You’ve come a long way baby
I have an acquaintence who is pentecostal, and who bemoans the fact that their local church hardly ever allows speaking in tongues.
He sees this as a detriment, and not a benefit.
Having read great swathes of the NT in Koine, there is no question that the Greek says “Unknown language”, but the operative words are “unknown” and “Language”. In other words, the people around the speaker might not know the language, but it is a language, and not just babbling like idiots. These are the same fools that whine that praying the rosary is WRONG WRONG WRONG!!!! but they sit in private and in public and yammer on like retards.
This is the very definition of cargo cultism. The Apostles were given a baptism of the Holy Spirit and fire. Fundamentalist Christians who want to be Apostles pretend to have received the Baptism of Fire and “speak in tongues” or “Pray in tongues” (Really, just meaningless babbling) thinking that if they pretend enough it will actually happen. In “Speaker For the Dead” Card talks about chinese people forcing their children to obsessively wash their hands to try to get them to develop the OCD that is referred to as being “Godspoken”. You can’t “Call down the gods” doing that, as Card demonstrates, and you can’t get the apostolic Baptism by Fire and gift of speaking tongues by pretending that you have.
Being a decent Christian is a difficult enough gig without adding that manner of silliness to it. The twists and turns added to Christianity by morons along the way that give us Greek Orthodox on the one hand, and Snake Handlers on the other, boggle my mind, when you compare the Church to the way it once was. Me, I’d love to go back to the day when Christianity was not a prayer you recited or a church you attended but a way you acted that everyone recognized, and herds of them were occasionally fed to wild beasts. We may not be far from that now. The age we are entering may well separate Christians from non Christians in a way most don’t expect, the War on Religion is already in full swing in some places.
12 comments Og | Uncategorized
I never know whether something like this is a story or real:
Return of Scipio “Tales from the Crypt”.
That’s why I tend to be skeptical of glossolalia (speaking in tongues)–how do you know you’re not saying something really, really bad?
*groan* I dumped my (political) bucket on my blog last night, woke up with a killer headache, and found this. So instead of ranting, I’ll limit myself to:
Very nicely said. Certain Christians, and others, should heed your words. This war on religion would be utterly pointless to all but the most irrational and fanatical Atheists, if the most irrational and fanatical deists would stop behaving abominably in the name of religion. Wouldn’t it be great if ALL that crap were to be relegated to the fringes, where it belongs?
I accidentally went to a pentacostal church with a friend my freshman year of college. I was okay until the nice lady in purple started doing her best imitation of a radar installation and the pastor started fire-and-brimstoning for the ‘new woman in the congregation’ to come up and get herself saved.
There were folks crawling up the aisles, screaming in tongues, twitches and other things that back in the days of the Salem witch trials would have gotten you hung.
I know that all religions look odd from the outside, but this was a step beyond. Can you tell I haven’t gotten over it?
This is closely associated with the strange practice of casting out demons. Those denominations that do this seem to find demons everywhere, while denominations that don’t aren’t troubled by demons.
My wife goes to a Pentecostal-type church, so I know a bit about the topic. There are really two aspects of speaking in tongues, one is, as Og mentions, from Acts, where people are given the ability to speak languages they never learned so that they may spread the Gospel to those they would otherwise not be able to communicate with. The other comes from Romans 8:26-28: “In the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words; 27 and He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.”, in a nutshell, in our humanity we don’t know how to pray as we should, but the Holy Spirit within us does know and causes us to utter words that have no (human) meaning.
Here’s the thing though, the first type of speaking in tongues is a public thing, if you came across someone who only spoke (insert whatever language you don’t know), and God wanted you to evangelize that person, He’d give you the ability to do so. The second is part of private prayer, not something (IMHO) that needs to be done in a corporate worship scenario. I know a number of VERY Godly people (including two Anglican-Catholic priests) who use this in their private prayers. It’s a method of prayer that some people find useful (personally I never did, at least not yet).
Og, as a Methodist, I don’t exactly agree with the Greek Orthodox church, however I think I have a lot more common ground with them than I do the snake handlers. (Even though being Orthodox, the Greeks are obviously not Protestants, and the snake handlers, are Protestants, even if they are weird fringe Protestants.
Personally? If you have to wrap yourself in seaweed and slither through piles of pineapple and lime jello molds to feel closer to God, i could not care less, ever.
If you want to twist scripture with pliers and use a hammer to fit it into the freakish jigsaw puzzle you call ‘Christianity” that’s fine by me also.
Don’t try to convince me this is God’s plan, because it is not; it is the distortion of God’s plan by men, and in the main, pretty damned goofy or plain fucked up men. When I arrive in hell, one of my first jobs will be giggling at all the people in hell who cannot communicate with one another, because for all eternity they will be yapping in the gibberish they “prayed” with in life.
1) In Acts Chapter Two it clearly states that when the Apostles were filled with the Holy Spirit to speak in tongues, the listeners were clearly able to understand them in their various native tongues. No one heard gibberish. And there are people, monks and anchorites among them, who can have a conversation with God without language as we understand it, and they’re not able to explain it, naturally, but it sure is to them communication, and not ooobla ooobla eee eee eee. I think that’s where the line in Romans comes from.
2) You’ve piqued my interest with mention of the Greek Orthodox. Care to expand?
3) Oh, to clarify, it’s not going to be a war on religion. It’ll be a war on Christianity, with a war on Catholicism the hottest. But then again, Jesus said the world will hate us for Him, and with the Catholic Church being the most hated by the world, I cast my lot on it’s being the closest we’ll get to on-target, goofy stuff (to outsiders) like rosaries and litanies and saint feast days notwithstanding. Do you see a big push for women Muslim clerics, or requiring the mosque to allow gay marriage? You won’t.
mts1 came closest to it. When mankind gained the ability to use language, and thereby rationalize their thought-patterns, religion was born. Since that day, religion has been whatever rationalizing Man wanted to make it.
The full panoply of attributes which Og, then the commenters have outlined are all, in their own ways, separate religions, created by individuals in the name and image of their Gods.
Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hindi, Shinto, none of them have changed a bit in their make-up from the first “must worship RA” thoughts of some guy on the edge of the Nile.
Religion was then, is now, what YOU want it to be. It is an extension of YOU, not the other way around.
MTS: The argument can be made that the greeks can claim to be the closest denomination to the original church. Certainly they have moved least far from the origins of the rituals, and even still maintain the mass in koine greek. I don’t disapprove, I have been to greek masses and enjoyed them, and I respect that they have kept the 2000 year old tradition alive as opposed to a steady stream of modernizations aimed at trying to “bring people in” which never work, like the Catholics have done over my lifetime. Certainly, I have dogmatic issues with them, but that’s another issue
Been in lots of churches as a Missionary Kid, but in the US mostly Left-wing ones.
There was the congregation in Vienna with a sad history that did not do them proud or the Jews of the city well…