...or got ate up by a snake.

As to a cult, didn't pretty much any mainstream religion start off as a cult too?

Crash:
Thanks for that link. I posted a comment there.

I think peer pressure has a lot to do with it. I first began to speak in tongues at about the age of 12 at a camp much like JesusCamp when all the other kids were being baptized in the spirit also. However, like drinking beer, it can be the result of peer pressure, but the experience itself is 'real' in the sense that something very unusual is happening in the brain.
I can still speak in tongues today, even though I am no longer a Pentecostal believer. Whatever I learned to do as a result of the social context in which I was raised is still a skill that the average person does not have. I think studying glossolalia might be useful in understanding more about our conscious control of language and it's connection to unconscious linguistic processing in the brain.
It's quite possible that there are a variety of mechanisms for speaking in tongues and not all practioners create the phenomena the same way. In my case, my mental experience is a kind of 'letting go' of my linguistic control and letting phonemes spew out of my mouth or into my mind in a random manner. It's quite different than consciously trying to string together meaningless phonemes.
I've never heard a tongues speaker use anything other than the phonemes that are a part of their natural language. For instance, I've never heard the clicking sounds associated with African languages or the phonemes typical of Vietnamese used by english speaking americans, when speaking in tongues.

*** CYA is what I say! ***
 

A little trick I learned MANY YEARS AGO was thus;

When you have an idea (Good, bad or ugly!) and you're contacting someone that's in a position to do something with it...mail a copy back to yourself in a separate envelope and when you get it, don't open it, put it in a safe place (Safety-deposit-box at a bank, attorney's office, tin can buried in your back yard, etc...). If you got the Post Office to Date/Time Cancel your letter, you've established a "time-line" on your idea.

Thus, if said "helpful" individual decides to profit off your original letter's content, just wait long enough (BUT, before the deadline for filing a lawsuit for whatever expires!) to cash in on their "ill-gotten" gains.

Revenge is best when served cold (or before you get self-screwed!).

When "friend" provides his "timeline" of when the idea first came to him (You've already mentioned that you've had that "3-martini napkin lunch" (without the paperwork to prove it, of course...)), all you do is wait 'til he's committed a particular date and then you whack the deposition team with the sealed letter showing that on such-and-such date, you mailed the information to him and never heard back. The time/date stamp on that letter (as well as it STILL BEING SEALED) will prove your time-line without a question, and since you've used the US Postal Service as a carrier, your "friend" will have to prove a MASSIVE conspiracy on the part of the USPS to keep his ill-gotten gains.

Good luck in the future...

ONE Q?

MARK G BURG,

Is YOUR name written in the LAMBS BOOK OF LIFE? :confused:

i have never understood the purpose of speaking in tongues. and now that you are not a believer in pentacostalism (if that is the correct term) why do you still do it?

i have had ideas stolen before. usually though it has to do with making money.

tom w

This is somewhat similar to a money making situation in that the paper will probably be used in a tenure application. All I'd like to see is credit for coming up with it. The reason I told him was because he had access to brain scanning equipment and could actually conduct the experiment.

I don't speak in tongues very often at all. The only use I have been able to find for it now that I am a non-believer is that it is a sure cure for insomnia. If you can't sleep because ideas keep passing through your mind, speaking in tongues will empty the mind of ideas long enough to go to sleep.
I think it might also be useful as one possible technique in meditation practice. I began to think about tongues again when I took a course in Buddhist meditation some years ago. The teacher was training us to empty the mind of ideas. With some experimentation, I decided that speaking in tongues could acheive that result without much deliberate effort.

The whole experience of learning to speak in tongues is very odd. It is like trying to unlearn how to ride a bike.

?????????

thanks for the response. i was afraid you would think i was being disrespectful.

so you can do it pretty much whenever you wish?

tom w

*** And the answer is... ***
 

Yep! In college, back in the '70's, followed up w/a dip in the pool in '96 (Why I waited that LONG, I don't know!) :o

AND...what am I missing here? "ONE Q?" :confused:

Later!

Can a name be taken out of the Lamb's book of life?

No disrespect at all. I can do it at anytime, but it is odd to call it 'at will', because it is more like 'unwilling' than 'willing'. I can decide to let my brain cease controlling the connection between thought and language and let the connection between language and the tongue (or speaking to myself inside my head) operate without thought or meaning. It's like having a clutch between the thought producing part of the the brain (the engine) and the language producing part of the brain (the transmission). Speaking in tongues is like disengaging the clutch.

Whoah. I just realized there's a mistake in that analogy. I made thought the engine and language the transmission, but the experience tends to suggest that the opposite is true. Language is the engine and thought the transmission, because when I'm speaking in tongues, the language engine is running, but there's no thought associated with it. It makes me think that the brain can sponanteously produce words, which we have been conditioned to direct into meaningful language. Speaking in tongues is a matter of overcoming this social conditioning to speak meaningfully and a resorting to a more primitive 'babbling' part of the brain where language is spontaneously produced. Could it even be the case that 'internal brain silence' is not natural but induced by the acquisition of language. This could even be taken to the extreme that the 'self' is produced by meaningful language and that self control is fundamentally connected to the controlling of our natural internal babbling state into meaningful language. This might explain why the Buddhist experience of no-self is associated with a complete repression of this 'higher' function of our brain and a return to a more primitive part of the brain which lacks any self.

Now that I think about it, this account would also explain the 'religious' component of the experience. If I'm right, learning a language involves a number of constraints on a person. Our natural grammatical abilities puts constraint on the structure of our sentences and the meanings of words derived from our social context put limits on the available meanings of words. Speaking in tongues is a relief to both these constraints. There is neither the constraint of grammar nor the constraint of social meaning. It is like removing a linguistic straight jacket so it feels good.
This might also explain the social class of Pentecostals. It began in the working and uneducated classes in which a sense of social control and social liberation would be minimal. Speaking in tongues is symbolic of release from all the social constraints put on people at the lowest part of the social hierarchy. For a social class which does not have access to the power of meaningful written words, speaking in tongues can be a substitute.. It doesn't explain the migration of glossolalia into the middle class since the 1960's.

Kerry,

If you recorded yourself speaking in tongues and replayed it back say 5 years from now could you understand what you had said? Or is this 'SIT' simply gobbledygook as a child might babble? Can anyone else under stand your 'sit'?

all i can say is wow!

tom w