chockfull

Sheesh. We can't even get our criticisms right. It's doubting Thomas high on wacky tobaccy. It must be your Satanic methods that are preventing you from getting that right. I guess we have some more colorful language coming out at times here - usually during about the 10th time we've gone over the same point we are belaboring much to the agony of our readers. I submit that it's simply a defense mechanism when dealing with tedious drudgery and it serves to keep the rest of our audience from falling completely asleep. Well, Thomas had to reach out his hands and touch Jesus side. He could have said "I don't believe your account. End of story" and walked away without ever touching Jesus. I'm sure if you are praying in earnest to God about this and are not completely thickheaded about it that He will find some way to answer your prayer. I'm 100% completely unsure about how He would even go about that, but that's why I don't have the big chair.

Changed his mind? I mean who knows what a man would do? I've been surprised so many times it's not surprising any more.

What's the meaning of "syntax", and do you have a link to a study we can read about it?

It has more adjectives. Thus it sounds louder in my head.

Hmmm. Comment my feelings on this. OK. First, here's a quote from this site: My feelings on this are it's a lot of horse puckey. VPW was an adulterer, who took advantage of young women. See Kristin Skedgell's book "Losing the Way" for concrete examples in detail. Oh, and in case you think she's lying, there are plenty who corroborate her stories. Also, VPW was a plagiarist. Receiving the Holy Spirit Today contains by conservative estimate about 70-80% of the exact content of J.E.Stiles book (who VP said led him into tongues) although Stiles book was published earlier. I guess if that's what you mean by a "many-faceted" ministry all right then. A list of people who used to be in the Way, but now run splinter groups or fellowships. Nice if you want to get in touch with someone from your past. This was plagiarized almost exactly from Oral Roberts most famous sermon, entitled "The 4th Man". You can find transcripts of that on Amazon to compare, and can find Oral's original teaching too. Oh, and by the way, they used to play Oral's teaching for the Corps in training. Somehow they were too brainwashed to pick up on the plagiarism angle of it. You have a nice and blessed day too!

Here is the direct quote. p. 50 Paragraph 3. "But it should not be so general that it includes xenoglossalalia, that is, demonstrating knowledge of a language one has not learned in the normal ways". Any more on how I've misstated it, you've corrected it, and I'm dishonest? From Samarin's definitions, I would think that your example would be accurate. Without demonstrating knowledge of Swahili, it would not be xenoglossalalia (see quoted definition). So it would be glossolalia to Samarin. And he declares glossolalia to be a non-language based on Hockett's list and the idea that it is not conversational. So yes, I believe that after carefully reading Samarin's work, you could SIT in perfect Swahili in front of Samarin, and if he or another linguist present did not understand Swahili, and there was nobody in the audience who understood the Swahili, and it was not recorded and shopped around to see if anyone understood the languages (I'm still not understanding why these guys have not done that - maybe because their works were before the internet age). I believe that he would conclude as you say.

OK. What exactly is the substance you are looking to be brought to the table?

And I say Samarin's conclusion that SIT is absolutely at least in part based upon his evaluation of it with Hockett's criteria. So it's circular logic to say that he "proved it's not a language" when even you yourself agree and put forth that SIT is not the type of thing that makes sense to measure by Hockett's list. Samarin as I already explained earlier, makes a quantum leap from his findings to his conclusions. The REASON he says they are NOT languages is exactly because of some of the interactive and sociological elements missing from it per Hockett's criteria. It's not proven that glossa is not turning out foreign languages. The languages weren't understood. Please provide the page number in which Samarin proves that the languages COULD NOT EVER be understood BY ANYONE HUMAN. You are making a leap of logic from there to that they are not languages. If they are not, then they never at any time on earth would have had anyone that understood them. Prove that, and you prove they are not languages. Short of that, NOTHING HAS BEEN PROVEN. How is this a detour when it is the crux of your argument that everyone was/is faking? xenoglossia is defined as a "knowledge of a language someone hasn't learned normally". Nobody has ever contended that SIT provides you with the knowledge of a language. So how is finding that's different than SIT make your work 'done'? To bring you back on point here, we are studying whether or not glossolalia produces languages. If it does, then your belief that everyone is faking it modern day has some holes in it. Ah, the "Doubting Thomas" standard of proof. So God has to pull the miracle off with SIT where someone in the audience understands the language and you'll believe it. Or wait, no you won't. You think that is a "secondhand" account. You would need to hear a non-native English speaker SIT and the tongue be English for you to believe it. I guess "high" would be the way to describe that standard of proof, if by "high" you mean "wacky tobaccy high". You could pray a long time without God ever doing that one. Well that's a creative twisting of my viewpoint, considering that I never suggested phonological structure proves anything. The ONLY thing I noted was that "linguists find a phonological resemblance to language, but did not recognize the language". I stated that would not prove anything one way or another. So how is it you misconstrue that into a "low standard of proof"????? when I'm not saying it proves anything?????? Your last sentence also is a very creative way to state that none of the linguists recognized the language of any of the samples presented.

