Raf

Apologies for projecting my frustration onto you, Bolsh. I stand by my comment, but not the snark. I still had Dr. Frasier Crane on my mind and I projected that frustration on to you. You did not deserve that.

Did you review the video? Because that's why I posted it. You choose the words "bullying" and "tough love" and that somehow binds me to accept one or the other if SIT is proved true? That's nonsense. Do you know how to argue your point? Because it seems to me you really, really don't. If SIT is true, then it's persuasion. If it's not true, it's persuasion. That is not bullying. You can make the argument that it's manipulation, if you insist on being negative. But it's neither bullying nor "tough love." I don't even think it's necessarily malicious. I mean, I don't accuse these people of not believing the crap they're selling. I just think they're selling crap. They're almost certainly sincere. But it's not about them. They're not liars. They don't realize they're teaching free vocalization and calling it SIT. Listen to JAL. He is CONVINCED it's a language. That's nice. It's not a language. Saying it is doesn't make it so. Blaming the devil for your recognition that it's in your head doesn't make it the devil's fault. Produce a language or we have nothing to argue (well, we could argue whether a language should be the expected result, but we've already been there and back again on that subject too. You're welcome to try).

The evidence didn't change. My understanding of and analysis of the evidence changed. STOP MAKING THE THREAD ABOUT ME. The evidence was the same 20 years ago that it is today. You are not my shrink, you are not my counselor, and you are not my friend. Your faux psychoanalysis is not accurate and is not welcome. It's rude and you need to stop. Got it, pal? Knock it the f- off. I've outlined my reasons for changing my mind, and those reasons do not include being hurt by a cult. You may want to stay stuck in the cult mindset, defending doctrine, evidence-be-damned, but I am free. This is the last time I'm going to be remotely polite about those of you who have chosen to make this thread about your amateur and incompetent armchair psychology of me. The last time. Evidence will change my mind. Nothing will change yours. You're being the stubborn ones here, not me. This thread is about SIT. If you want to start a thread about RAF, you are welcome not to. Thanks.

P.S. I changed my mind about SIT years before I changed my mind about God, so I would sincerely appreciate it if you would stop trying to mix the two issues, because they are not related. And I've said that multiple times. And your continued insistence on mixing the two issues makes your debate tactic dishonest. And I'm tired of defending my position against dishonest arguments. P.P.S. I'm not atheist because I was in a cult. I'm atheist because I concluded that the evidence for a god is lacking. It's not because Wictoh Pao Wiewille huwt mah feewings. It's because when I look at god claims, I do not see substantiation that I find compelling. If I were to say the only reason you're still a theist is because a cult damaged your critical thinking skills beyond repair, you would be insulted. So understand, when you say I'm an atheist because a cult hurt me, the only appropriate thing to do afterward is wipe it and flush. Because that's what that comment is.

I did not have a "bad experience" with SIT. I had the same experience you had: Wanted it to be true, faked it and later realized it was a three-dollar bill. The only difference between your experience and mine is that I admit it. There IS something you can say or show me to prove that SIT is possible. Document the language you produce in front of a disinterested third party. That's what kills me. You guys are acting like I'm the stubborn one, when I'm the only one who has said over and over and over again that evidence will change my mind. Can you say the same? If I showed you that it could be faked, how it could be faked, how it could be done without the person involved realizing it was being faked, what the product of fake SIT would look like, that it looks exactly like what you produce, if I even got you to admit while trying to refute me that it was possible for someone to THINK they were speaking in tongues but have the "spiritual connection" turned off and thus be faking it without realizing it BY YOUR OWN ACCOUNT, would you THEN believe that maybe, just maybe, you aren't producing what the Bible says you should be producing, which is a language? Because I've covered my end of that deal. But none of you who insist I'm the stubborn one has produced actual evidence that you're producing the Biblical result of SIT, which is a language. So spare me the "nothing's going to change your mind, Raf" trope, because it's demonstrable nonsense. Produce a language, prove it (and that means not using a decades-old anecdote involving anonymous people half a world away as "proof") and I will change my mind. You won't change your mind under any circumstances. I think I'm not the one being stubborn here.

