. A great example of these kids in adult clothes is that link I gave above where another child is arguing with the other kids, "You're not doing it right!". Neither have any real depth of understanding what they're dealing with. Children with no understanding.

[Akheia]

I think we're both saying the same thing, but me in a much less charitable way I love hearing your take on things. It helps me make a little more sense out of what happened to and around me. I was always very reluctant to just say it was all just totally fake; the feelings themselves can't really be gotten around. By the same token, nor can my direct observations and experiences. I saw a legitimate feeling perverted and misused and abused. When I say that it was fake, I mean that what they said it was and how they said it was meant to be used are totally false. It is not some miraculous display of Yahweh's grace, not a sure sign that one had attained salvation, not a divinely-sent prophecy, and certainly not any sort of earthly language.

 

So one lady out of how many tens of thousands of Christians manages to do glossolalia by herself without ever having ever heard of it ever in her entire life ever? As nice as your friend sounds, I doubt she'd never have heard of it somehow. Even as a young Catholic child I knew about charismatics; my grandma had got a monthly Catholic magazine that had a series about them (oh my gosh I thought they were just FASCINATING, but I was scared to ask about it). It's hard to fathom that your friend didn't have that cultural expectation for what to do when that sensation came upon her. Even if she'd managed never to have had that priming of the pump, that's still just *ONE* person out of how many? In sum: can it be spontaneous? Sure. The myth had to come from somewhere. People do all kinds of spontaneous things to get into ecstasy and while under its thunderclap influence. But I don't think fundamentalism lends itself to that sort of spontaneity. And what they do with it once they've gotten themselves worked up into that state is nothing short of disgusting.

 

It's incredibly sad that your onetime employer was put through such unnecessary stress. It sounds like you and I both had the same general confusion about why God would withhold his grace from someone who desperately wanted it, but give it so lavishly to those who didn't seem particularly worthy. I share your anguish over Eli's pain. I saw others like him as well--my church's theology was a lot like yours--and I didn't speak in tongues for about a year after my conversion to fundamentalism (well, reconversion; I'd drifted out after the 1988 Rapture scare and got back in about a year later, and didn't speak in tongues till almost a year after that), so everybody was terribly worried about me. In a way, demons and speaking in tongues and stuff like that was about the only "real" evidence any of us had that all this stuff was real, because Jesus sure wasn't talking much. If demons turn out to be just bad luck or ill-will and speaking in tongues turns out to be not at all uniquely Christian and not really language, then wow, that raft starts capsizing pretty damned quickly.