All right - we're getting Lambchops raspberries from others here. We seem to agree on the fine-grained detail of what we're digging into here. Where we diverge is what conclusion it tells us. I say NONE. You say "it proves they are not a language". I will stop at saying my conclusion of your position is that you have a very selective and low burden for what you consider proof. And don't expect me to accept what you call PROOF, because it absolutely is not by any kind of application of logic and scientific method.

Disagree. We must examine each on merit to see whether they make sense. The first 5, all a phonetic sound list, all DO make sense. The linguistic analysis of glossa IMO can't be proven one way or the other without the miraculous phenomenon that happened in Acts 2 happening in a lab or an account similar to don and socks being reproduced in a lab. Hockett's list is NOT irrelevant to the discussion as it was brought up by a LINGUIST. Doctrinal. i'll start a thread in a while on "Scriptures that pertain to SIT figuratively". That should provide enough ammo to argue over this there for quite a while. I never said I didn't believe they were real human languages. I just said that it's never been a sticking point in my prayer life that what I was speaking to God actually had to be a measurable known human language. I figured I just spoke as the Bible instructs and God energizes. It's worked for me for a while. I'm not 100% on the figurative hyperbole interpretation but it does have a strong case for interpreting it that way. I would state this differently. The FACT that SIT is PHONETICALLY indistinguishable from language does not mean that what is spoken is genuine and not faked. That cannot be determined unless the language is understood. Here's another rub. Do you include the interpretation of tongues in trying to apply Hockett's features? I would say that you have to, but insert the caveat that the interpretation could be faked. If you include the interpretation, then many more of Hockett's feature list can be checked off. I think it still leaves a handful that SIT would not satisfy. What conclusion would this leave a reasonable person? That SIT and language are similar phonetically, and that you can't reach a 100% conclusion one way or the other on whether or not it is a real language unless you understood the language. It seems to be unprovable either way without God's express cooperation. And it does seem possible to fake it. That's as far as you have to go to prove ASL is not a language by Hockett's feature list. And it does highlight an issue with using that list exclusively as proof or criteria. And Hockett would probably also include ASL as a language and note it as an exception, as would most reasonable people. Does that help us with language classification of glossa? Not really. Still at the point where it's unprovable until understood directly.

Agreed. There are two Greek words in glossolalia - they are: glossa - tongues - 3 defined meanings to this, could refer to the organ itself, or languages or dialects laleo - of persons speak, tell, with focus on speaking rather than on logical reasoning as with lego (say, speak); So do you find it significant that the root of the verb behind the "speaking" focuses on speaking as an act itself as opposed to the logical reasoning present in normal conversation? Many do. The understanding and emphasis to me is that the person speaking does NOT engage the logical reasoning mind to produce the language in tongues. Listen, by logic you can't cherry pick parts of your sources, ignore other parts and remain anything close to credible. Samarin included Hockett's features of language in his analysis of tongues AS A LINGUIST. AS A LINGUIST, as many have brought up to me criticizing me for pointing out problems in his research, he KNOWS MORE ABOUT LINGUISTICS, THE STUDY OF LANGUAGES, than anyone on this thread. As such, HE thought it pertinent to include Hockett's list in his study. Your main point of contention about tongues is IT IS NOT A LANGUAGE. Samarin discusses this. Samarin himself in his research did not obviate that Hockett's list "makes no sense". To him it made sense to apply this to glossa. That's why he included it in his study. I tell you spelling this stuff out is tediously pedantic, but obviously necessary as people are trying to follow logic on this thread. Phonological structure DOES prove something. It proves phonological structure. It proves that the 1/3 of the list included by Hockett is satisfied by glossa. It proves that phonologically, tongues can be INDISTINGUISHABLE from language. This is important to understand, and yes, Raf, you have to admit this. I know you really don't want to. But to not admit this is basically to stick your head in the sand and say that a good part of what linguists do to evaluate whether sounds are languages is invalid. And you are not a linguist, so you have little credibility repeating your opinion on this. Now does this prove glossa is a language? NO. It just proves it SOUNDS LIKE A LANGUAGE. It proves that phonetically it is like a language. Your other points that you bring up are very valid. How can you determine the other 2/3 of Hockett's list without understanding the meaning of the words spoken? You can't. You can't prove it is a language. You can't prove it's not a language. So we are back at square one for proving the OVERALL question of tongues being a language. But we HAVE gained valuable insight on tongues from a phonetic point of view. And SITers who have not subjected their "product" to objective analysis have accounts where real, human language was produced. These were done IN A SETTING THAT IS CONGRUENT WITH HOW SCRIPTURES DESCRIBE THAT TONGUES SHOULD WORK, as opposed to man's manufactured test lab. The importance to this is BIG. IF tongues work according to descriptions in scripture, and someone (JUST ONE PERSON IS ENOUGH FOR PROOF) produced a language in this setting, then this cannot be discounted. A response of "I don't believe them" is not a scientific, logical, or reasonable response. Now you could say "these accounts are firsthand accounts, yet are not independently verifiable". That is accurate. That is logical, reasonable, and supports the scientific method. The fact that in a small sample space like the one we have posting on this forum (number of members in the hundreds) we have TWO DISTINCT FIRSTHAND ACCOUNTS should give any reasonable scientist enough ammo to try and investigate these types of accounts more globally. But "I don't believe them" ????????????? "End of story" ??????????? Give me a break with that logic.

