This – praying in tongues – is one of the multiple theological reasons why, after 35 years of Christianity were finally over for me, I can never go back. Ever.
To put it briefly, among those Christians that believe in it, praying in tongues is a function of the Holy Spirit, given at the will of that portion of the trinity, not to be mocked or taken lightly any more than the Holy Spirit is to be mocked or taken lightly. I wasn’t into it but it never even occurred to me to mock or denigrate those who were, because it’s a big deal to them, a very serious thing. And I still don’t want to.
But every single time I have ever seen it done publicly, like this (and even in some churches) it has been a circus sideshow and a mess, accompanied by extremes in personal behavior, not undertaken with any kind of seriousness but with arrogance and frivolity, and in such a way as to invite outsiders to make a mockery of it.
It doesn’t track, and it never did. Put it this way. When you personally – yes, you human reading this, whether you are religious or atheist or none of the above – have a sense of something that is truly special to you, truly set apart, you do not parade it around like Eddie Murphy with an ice cream cone, lol. That’s what holiness is: a state of being set apart. That’s what the gift of tongues is supposed to be, according to historical Christianity. But you’d never know it by these public displays of sanctimony.
To put this into historical context, communion is also considered holy – the holiest of the holy – and for centuries was conducted in solemnity behind closed and locked doors, after non-believers were ushered out. There is still a nod to this practice in Eastern Orthodox liturgies even now, two full millennia later, and to this day I have never been in any church anywhere that treated the practice of communion with this level of disrespect.
But these days you get to a function of the “Holy Spirit” itself, the release of this “gift” upon select humans, only to see that apparently the Holy Spirit is now picking the absolute worst of humanity, the most overtly profane people it can find, so that this “gift” – and by extension the Holy Spirit itself – can be made into a political show in places like the floor of the Arizona State Senate for the rest of humanity to look, point, mock, and wonder:
If this is real, why THOSE guys???
Matt 6:5-8 “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. 6 But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. 7 And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. 8 Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.
It sure seems like an attention seeking parade.
It’d be nice if they would read their own text and get back in the closet. I agree with the poster up there - if it’s truly a sacred thing, this sickening display would absolutely sully the whole thing.
I think that preacher screaming about gays and liberals did a lot of damage way back when (used in the trailer for The God Who Wasn’t There). Pretty sure that was around the time the xtianists made a conscious movement to ally themselves with politics to forge a theocracy.
Whirling, I thought your original strikethrough for the actual text was perfect – seeing as how they’ve pretty much nixed that section from their own Reader’s Digest Condensed versions. I thought you meant to do strikethrough, lol.
But every single time I have ever seen it done publicly, like this (and even in some churches) it has been a circus sideshow and a mess
Hey! As a circus sideshow performer, I’d like you to know most of us are professional about what we do and running a show requires a shit ton of coordination
Lol, true enough. I stand corrected.
Do people not realize that “speaking in tongues” was just 1611 language’s way of saying “they spoke in one language but everyone heard them in their own language”? It literally said that in the passage. Anyone who performs “speaking in tongues” in the “modern way” is lying to you about believing in their religion and about taking it seriously.
My favorite part is that I’ve been an atheist for 8 years and can still speak in tongues. If it were what they say it is, I’d have lost the ability to long ago.
Yeah, I specifically avoided all that, seeing as how I now believe the entire religion is false.
But for anyone willing to hold their breath long enough to see these Christofascists stop making it up as they go along and actually give two shits about their own holy book, that’s definitely a point for consideration.
Honestly thats a semi believable part of the bible. Hear a language enough and ya kinda start to get ahold of it. Mind you it requires a base to work with, but given the whole Rome thing I suspect ya could pick up quite a bit at a market or port. Hell Ive experienced it myself, ive on multiple occasions have read Dutch or a Nordic language only to realize I dont know said language and promptly cant read it anymore.
I also watched a Dutch candle making video, that was a weird day overall though.
It depends on the denomination and church you grew up in. Some of them— like the Baptists I grew up with— tend to know what the eff is happening when it’s in the Bible. No, their problem is they keep adding conservative bullshit into their religion and it’s a 50/50 on whether or not they say it’s in the Bible. As bad as Baptists are, I respect a denomination that says “gays are bad because [KJV translation imperfect]” and “guys can’t wear earrings” (even though they do in the Bible), more than one that rolls around on the floor spouting complete gibberish and saying that’s what Biblical speaking in tongues is (even though the passage was super clear about what it actually was). It’s a whole different level of stupid, is all I’m saying.
I heard there is problems with psychiatric help in USA, but I wasn’t aware it was this bad.
Oh, man, you have no idea.
Look up the Pentecostals for a good time, and then keep in mind they’re considered mainstream.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentecostalism
Also:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_handling_in_Christianity
Please, anyone who reads this, stop posting links to the mobile version of Wikipedia. It doesn’t switch automatically on PC, and I see it happen all the time. Just take the half a second to remove the “.m” from the beginning of the link, save everyone else from the pain of having to be surprised by it and taking the time to do it themselves.
