chockfull

I will say regardless of what people hold as the truth on this topic, the way we handled it in TWI was horrible. Referring to a refrigerator magnet may very well have been the only redeeming quality of that class. Yes we would hate for any new posts on this thread to languish around for hours until you are able to get to them.

So you are saying you believe SIT is a "languish" ??

The whole idea behind excellor session was basically ego and control. And it probably had to do more with expanding the hold over the cult member than anything else. The whole PFAL class (and BG Leonard's class where it was plagiarized from) was one class. Then split up into 3 classes. The middle class had to take up space. So IMO TWI took a lot of liberty with these things and designed another form of control - excellor sessions. For me, the jury is still out on nonreligious people. Samarin I note gave 4 examples - two of them by mediums/psychics speaking to their spirit guide, and the other two were personal incidents that were uncorroborated thus I can't give them any more weight than my own or socks experience on this thread where attendees in the meeting understood the tongue in their own language. Raf, no offense, but I just took the time to post a couple pages of direct references to Samarin. If you want to refute me, why do you expect everyone to hold to your opinion on the work rather than the work itself? The Bible addresses the topic. It is quite easy to see through basic common sense that if the elements of a language involve a person understanding the language directly, and someone does not understand the language, then it's pretty much plain ignorance to reach the conclusion it's not a language. That would be like a foreign exchange student coming to my house from France, and me saying since I don't understand French that he is illiterate.

OK. Suffice it to say that if there are a number of authors who quote Samarin simply to point out that his research and his conclusions are incongruent, that merits consideration. I mean I would have to have a lot of motivation to take the time to write an article to publish doing that. I completely disagree. Samarin, as a trained linguist, notes that glossa PHONETICALLY resembles a language. Now it may be your assessment that the relationship between phonetics and language are superficial, but it is not mine, and Samarin never states it that way. The only conclusion I'll draw from it is the same that Samarin notes in the detail of his article - that phonetically linguists find little to no difference between glossa and a natural human language. That is accurate. And it's pretty much in opposition to your $2 bill example.

Samarin continued: Next, Samarin delves into the meat of things - linguists / phonetics specialists definitions of attributes of a language. I don't want to retype all of them - they are found on p. 66 of the Samarin article - http://philosophy-religion.info/handouts/pdfs/Samarin-Pages_48-75.pdf I'll list the attributes for discussion sake (read the article for more detail): 1. Vocal-auditory channel 2. Directional reception 3. Rapid fading 4. Interchangeability 5. Complete feedback 6. Specialization 7. Semanticity 8. Arbitrariness 9. Discreteness 10. Displacement 11. Openness 12. Tradition 13. Duality (of patterning) 14. Prevarication 15. Reflexiveness 16. Learnability Samarin writes regarding glossa and these criteria ( I am typing out the references where he says glossa does NOT meet the criteria for a language): "Glossas, by this standard, are not human languages, primarily because they are not systems of communication. They are not characterized by semanticity (7), arbitrariness (8), displacement (10), prevarication (14) and reflexiveness (15). Semanticity - linguistic signals function in correlating and organizing the life of a community because there are associative ties between signal elements and features in the world Arbitrariness - the relationship between a meaningful element in a language and its denotation is independent of any physical or geometrical resemblance between the two. Displacement - Linguistic messages may refer to things remote in time or space, from the site of the communication Prevarification - Linguistic messages can be false, and they can be meaningless in the logician's sense. Reflexiveness - In a language, one can communicate about communication." First of all, if you take SIT at face value as for private prayer ("I pray with understanding, I pray in the spirit") then as described scripturally from my perspective it is NOT a system of communication between humans. It is human to God. So OK, Samarin, it's not a "human" language in that respect, as it doesn't function in correlating and organizing the life of a community like a native language does. For pretty much all of his other reasons listed, the sole reason they are valid is because whatever the language is spoken is NOT understood. If a tongue is not understood (and the other is not edified unless interpreted - as I Cor. 14 states), then how can you be certain scientifically whether or not the attributes of arbitrariness, displacement, prevarification, or reflexiveness are being met or not? How can you scientifically ascertain those elements not to be met unless you understood the content of the message? Or is Samarin simply running down a checklist to automatically say NO to those elements because he himself doesn't understand the tongue? To me that is NOT a rigorous or logical conclusion from a scientific perspective. It would be a more honest conclusion to say "unless or until the language is understood, we cannot ascertain whether it meets these criteria". Three things I'm starting to get as far as a picture of Samarin from reading: 1) The guy really is a linguist - he breaks down concepts and examples very well in terminology of his field 2) He really has a predisposition against SIT 3) I should nickname him "Captain Obvious" Well, read the next post of mine. It's circular logic. It doesn't meet the structural criteria because it's not understood. The elements of the structural criteria Samarin states it doesn't meet cannot be met unless the language is understood. I mean, for example - displacement - linguistic messages may refer to things remote in time or space. SIT never contains a reference to God? Never talk about the hope? Never refer to abstract concepts like love? Only if you don't believe the interpretation of those messages is genuine. http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0026068206/ref=dp_olp_used?ie=UTF8&condition=used $31 for Samarin's main work on the topic. Used. I don't know - maybe next paycheck if I'm still so inclined...