Another cool video (not affiliated past or present with TWI). I really started paying attention around 13:20, where he talks about Pride being a stumbling block. You wouldn't want to be proud, would you? “Pride keeps people from praying in tongues, because they’re afraid of how they might appear.” You wouldn't want to be afraid, would you? "Stop being afraid that it's not God." "Don't fight it." "Let the sound come out." "Don't overthink it." Notice how much time is spent getting you to overcome your fear of SIT. Why would anyone be afraid of speaking in tongues? Seriously, are you afraid of dessert? Are you afraid of your favorite meal? Why would anyone be afraid of SIT? I'll tell you what they're afraid of: when it's time to start, nothing's going to happen until they make a decision to fake it, and these teachers lay some pretty decent groundwork convincing people that they're not faking it before they even start speaking. That's how you get people to fake it without realizing they're faking it. You convince them that the fake is the real thing. Except, of course, the product is not a language. But hey! 9,000 dialects, PLUS the tongues of angels, right JAL?

Special emphasis on timestamp 3:05. Boy, when a man of God tells you that your doubts are of the devil, the sure helps you overcome them inhibitions, don't it? (Ignore the creepy guy on the left, who's there to make fun of JAL. Or enjoy him. I don't care). For those who don't know, the speaker in the video is John Lynn, former hoity toity for TWI. What he teaches is pretty much what TWI taught. It's where he learned it.

B, I appreciate your comments and thank you for them. There's a lot to unpack on the subject of healing, arguments that are out of place on this particular thread. I'm sure you picked up that I was drawing a parallel about how claims are defended, not seeking to debunk faith healing on a thread that's not about faith healing.

Here's how it works: You make a claim, you have to prove it. That works for history as well. It IS somewhat different in that field, as in history, you can never know for certain every detail of what happened, but you can make logical determinations of what most likely happened. So I'll never rely on history to prove a miracle did not happen (because the method is biased against it). BUT! If you say a miracle took place that came after 10 other miracles that resulted in the exodus of a.5 million people from Egypt at a certain time period, and there is no historical record of such an exodus (and the story conveniently fails to pinpoint the name of a Pharoah during which this would have happened) and there's no record of the loss of the army in the Red Sea and no trace of a million or so people living for 40 years in the wilderness near... you start to get the picture. The events recorded in Genesis and Exodus would have left evidence behind. Not small traces of evidence either. Big ones. Like evidence of a worldwide flood. Or evidence of a regional flood large enough to land a boat on the mountains of Ararat. No such flood. So please, don't come here and throw your illogical comments at me and then accuse me of being small minded because I go where the evidence takes me and you refuse to. The argument that A didn't result in B, so C won't result in D is invalid if A never happened in the first place. And if you can't establish that it did, then the failure is YOURS, not mine. Back to topic (from which you are desperately and transparently trying to deflect): Demonstrate the language you're producing or STFU.

Methinks you're trusting fictional accounts of things that never happened above actual historical accounts and records of things that did. Tell me, on what basis do you dismiss the accounts of the history of the western hemisphere contained in the Book of Mormon? Apply the same reasoning, and you HAVE to conclude that Genesis and Exodus, at the very least, were works of fiction (not all of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles, though. Some of that likely did happen). But if you're going to cite signs miracles and wonders as proof, it'd be best not to use those contained in debunked histories of events that never took place.

The musical episode was fantastic.

T-Bone, you were not off topic, to the best of my knowledge. By the way, does anyone still have a copy of RTHST or the Green Book? I'm interested in reviewing the "How to Speak in Tongues" chapters.

