But it IS unintelligible. That was the point of it at the church I went to.
And useless… and I say that as someone who’s done it.
As the new kid in the big city, I got invited by friends to a Pentecostal church, where they got us all to “speak in tongues” by telling us “Now, you need to practice…” To just start repeating nonsense syllables over and over and overandoveranooveranoberanoovberannoober until it got out of control, at which point presto, it’s the Holy Spirit speaking through us “in words beyond human understanding”… sure, of course that’s what it is…
I thought those glossolalia outfits had someone “speaking in tongues” and then another person “moved by the Spirit” to translate the tongue-speech into English.
Way back in 1978, a friend and I were invited by another American friend to visit a church in Itaeweon, Seoul. This turned out to be a Pentecostal outfit. When people started screaming gibberish and rolling around on the floor–and there were a lot of folks; this was a big place–is when my friend and I (we were both 19, so we weren’t that worldly-wise at the time) bolted for the door.
I don’t know any personally, but if you can point me to them, I’ll be glad to explain to them that they’re speaking gibberish. Not sure what that would accomplish, as I doubt they’d find me persuasive on the subject, but I’m willing to give it a go.
Which, if you think about it, makes no fucking sense whatsoever… I mean…WTF??? I let this person say shit he cannot understand, and let THAT person 'tranlate???
A person may offer a different and self-serving translation and who could contradict him?
Because somewhere they read there is a Gift of Tongues, and a Gift of Understanding Tongues, and therefore they figure they must go together.
Because pity the fellow who gets the latter while nobody is getting the former. He’s just sitting there with a gift from the Lord that’s perfectly useless.
At least there’s no evidence the females were underage, unlike his fathers’ victims.
Of course he has probably been screwing every Happy Clappy Groupie he could lay his hands on since he got hair on his hypocritical balls. Most of them probably welcomed it and many probably didn’t but didn’t want to speak out
I agree that her acts were reprehensible, but her sentence is pretty much in line with sentences given for non-violent white collar crime. I get the impression from your initial post that you feel she should be punished more because she was an official in a religious organization and not because of the crime itself. If hypocrisy was a punishable crime by law, I would agree. It isn’t, so I don’t.
Better still, they should recruit 70 members with The Gift Of Understanding, and have them interpret the gibberish – all working independently of one another, of course – and see if they miraculously all come up with the same translation. It’s not like it’s never been done before.
“The first incident involved Pastor Brian text messaging with a female member of staff, which ended in an inappropriate text message along the lines of, ‘If I was with you, I’d like to give you a kiss and a cuddle, or a hug,’ words of that nature,” Pastor Dooley told the meeting.
snip
The woman later came back and asked for compensation because she was struggling to get a job as a result of what had happened to her and the church agreed to pay her a few months’ salary, which Mr Houston later reimbursed, Pastor Dooley said.
I am going to go ahead call bullshit. They are not going to pay ANYTHING on the basis of the ‘quoted’ text’. Hug, kiss, cuddle my bleeding ass.