What Samarin was getting at was to examine glossa with the attributes that are commonly accepted as the elements that define language to see whether or not they apply. He found 5 discrepancies out of 16. Why did he do this? Because the study of linguistics commonly accepts these. Because it was his field, and he was applying the knowledge of his field to glossa. No I think you guys are missing the point. SIT is never referred to in the Bible in the same sense as a language in the same context that other languages are referred to. Where are they referred to? Here's one example: Genesis 11:9 Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth. So this vast exercise of the fanfare and the trumpets and the declaration of "SIT is NOT a language" is to me all kind of a waste of time. I mean even to me how it "feels" is not like I am talking in one of the two languages I've learned. It's more of a prayer / worship / meditative experience for me where I am staying my mind on someone or something I don't understand and communicating with God. The scriptures I see on it like in Rom. 8 "groanings which cannot be uttered" I Cor 14 "if I pray in an unknown tongue my spirit prays, but my understanding is unfruitful" all carries that same "feeling" for want of a better word. And many times I don't want that feeling in prayer. I need to talk, I need to express my inner heart's thoughts and dreams, I don't need to disengage the brain from language processing. So to me my first reaction to some of the challenges for "proof" were like - "why would you want to put some kind of spectrometer on an experience like that?????" and then the ultimate that we were trying to get to is "whether or not they were a real language". My gut reaction was "who cares? it's just a way I can pray to God spiritually, and it's really not that big of a deal". And I think it got escalated because someone called me a liar and said I was faking it. So I decided to dig into it to respond and got caught up in the detail. I mean some of the prophetic implications of Pentecost to me go all the way back to Genesis 11:9. Mankind got too egotistical to allow him to make his hierarchies of politics and religion, so God confounded the language and scattered the people. Then on Pentecost, through Jesus accomplishments, he brought them all back together again with that display of SIT and the miracle of it uniting people again. I mean if you really want to attack an account of something, there's probably a better place to start than some random Africans in a prayer meeting. What do you mean "confounded the language of all the earth"???? It does fit many of Hockett's 16 defining features of a language. For example, the first 5 - Vocal-auditory channel, directional reception, rapid fading, interchangeability, complete feedback. There is absolutely no way a sane person would argue that SIT does not use a vocal-auditory channel for linguistic communication. So SIT for example, fits many of the criteria for language that say American Sign Language (ASL) does not. So does that mean next we will all be thrilled to enjoy Raf's next treatise on how ASL is not really a language, and thus all those deaf people are all faking it and lying to themselves?

