Neanderpundit

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.

I walked back and forth from home, it was close, about two miles.

Days like today, once in a while Dad would get up and run me in in his pickup, so as not to ruin a suit. Mostly, though, I’d put on an oilskin and trudge off through the cold rain.

I never minded. I loved the rain then and i love it now, I had a Samsonite briefcase that was solidly waterproof and the only issue was that my fingers would get cold by the time I walked up the steps at school.

I learned to be able to walk quietly then, to move without making much noise, and it helped me to see the wildlife that was in my path- rabbits and squirrels and the occasional quail, even sometimes a deer sharing grazing in the school’s stables.

Sitting in Math first thing in the Ayem, I didn’t think too much about the Binomial Theorem, my head was full of the falling leaves glued to the pavement with the October rain and the squirrels gathering the last Burr acorns, rabbits putting on the last layer of fat prior to the long winter’s snooze.

The hallmark of Humanity is the feeling you get being indoors next to a warm fire, dry and snug, while the cold rain rages outside. This was our first acheivement, and I still think the best, it certainly gives me the most comfort.