They’re blowing off steam. It’s cathartic. They look no sillier than people dancing to techno at a club.
Haj
Unless they’re totally inebriated and/or high on a drug cocktail, the people at the club don’t think or try to make others believe they’re experiencing something profound.
Amused? No, not amused…
If the people seemed desperate, as in the situation that Loopydude described, I’d feel sorry for the congregation members and curse inwardly that the wealthiest nation in history still has people living in “abject poverty.” If the people appeared to be doing it in a “Look at me, I’m a better Christian than you are” way, I’d be disgusted. If the people seemed to be genuinely getting something out of it for their own personal reasons, well, more power to 'em.
Regardless of the specific motivations, I’d still be looking for a polite way to get to the door and leave. Such behavior in public would make me acutely nervous, especially as an outsider to the group. I would certainly never say anything to the people I’d just witnessed about their behavior - like Bill H, I recognize that they may well be getting something valuable out of the experience, and I’m not about to trample on anyone’s beliefs if I can avoid doing so - but you’d never get me within a country mile of that church ever again. And, as much as I wouldn’t want to, I suspect I’d find graceful reasons not to spend time around anyone I had seen behaving that way.
You’re right but my earlier comparison of a Grateful Dead concert still holds.
Haj
Agreed. I almost mentioned sporting events and concerts in my original post.
I’m a (not-very-practicing-anymore) Catholic and I think I’d want to laugh but would manage to hold back until I’d snuck out the back of the church, at which point I would sit on the ground and laugh till I cried.
Maybe I’m ignorant and/or intolerant, but those services where people speak in tongues or the preacher smacks someone in the head to exorcise the demons that are causing his disability just plain crack me up. I guess they’re just getting really into their faith, so, good for them… but I still don’t get it.
It’s like Beatlemania, but for Jesus.
Too true, perhaps.
I tend to find manic fan worship to be highly disturbing as well. Great and enthusiastic admiration? Sure. Makes you wanna dance and cheer? Hey, that’s fun and perfectly healthy. But makes you scream, cry, and fall to the floor in a jibbering clonic fit? Now you gotta wonder if something is seriously wrong. I don’t think this behavior is limited to excessive displays of “religious exctasy”, and is similarly troubling in any context, whether the catalyst is person worship or spirit worship.
my s.o. wont let me go to any of these churches because she knows i’d laugh and tell em all how rediculous they actually look to thier faces… sad
This is one thought is exactly the reason I opened this thread up again, as it just occurred to me. I see this exact kind of behavior in a totally different context when I watch old footage of early Beatles concerts. Which tells me that the whole thing is more to do with being human than being in contact with God.
Did the Blues Brothers walk in and receive a Mission From God?
I hope your kidding, aren’t you really saying that just because of the way someone worships they couldn’t teach you anything? :dubious:
That’s like me saying I couldn’t learn anything from a teacher because they were an athiest. 
What does this professor teach, and at what kind of college?
And yeah, there are some people I don’t believe would be good teachers because of the way they worship. I don’t think I’d be able to take someone seriously if he or she were say, a snake-handler.
As an atheist I have no problem whatsoever with that type of service.
Actually I prefer it. Religion is an important cultural, social and psychological activity from my perspective. Like theater, dancing, recreational drinking or sports. It serves certain purposes. Ecstatic religions seem to be fulfilling their roles a good bit better than the dry, mundane methodist services I went to as a child.
Nothing is worse than sitting among a muted disinterested audience listening to a inoffensive, half-hearted sermon by a third-rate speaker about some well-worn topic he has no real insights into. And then everyone gets up to sing - badly and embarrassed. And sits down to surreptitiously glance every three minutes at their watch, infinitely grateful when the whole thing is over with. I do not see the purpose of that kind of religion.
I was raised in church for most of my life. From the ages of 12 through 18, I attended an Assembly of God church (Pentecostal) where my father was a deacon. The sorts of things that START describes were commonplace. I myself have spoken in tongues. For the record, I’m 19 years old now, so this is all fairly recent.
My personal opinion on these types of services is that the congregation is conditioned to believe that this behavior is truly caused by the Holy Spirit. It was the attitude in the church I attended that if you weren’t speaking in tongues, being slain in the Spirit (ie, falling over backwards during worship), or running around screaming (or laughing or crying) that you were a) backslidden or b) never a real Christian to begin with. Regarding the slain in the Spirit concept, deacons would actually stand behind a person being prayed over, for the specific purpose of catching him/her so no one landed too hard.
In my opinion, this sort of thing is equally sad and disgusting. It is sad that people are brainwashed to believe that this is the only way to validate one’s faith. It’s disgusting that piety is replaced by an effort to prove one is a better Christian than the next guy by acting more ridiculously during services.
START , it is my opinion that what you are participating in is damaging to you as a human being (whether you engage in this behavior or not, I feel that simply believing is unhealthy). I feel it is especially damaging to the younger children in the service. Frankly, if I were able to, I would tell your pastor to f*ck himself the next time he tries to encourage the youth to act like hysterical morons during service; this kind of behavior has nothing to do with God.
To illustrate my point about the psychological damage I feel these sorts of churches can cause young people, I’ll give two examples in my own life. When I was around 15 years old, I used to believe that God punished me for masturbating by giving me acne break-outs. Less humorous, I still struggle with a general revulsion to homosexuals that I rationally know is not right, but have found very difficult to denounce internally.
Uglybeech , I can tell you first-hand that often times these services are more similar to a gathering of the Third Reich than the gathering of a few good Christians. I would say that it is just as unhealthy as a boring, dry church service (for the record, I attended a Free Methodist church prior the Pentecostal one where such services were the norm).
You’ve been whooshed. It was a rather nice wordplay, actually.
This kind of ecstatic behavior is also seen at sports events (like the superbowl) nad rock concerts. It seems to be confined to people with below-average intelligence…much like the example in maine. My questuion is: when these people recover from their madness, do they feel any better for it? I can see the cthartic value in emotional release, but when you think about it, after all this emotion, you still realize you hav to go on living in that shack in the woods. I could accpet the idea f the minister would say, “ok, people, lets get together and build a community center for the kids”. But having screaming fits on a Sunday morning…what does that help?
The only word that comes to mind is “pity.” I bet there were a few people in the church who were thinking “I love Jesus and all, but this is fucking looney tunes. Is this really what God wants?” But they can’t leave or call bullshit because dissent and doubt are so deeply discouraged in that sort of environment. Some people are going to be trapped in that mental prison forever, and anyone who escapes will need years of therapy to figure out which way is up.
IMO, this says more about your definition of “intelligence” than it does about the people who have this sort of experiences. Particularly since this sort of ecstatic, out-of-your-body experience happens across time and cultures.
And FWIW, I’ve had a couple of experiences like this myself, and I don’t have below-average intelligence.
In response to the OP, I’m not an atheist (far from it, actually) but I might have been amused. I haven’t been witness to any such display in person (not one nearly so dramatic, anyway), but the times I’ve seen such displays on TV, I often find myself chuckling. 
I agree. And since I used to work in a bar, I’ve seen a lot of people that, IMHO, look pretty darn silly dancing (very few that don’t look silly, actually)…I’d like to think most of them weren’t actually deluded enough to think they looked cool and wouldn’t be caught dead doing it sober, but that’s probably giving them way too much credit.
Soft atheist, here. I sometimes go to church with my family or friends and actually enjoy it, usually. But I’ve never been to a Pentacostal service.
I would have found the scene you describe disturbing-creepy while it was going on. I am distressed and agitated by yelling and chaos. After it was all over, I would find the scene more amusing-creepy.