I think Poythress is a theologian and not a linguist, and Samarin is a linguist and not a theologian. I'm starting to pick up on a distinction in Samarin. I think his conclusions are saying glossa is "not a language" because like the 16 criteria everything in the linguistics field is set up to look at language from a perspective of how it works in the context of a sociological sense. Meaining that he would likely rule it out as being a language simply due to the fact it is not understood natively in most cases. So in that respect I think when Samarin says "it's not a language" this is quite different than your position. Your position is more "it's not a language because people are faking it and lying to themselves it means something when it is just basically gibberish super-imposed by the human brain dressing up the fakery to sound more like a language". Samarin's position is more "it's not a language because it's not really communicating with other humans and forming societal and sociological bonds, and that's basically what my field of linguistics says a language is". yes we are both coming up to speed on this field and the resources in it in the midst of discussing it and debating.

In many ways AA has done a work that TWI was and is too lazy to ever do anything close to. They have taken a specific category of people with special needs and dedicated resources to helping them. This includes work evaluating that category of people medically, psychologically, sociologically, setting up an infrastructure of meetings and mentorships, and packaging it into a simple enough program to implement that you see groups operating under their banner almost anywhere you go. TWI has a McDonald's approach - one size fits all. If someone shows themselves to have special needs, rather than doing any work at all towards adapting to meet those needs, TWI basically will isolate them, attack them, and eventually cast them out. Oh, and they will do this while vehemently denying they do anything like this with their mouths. In many ways, AA meets what society's expectations are for a non-profit. Help the community in tangible ways. TWI does not.

Well, sorry excy. This discussion has helped me to dig through the topic, even if it hasn't helped others (which I think it probably has - at least to stimulate thought and evaluation of TWI's teachings). I've heard a couple comments that people were more bored than the INT class (so some of our back and forth probably gets tedious to read). For you and I it's been a good exercise (to me) in critical thinking, logic, research, and how to approach scriptural studies and Christian topics in a post TWI state. I will probably continue to try to post content on this thread related to the topic such as when I finish new resource reading material, but will probably de-escalate the debate side of it. I know your beliefs and stance on the evidence well enough so going over it again and again would just be tedious. We are on the outlying opinion side of the debate and the poll is pretty evenly divided so I postulate that our two viewpoints probably represent the spectrum of what people's beliefs are on the topic. There are other little things or phrases that come up in the discussions that help me too. For example, geisha brought up "vain repetitions" in prayer. I hadn't considered that as applied to tongues in prayer, but that struck my interest in streamlining things. I mean if I'm sitting around with a mind picture and SIT over and over and over again, that's kind of a waste of brain matter. I'm sure God doesn't need to hear me repeat myself, regardless of what language its in. So you know, housecleaning some of that is good. If I know about something I'm praying about, it makes more sense to have the conversation with God in a language that I understand too so it helps my head. If I don't know, or if I'm just praying for someone's overall well being, then maybe just a focus on the person or situation and SIT seems a better fit. I like to improve things where I can.

I mean there is the distinct possibility that all our 50+ pages on the topic is a completely futile endeavor. But to me it's common sense to look at what you can to help your viewpoints / beliefs be the most fact and reality based you can. Your point on people faking it without knowing it is a possibility too. I mean if the people recorded aren't supposed to be and God subsequently shuts down that side of the spiritual energizing, then they are doing the same thing they always have been it just doesn't have the "magic sauce" in it. These are all things I would list in a study or paper in a "Caveat" section - probably all in bullet points. That way you obviate all of the potential roadblocks in your tests to reaching your findings. I find that Poythress does this a little better than Samarin. Poythress I think you described as "stops short of reaching conclusions". Now I don't know his logic but with a number of things up in the air about the feasibility of performing such a study, that approach to me seems a little better - share what you did find and leave the conclusions to the readers.

Do you do business plans for universities too? I mean you could make a TON of money - there have been what, 40 years of people paying you tuition WITHOUT EVER HAVING ONE ACCREDITED PhD in charge of the program. And also, your alumni program should be patented. Nowhere else, when people attend a college, does the end result come out that now they owe you everything and you owe them nothing.

Maybe I've missed it but outside of the language of the poll entry I haven't seen a lot of people supporting how TWI handled and taught that topic. I have asked a couple questions related to if the Bible says you can but somehow today you can only fake it what changed and how can you trust the Bible on other pointS then. I don't believe it is a doctrine that has a bearing on salvation. And yes, in TWI there was a lot of fake everything, this topic included.

Post #587 on this page is Socks story - and he answers once about after. I'm sure you've ruled out the normal causes. Teething could be another. We had one with colic, nothing worked with that one except putting him in a car seat and driving him around...

empirical - adjective 1. derived from or guided by experience or experiment. 2. depending upon experience or observation alone, without using scientific method or theory, especially as in medicine. 3. provable or verifiable by experience or experiment Which definition are you trying to tie to SIT? I guess if you mean #3 definition - we are investigating the topic to see the extent of which there can be found empirical evidence related to SIT.