Probably more users on mobile than PC and anyway it’s super easy to do what you’re asking with m+kb
The reason I ask to remove the .m out of consideration for PC users is because it actually does correct itself on mobile. It’s not a symmetrically degraded experience, it’s only worse for PC users. And yes, it’s an easy fix with kbm, but respectfully, it should also be easy for the original poster to fix it themself.
Exactly. When you’re on mobile, the website will check and automatically switch you to the mobile version. If you’re on desktop and click a mobile link, that switch doesn’t happen, and everything is giant font and wide margins. The assumption is that desktop is still the default means of viewing. And when inserting a link from mobile, it’s not that hard to delete the m.
Makes sense, didn’t realize it autocorrected on mobile.
No. Stop being a self-entitled, lazy slug. They got the resource for you. If it’s not good enough for you, either fix it for your use case or don’t click it at all.
It takes just as little time to remove the .m. yourself, maybe even less.
I myself do indeed remove the .m.s from my links out of politeness, but it is impolite to demand that others do this.
IMO demand implies stronger language than I was using, my intention was to simply make a request of anyone that encountered my message. I’ve only started making this request because this happening is something I’ve noticed happen for literal years, and I want to raise awareness about it, hopefully get others to notice and not make this mistake. Honestly I think the perfect solution would be for Wikipedia to implement a fix on their end, but I have no idea how to go about making a request of them like that.
Why is it always republicans.
These idiots are fucked in the head.
So I guess it’s now ok for groups of Muslims to pray together to the east on the Senate floor, satanic temple would line up behind them, oh and don’t forget about sacrificing of goats to Thor and Odin while we’re at it. I guess all that is ok now …right Arizona? Right?
Sounds like an epic party
Sounds like a Supernatural episode waiting to happen
This timeline is getting to be absolutely ridiculous.
What happened to the separation of church and state?
He is also known for sponsoring a Senate bill, which recently passed, that would permit the Ten Commandments to be recited aloud in public schools.
Is this that indoctrination Republicans have been screaming about not wanting in schools? I guess it’s OK if it’s their particular brand of indoctrination.
Your elected officials. They should be hauled off in straight jackets.
*Arizona State Senator Pretends to be Possessed by a Ghost Before Abortion Ruling
*Schitzo cultist spits out world salad before fucking everyone over.
- live action skibidi toilet just dropped
Wolololololo
*Arizona state senator becomes bilingual; adds Gibberish next to primary language of Bullshit.
That video. Wow.
Reminds me of the chants in the game Control https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOI-uY7m-Og
Such a good game!
May the Lord open
Under his eye.
Blessed be the fruit
Remember when the right spent so much time, even all the way into 2022, gaslighting that people are being hysterical and over the top to talk about Gilead states?
Of course they were dirty liars.
He should be removed from office. He is not well.
Not for nothing, but speaking in tongues is demonstrably bullshit. It’s been studied linguistically and neurologically, and been found to be wholly non-miraculous.
Has anything been found to be miraculous?
Ladybug and Cat Noir.
Octopi. Miraculous little creatures
Quite a lot actually, through rigorous examination by the Catholic church.
Fkn lol
Depends on who you ask. The Catholic Church will claim rigorous evidence of it’s miracles, especially the ones that lead to sainthood.
Of course, they don’t respect the scientific method, so what’s the point of trying to have a serious investigation if the methodology is going to be biased and flawed?
There are a lot of aspects of the world that are wonderful, can’t yet be explained, and maybe don’t even need explanation to be worshiped and enjoyed. Religion is just a means to make sense of these parts of our cosmos (I myself am a complete atheist, but have friends whose lives have been definitely enriched by finding religion). The problems arise when manipulative people codify these beliefs into regimented systems of control. That creates an incentive to coerce others to follow the same beliefs. That in turn leads to religions beginning to be shaped by a kind of memetic survival of the fittest. Some religions try to short-cut the hard work of having actually good ideas that improve people’s lives, by instead coercing people into beliefs that maximize birth rate and reduce individual thought.
Well, there’s a jellyfish capable of immortality. It’s as close as anyone is likely to get to a miracle in the real world.
Wonder Bread was in the running, back in the 60s.
My friend’s dad would make us sandwiches when we would come inside for a break. Wonder bread, with Miracle Whip and a slice of American cheese. Sometimes baloney, but it had to be fried.
Classic Americana kid food. I loved it then, but am now horrified that I actually liked it.
Well, no. Plenty of things have been, and still are, unexplained, but that doesn’t mean they violate the laws of nature. It just means our understanding of those laws is incomplete.
Like 3,000 years ago, a total eclipse would have seemed miraculous, but people of the time just had not yet mapped orbits and the planets.