Another thing Samarin notes where glossas are different from language: Repetition. He states "on close examination glossas are different from natural language by being simple and repetitious". I'm not so sure that SIT messages being "simple and repetitious" are any indication that they are not a language. There are plenty of "simple and repetitious" messages present within the use of almost any language. Look at advertisements for example. Possibly the nature of the intended message is simple and repetitious? Like an uplifting message or praise, possibly repeated for emphasis?

More Samarin "If a glossa is meaningless, this does not mean it's gibberish. There is something onomatopoetic about the word 'gibber' that makes it incompatible with glossolalic utterances. The principal linguistic feature that distinguishes them from gibberish is the remarkable number of phonological units at various levels. Starting with the highest level, one finds macro segments (comparable to sentences), micro segments (comparable to words), syllables, and sound units (comparable to phonemes). The micro segments are separated from each other by pauses of greater or lesser duration and are characterized by certain configurations consisting of stress and pitch. ... (gives linguistic example) In other words, glossic syllables are not simply spewed out in a haphazard sort of way; there is in each glossa a kind of microsegmental syntax similar to natural languages" So when you dig into Samarin's scientific findings as a linguist, he finds that SIT / glossa pretty much has phonetically all the characteristics of a language. His conclusions seem to me to be that "it resembles a language, but it's not a language because nobody understands it". Samarin after all this research seems to me to state a whole lot of the obvious.

Next, getting to Samarin's main point. He states that glossolalia is "meaningless", and that is one of the big sources of his conclusions. By "meaningless" in his writings, he is mostly referring to the concept that the person speaking doesn't understand the words being said. This he uses as evidence that it is not a language.

Samarin's other examples of "non-Christian glossolalia": 1. A medium - Helene Smith - records 2 langauges in her spiritual conversations 2. Two other personal anecdotes - neither of which hold any more weight than socks experience on this thread

Another interesting fact from Samarin. In the cases he is examining where there is glossolalia among non-Christian participants, he submits one example as Albert LeBaron. LeBaron has recorded conversations with his "psychic automatism" where there are messages in another language and the interpretation of the language into English. He says there are a number of other examples. I haven't seen all of his other examples. I haven't even seen one of his complete works, only one article. Yet I would submit that LeBaron's "example" is something in quite a different category than "glossolalia". I will reserve judgement on the overall topic of "non-Christian glossolalia" until I have more of the direct sources cited.

Yes, the last time we tracked it down, it was Sherril quoting Samarin's published work, which we do not have a link to or a complete reference to. In that work, Samarin quoted linguists responses. Sherrill noted inconsistencies in what the linguists in Samarin's study observed and what Samarin himself concluded. I actually see parallels in issues with Samarin from the only published work we have an online link to - "The Linguistics of Glossalalia". For example, his basic definition of glossolalia: "A meaningless but phonologically structured human utterance believed by the speaker to be a real language, but bearing no systematic resemblance to any natural language, living or dead". Then immediately after his definition, where he includes what he says is 3 features that appear to be necessary in any definition of the phenomena, he says the first of these is this: "a phonological structure, (that is the kind of patterning of sound generally typical of real languages)which distinguish it from gibberish". So to me the guy is self-contradictory in his own definitions. He is choosing how to define this in his paper, and his definition says "bearing no systematic resemblance to any language", then in defining 3 key elements to glossolalia he states that the phonological structure is generally typical of real languages. Hold on there, ace. If it "sounds" like a language (in your scientific terminology), then it DOES bear a systematic resemblance to language. He makes no sense. It "sounds" like a language, but doesn't bear any resemblance to a language. Sorry, as Samarin stated, glossolalia actually DOES bear a resemblance to a language. Phonetically, it "sounds" like a language. That IS a resemblance. This type of inconsistency I think is what leads a number of other authors like Sherrill to write works criticizing Samarin. I myself have scarcely seen that kind of internal contradiction in a published study right in the same sentences of the definition of terms. It is very glaringly obvious to the point of where I have to question Samarin's bias towards finding glossolalia as not a language. Now if Samarin would have wrote that glossolalia "bears a strong resemblance phonetically to languages, but it is questionable as to the legitimacy of the meaning or interpretation of the utterance compared to language" he would have been more consistent even with his own logic.