Where did you get the convoluted notion that SIT was some kind of "empirical claim"????? I am not saying that if you reject modern SIT you can't embrace Christ. I've seen plenty of real life examples where people do exactly that and have a strong Christian life.

And if you do this, I propose that you are no longer investigating SIT. You are investigating another phenomenon - that of a human to make mouth noises. You are investigating people faking SIT or doing something else altogether.

To argue about the numbers of UFO abductions reported in conjunction with this discussion is completely irrelevant. Here's the problem. First, it's an ad hominem attack, as you are placing a correlation between people reporting UFO abductions and tongues simply for the purpose that it's widely accepted that those reporting UFO abductions are commonly viewed as crackpots and you are drawing a parallel there. Second, you provide no substantiating evidence there are more claims of UFO sightings. Third, we are discussing spiritual matters to do with God and the gift/manifestations, not UFO's. This is very, very tired logic. It's tedious to deal with, but I'm going to do so because outside of me there is nobody challenging it. Honestly, your arguments would have more weight with me if they were logical, thought through, and dealing with the facts at hand, as opposed to labeling, and constantly stating your opinion on the matter. Does it bother me you are doing this? Not at all - it's not my life or logical choices. I have NEVER asked anyone on this thread to take my word for it that it is real. I am simply digging into information we have and presenting logic regarding the information. You, on the other hand, state over and over your opinion as fact. In reality, you sound far more like the used car salesman here. Of course the spiritual matter of SIT compares to the resurrection and the new birth - in that they are ALL SPIRITUAL MATTERS. As spiritual matters, there are elements of them that cannot be detected by the 5 senses. But in your viewpoint, you really want to get away from looking at SIT as a spiritual matter. You want to look at it as a senses experience where everyone is faking it. It is your viewpoint that has the flaw, not the SIT we are studying. This I support you in. All of those people who were / are acting like that John Lynn video, whose life is a fake, all of those people that made something up to please somebody in TWI - they are wrong. It will help them to admit they were faking. But to those that have that doubt enter in, just because you doubt your experience in TWI because of the putrid fruit that has shown itself in the leadership of TWI, because of the Nazi-like excellor sessions and man's manipulation presented in the intermediate class, or because of other reasons connected with the cult, that does not mean you faked it. So search the scriptures, search your own soul, pray a lot, and look for God's direction.

No, bringing up logical conclusions about other spiritual matters to highlight the difficulties in PROVING spiritual matters is simple common sense. It is not fear mongering or any other label you want to attach to it. You are trying to prove something that cannot be detected by your 5 senses - spiritual energizing. You want to focus on all of the 5 senses aspects about SIT. That's your choice, and if you want to become afraid because you do this about SIT that it will transfer over into other areas of your faith that's your business and your problem. But it is not the problem of someone pointing out that spiritual gifts are spiritual in nature. It almost amazes me that I have to keep highlighting basic elemental things like this.

Then by this logic, your assessment of Samarin should be he has no accounts of non-Christian free vocalization. He used 2 mediums as one example, and 2 personal accounts as his other examples. But it's not. Illogical. The people involved with the incidents absolutely knew who the other people were. The fact that you don't know them is somewhat irrelevant. It is nobody's burden of proof to demonstrate this to you. I have heard about a half a dozen accounts similar to this, and have known a few of these accounts where people were in them in the same fellowship. So I know at least one of the stories I heard the facts were corroborated by two separate people. I'm sure the people making the claims on this thread could track down some information, or maybe they couldn't. Either way, they don't seem to feel motivated or compelled to have to do that for YOU. I'm sure you'll take this to mean it's not proven. That is a very egocentric definition of proof. It has been proven TO OTHERS. The fact it has not been proven TO YOU is not really relevant to everyone else. They determine on their own whether or not they will believe the accounts. The only difference is that most will not state their beliefs in terms of "absolutes" and "facts" assumed to be incontrovertible. You have done this page after page. You see this is where I start to divurge from the whole scientific proof thing. It's kind of like whether or not people want to believe Jesus was raised from the dead. There is no conclusive proof. There's no proof of the ascencion. There's no proof of the new birth. And you have sincere people vehemently arguing against each one of these things. Yet God leaves it up to each individual's freedom of will to prove it to themselves, to believe it for themselves, to pursue it for themselves.