In this case, glossolalia is a phenomenon that has been well-studied and found to be entirely mundane. They are not speaking foreign languages they had never heard before, they are not speaking new languages, they are not making phonemes that they have not heard before. Anyone can learn to speak in tongues, even if they do not believe in the spirituality of it. Neurologically, someone speaking in tongues is fully conscious and totally in control.
There are no cases of spontaneous glossolalia in groups that are not familiar with the experience.
It’s weird, for sure. The people doing it seem to sincerely believe they are doing something. And there’s no correlation to neurological conditions or mental illness. Functional MRI exams show that it isn’t always controlled by the same part of the brain responsible for speech.
It just seems like people can learn to convince themselves that they have the magic power to talk weird and believe that they are channeling some supernatural power. They are not channeling any supernatural power, they are just making weird noises.
Sadly, only Miracle Whip has passed the scientific tests to legally be called miraculous.
Its got the creamy/tangy in spades
One man’s miracle is another’s abomination, as they say.
Miracle Max was also pretty miraculous
Just don’t rush him, you don’t want rotten miracles.
Nothing is miraculous. Nothing exists outside of nature. Only dimwits believe in that shit.
It seems like a delusion of grandeur. A mental illness.
Isn’t that most religions? You have the sacred knowledge of the divine will of the creator and ultimate judge of the Universe, who is also your close personal friend. You telepathically communicate, and He tells you that everything you already think is correct. Whatever happens in your lifetime, you’re going to hang out with Him behind the velvet rope in the afterlife while all of your enemies are tortured for eternity.
As a person who actually read the fucking Bible a lot, I can’t even believe that some people are this fucking stupid. “Tongues” is literally the word for “languages”, and it literally said right there that the apostles preached to many people and spoke in many “tongues” at once, which means that everyone heard them in their own language.
Anyone who accepts “speaking in tongues” in the way they say it now isn’t a serious Christian, they’re a fake moron and they know it. Some people actually take their religion seriously (for better or for worse), but these bold-faced liars don’t.
Yes they have misinterpreted the Bible, but also they don’t seem to be liars. Their faith appears to be entirely sincere, and there’s no evidence they are lying. From the outside, they look as serious as every other Christian, which is to say it’s all ridiculous.
I don’t want to make assumptions about you, but your point is the sort of “no true Scotsman” argument Christians like to make about the “other” Christians they don’t agree with. Believers can see and point out the flaws in the beliefs of others, but all religions are down in the same irrational hole.
What are you talking about? The modern take on “speaking in tongues” is literally misinterpreting the Bible so that— instead of you speaking one language and it coming out clear in everyone’s language like what was very clearly expoused in the passage— you shout a bunch of gibberish like a moron. You have to make that up and make up that you believe something is happening. It’s like how some Pentacostal pastors get people up in front of everyone and claim to heal them from physical sickness right then and there by putting their hands on them. They’re fucking liars, it’s all for show. It’s the same kind of “faith”-based hucksterism as psychics.
Not all fucking forms of religion or even Christianity lie that obviously and hard. Usually the people mostly believe what they say, even if it’s often via cognitive dissonance.
Just because you find it ridiculous doesn’t mean that they aren’t sincere. You’re assuming that people cannot convince themselves of a delusion so hard that they fully believe it.
Consider Catholics who believe that wine and bread turn to blood and flesh when blessed by a priest, or Young Earth Creationists who reject the whole of modern science because their holy scripture says that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, or faith healers, or people who pray for miracles, or people who believe in ghosts, or a global flood, or the stories of Adam and Eve, or a burning bush passing down commandments, or that Moses brought plagues to free the Jewish slaves in Egypt, or that Christ was born of a virgin and rose from the dead. All of those beliefs are equally irrational.
It doesn’t matter at all if their interpretation of the Bible contradicts with your interpretation of the Bible, because the Bible is not a source of literal truth. It contains many demonstrably false statements, and a myriad of contradictory statements. Even as a source of allegorical morality tales, the Bible is lacking by any modern standard.
You think they are ridiculous. Matthew 7:3
- Some of these beliefs-- whether true or not-- are not as absurd as you think. A lot of people have magical thinking, it’s just that some magical thinking is far, far stupider in context than others.
- You clearly don’t understand the difference between making shit up and believing something to be real in the first place. “Speaking in tongues” (not the Bible version) is the former. A huckster doesn’t believe they’re psychic for example— they’re just bullshitting. To say I have no right to assume that they know they’re not psychic, that is absurd.
Your arguments are stupid and I’m done talking with you.
Now that’s the face of Women’s Health.
As usual.
Holy shit. It 100% looks like a satanic summoming is taking place based on the video.
What is wrong with these people? Get help!
As someone mentioned two weeks ago, we don’t have an official language. They should actually set their rules in Santanic gibberish since they’ll mean squat in the end when people finally get the courage to ignore them.
Something something separation of church and state
Well said.