Here is a reference that has collected thoughts from many sources - and has a decent bibliography: http://www.religioustolerance.org/tongues5.htm One interesting thing to note is in the billiography, it references 4 of Samarin's books, of which he wrote all in 1972-1973. The one we have a reference to in our thread: http://philosophy-religion.info/handouts/pdfs/Samarin-Pages_48-75.pdf - "The Linguisticality of Glossalalia", which was an article written for the Hartford Quarterly is not one of them. NOTE: Regarding Samarin, for me personally it is a little more difficult to get a handle on his work when we don't really have an online version of any of his full published books. Many of our quoted sources refer to him.

I'm all for letting a man's words judge him.

And later on, to complete the irony, Martindale drops at least one guy from the Corps for doing exactly this.

The interpretation part of the study quoted by this guy is absolutely wrong to me because SIT and it's interpretation according to instructions in I Cor. 14 NEVER talk about having one person SIT and to go down the line asking a bunch of people to interpret it. If these manifestations are spiritual then you have to do them according to the instructions, or they won't work right. You can't game God on this stuff. And you can't rule out that as a matter of course, the first guy interpreting had the genuine message and the other guys down the line were making it up. I mean, I could get bogus results on the revelation manifestations by doing things wrong too. All I would have to do is picture a cookie jar and put tons of mental effort into God revealing to me something about a situation. I could sit there for years and decades and have the same experience - no power from God. So the guy's conclusion is that you can't get anything cognitively out of tongues, but you can get a lot out of the emotion of the speaker and voice inflection? What a crock!!!! And these are representative of the types of studies that I'm supposed to believe "absolutely prove that SIT doesn't produce a language?" I don't think so.

Your analogy doesn't sound silly to me. Of course if Paul's SIT had substantial elements different from modern day SIT, then that would give you scientific relief. But it causes doctrinal problems. If I can do everything Paul and the Bible instructs regarding SIT, and God does not come through with power from His end, then wouldn't that make God a respecter of persons? Even further, can we trust scripture then? If it doesn't produce what it says when you act on it, it has no more value than any other book. Paul himself had critics on the day of Pentecost, people who saw the miracle right before their eyes, and chose to get up on a platform and cry out that these guys were drunk with new wine. What's to say that you guys aren't the same thing in modern days? As I asked you before, if you want me to believe I'm using sugar and Paul used salt, you are going to have to provide some kind of logical explanation. Why would SIT no longer work now, when it did then? What changed between the first century and now? If that changed, how can you be certain that other things in the Bible that are available still are? Do promises of God come with an expiration date? Oh, and also, there are some studies again which say glossolalia does not produce language, there are others that contradict that and say that it does. Samarin himself uses linguists that don't arrive at his same conclusions. His linguists did NOT conclude that glossolalia was definitely NOT a language. Only Samarin. There are other sources that disagree with him.

Either statement is fine. They aren't the limiting factor. For me, the convincing part involves an element of faith - of trusting God and acting. And an element of logic, both scripturally and scientifically. I mean, sometimes facts and logic can't get you all the way there. What do I mean? Well, for example, Euclidean geometry. Everything there is derived from 3 postulates - point, line, and plane. Those are reasonable postulates that pretty much nobody will refute. So we be-bop on our merry way living life and designing things based upon Euclid's theorems. But then Einstein comes along, and asks "what happens when you try to apply all these principles as you are approaching the speed of light?" And things change. Lines, planes distort into curves, objects. The seemingly solid postulates don't hold up in that environment. I want the science, the logic, the proofs, the objective analysis. But I still realize that all this is the surmising of ants in a very large universe, all created by God.

I'm not inclined to make that argument of "it can't be disproven so it must be so". I would be more inclined to reach a doctrinal position that is relatively sound and logical and use that (at least for myself) as a basis or augmentation of personal proof. That and just pray and trust direction will be there. All of your roadblocks you are highlighting remind me of Thomas Edison. Just 990 more experiments and you'll discover the light bulb. Or if we can't we'll at least be a lot more educated on the topic :)

Yes, that's the challenge. The embarrassment and exposure. Those are real considerations. Also, what would it do to community/professional areas? Those reasons would be very real ones to consider using a pen name. Like "Sky Rider". That way the people who know or could figure out know. And the rest be-bop around blissfully ignorant of who you are, preserving current day relationships. All awesome.

