[QUOTE=DocCathode]
Which is why I said earlier that the important thing is how a religious belief or practice effects people. If a particular belief cause adherents to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and watch Monty Python, then that belief is a good thing. If a particular belief causes adherents to start an Inquisition, become suicide bombers, or forward e-mails promising that Bill Gates will give us money, then that belief is a bad thing.
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I don’t think you can blame or credit religion for individual people’s behavior. Good people will be good people regardless of whether they’re religious or atheists, and bad people are the same.
[QUOTE=ralph124c]
I don’t get it: the Gospel story of pentecost says that the apostles started speaking, and everyone understood what was said, in their own language. This ‘glossolalia’ stuff is just gibberish-it means nothing to anyone except the person uttering it.
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The Gospel indeed says that. And I can’t remember what verses my old Foursquare church used to justify it as a ‘private prayer language’, but I’m sure there was something.
As for it meaning something to the person uttering it, I wouldn’t be so sure about that. As I’ve said, I was not in a ‘state of ecstasy’ when I first became capable of, uh, rattling off syllables that I still think sound like a Native American language, (but very probably are not). I could do it right now, sitting here. Same sounds. No emotion. No meaning to me. No idea what it’s supposed to accomplish. Even back when I called myself a believer, I simply “took it on faith” that it meant something to God because it sure as heck meant nothing to me then. Even less so today.
I used to envy the people who had - I mean felt, or experienced - what I would now call ‘a religious experience’ (though then I would have called it ‘the presence of the Holy Spirit’ or something like that). The sorts of churches I went to were really big on the whole idea of experiencing a relationship with God, the way one might experience a relationship with someone you know and love. You had to feel it. I never could. I’m not utterly convinced that most of them did, either - I ran into a lot of people who confessed privately that they didn’t feel anything, and that prayer didn’t seem to work for them, who were publically much more fervent and self-sure.
I’ll buy the ‘power of suggestion’ suggestion, but I still don’t know how to classify my ability to still make this…ah…speech, when I don’t even believe in it anymore.
I will honestly speak to the power of tongues. Yes. I had a powerful experience. I was a child of 10 or 11 and the whole experience is quite indelible. I went to a church service with family and was totally agape and frightened during the proscribed ecstacy. I really sid feel a pwerful emotional connection and although they explained it as the spirit. I saw it as the ignorance and fear. Quite an exquisite bond although under all the princiupals that I have come to despise. It is dishonest. I was ignorant and afraid and they sucked me in.
no I’m not.