Yeah, well it didn't work. I've encountered a few with the real disease that probably would have been better off at an AA meeting than a fellowship. Just by common sense, the folks at AA are much better equipped to handle the disease than your average fellowship coord. in TWI (or even you non-average - Corps / clergy / whatever). TWI provides NO training AT ANY LEVEL on dealing with the disease of alchoholism. Hypocritically, he was largely governed by his Baptist upbringing there. VP would do moonshine at a night owl. Craig would never. He should have stuck with his Baptist upbringing on sex.

What I'm starting to see is that a lot of the position taken by people on whether or not "tongues of angels" has any leeway for being interpreted as different than a human language has to do with their views on some of the prayer related verses surrounding SIT where it is not explicitly stated as tongues. Like Rom. 8. I personally am not 100% either way on that one currently. I'm kind of approaching it on two fronts - one is Biblical/doctrinal. The other is scientific / practical. I'm doing the best I can to put posts in the right place for that, but probably still failing. So for me, if discussing SIT drives me to a bottle of beer, what does that do for my salvation? Just asking. Allan, "free vocalization" is the term a bunch of scientists came up with in the studies we are reading. I don't have a major issue with the term. SIT is literally "glossa" = "laleo" - "tongues" + "speaking without reference to the words being said". So I view those terms interchangeably so I can have a conversation with many on it. SIT, glossolalia, free vocalization. The distinction I have internally currently is that studies describing "free vocalization" are showing people doing similar things (at least they appear similar to all scientific and senses evaluation) whether or not they claim to be inspired by God. So by sheer logic, if SIT works like the Bible describes, then whatever the nonbelievers are doing probably can't be energized spirit. So they are doing the exact same thing, or something real similar without the spirit of God being involved at all. Raf, I'll get to Sherrill later today - I'm a bit slammed earlier.

Well, by your logic and application of the figure hyperbole, I'm sure your interpretation of those verses is that Paul was saying to have as much sex as possible and that only women should preach in the church. That would be consistent with your interpretation of "I would you all spoke with tongues". It means the opposite, right? Because Paul was reproving them and their attitude wasn't right? It's funny how people only see pride in others but miss it obnoxiously sticking out of their own persona. Here again, like scripture says, why don't you worry about your own issues? You are not the matron of gentleness, tolerance and kindness that you view yourself to be. Wow - now look who's getting nasty. That's OK - I've faced this kind of thing plenty before. People don't want to address their illogic, and if you persist bringing it up to them all they do is get more angry with you. I'm a little more direct with you because you run over people. And I'm not surprised that you are going to stay as far as you can away from people who SIT. People will go to extreme lengths to avoid that within themselves that they need to change. And they will do it acting as pious and Christian as you please, all the while the rabid anger is rising up within them. And they look for anything else around them to blame except themselves. I don't need to defend my faith to you. And I'm having a fine time on this thread discussing in a rational matter the topic with other people who aren't as mad as you.

I ran across another reference - The Psychology of Speaking in Tongues by John Kildahl: http://www.amazon.ca/psychology-speaking-tongues-John-Kildahl/dp/B000GRFWIW/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1350325467&sr=8-2 This is an out of print book published I think in 1972. It's reviews call it "devastating to Pentecostals" so I am gathering that it negates SIT scientifically. Reviews also state that the psychology portion of it is very insightful and has been established w more since then.

The difference in my views are that I hold the Romans 8:24 reference to be a non-Trinitarian interpretation, and the "groans that cannot be uttered" to me are describing private prayer life. As such, I would not limit the communication between myself and God to need to be in the language of a person on earth. That could support a "tongues of angels" type interpretation.

Next Moore gets into what I call "Jehova's Witness" territory. He claims that if you are doing something yourself that God didn't recommend, you could be possessed. This is great logic for introducing fear around the subject into the reader, and moves pretty far away from any scientific analysis. Suffice it to say any person can refute this and probably does daily. For example, I do things probably on a daily basis God doesn't recommend (probably and hypothetically). There's a lot more things God says I should do that I don't. This is called "being human". This is not going to get me possessed by the spirit of Dr. Pepper. (or whatever). Come on, Moore. Can we move beyond the tribal superstition "booga booga" mindset here? The section after this one is Are the tongues of 1 Corinthians different than the tongues in Acts? For this section it brings up theological arguments I have never heard before, and thus I learned a lot. Many sociologists and theologians bring up differences between Cor. and Acts in what they were doing. Honestly never thought of that before, but it's important to consider if there is a lot of mainstream Christian attention on it.