I was going over the original posts that resurrected this thread after two years of dormancy, and I wanted to address this one. The numbers were not included in the post being quoted. I added them for convenience of reference. Ok, so here we go: 1. The feelings you experience during SIT are subjective, and you experience because you want to. The Bible doesn't promise "chills," good or bad, when you SIT. The presence of chills is a psychological result of the fact that you believe you are doing something that connects you to God. That you feel it doesn't prove or disprove it. That someone practicing free vocalization DOESN'T experience those things is a result of the fact that such a person is not expecting or even desiring such things. You can get "spiritual insights" walking your doggie. That doesn't make dog-walking a manifestation of the spirit. 2. I doubt anyone would do a brain scan of people practicing free vocalization because ... why? I know we talked at length about the brain studies in the original thread where we hashed these things out, but the bottom line is this: When you are practicing free vocalization, you are not pre-thinking the sounds you will make. You don't really have to. You just go and let the syllables fly. The brain scans of people speaking in tongues show they are not using the language centers of the brain. No kidding. You would only do that if you were pre-thinking the sounds. You're not pre-thinking the sounds in SIT. So the result SOUNDS like "they're not making it up," but that's an incorrect extrapolation. They ARE just making it up. They're just not pre-thinking the sounds. I agree with you: I would expect the brain scans of people practicing free vocalization to be identical to those professing to speak in tongues. As for whether actors or practitioners of other religions experiencing the same effects you feel... I think I answered that in point 1. There is no reason, none, to believe that the effects you describe are anything but psychosomatic. 3. Most of this is doctrinal, except that last line. If Paul spoke in tongues privately, then it's possible that people speaking in tongues today are still practicing Biblical SIT. I agree. It's possible. If they're producing a language. If they are not producing a language, it is not Biblical SIT. Biblical SIT was always a language. Whether it was identified or not, it was always a language. Tongues are languages. You cannot speak in tongues without producing a language. So the fact that people do it privately doesn't invalidate it. The fact that they're not producing languages invalidates it. I know, I know, no one has proved these are not languages. Fine. But the failure to ever identify an actual language in any sample of SIT argues against the notion that languages are routinely being produced but disinterested observers are NEVER able to spot them, ever (except, of course, for anonymous people who are conveniently now half a world away). 4. A doctrinal question, but briefly: Have you given ANY consideration to the idea that you might maybe be misinterpreting Paul? That he was not writing to Christians who would be living 2000 years after he wrote but to the actual recipients of his letters? Or is it possible that he wishes you would all speak in tongues, but he somehow forgot to tell anyone HOW, and we were all taught a counterfeit method we embraced because we wanted it to be true? On a separate note, you asked in a related post for an example of how someone can fake doing something without realizing they were faking it. I don't know if you realize it, but PFAL taught us exactly how to do that. Here are the ingredients: A - Sincere and intense desire to do it. B - Indoctrination into its availability. C - Tearing down of inhibitions that would block you from faking it (a group setting was REAL handy for this). D - Social reinforcement. We're all with ya! E - (and this one is crucial) Dispel doubt at the beginning, or BEFORE the beginning, by equating doubt with unbelief and devilishness. VOILA! For those of us who shared a similar experience, we probably DID know from the very first moment that we were faking it. But we were told repeatedly beforehand that doubt, worry and fear issue from unbelief and were of the devil. We were told immediately that the thoughts we were having (that we were faking it) was the devil trying to talk us out of it. You wouldn't want the devil to win, would you? Besides, no one gets left out. You wouldn't want to be the one who got left out, would you? I don't know how you started SIT, but regardless, if you're not producing a language, you're not speaking in tongues. No matter how it makes you feel. [Yes, I am aware that not everyone had the same "first SIT" experience. My post answers a question of how people could fake it without knowing it. That anyone had a different first SIT experience is beside the point in answering that question].

Really, really think about this logically. If you knew for a FACT that God parted the Red Sea FOR YOU, and YOU walked across it, seeing the sea on both sides of you failing to crash down on you as you walked across on dry land, would you EVER doubt God again? Yet they did. This is not logical. It's just not. If the signs, miracles and wonders God performed for Israel weren't enough to get them to believe, what makes anyone think they actually happened? Their failure to believe in the face of such overwhelming confirmation is a characteristic of fiction, not history. Israel failed to believe because the plot required them to. Do yourself a favor. Go read Judges, particularly the section on Samson. Read it slowly, as history. Remember these are real people in a story that actually happened. When you're done, ask yourself... What kind of UTTER MORON is Samson? I mean, just how stupid do you have to be? This whole "if Israel didn't believe after signs and wonders, Raf won't believe if SIT is confirmed with an actually produced language verified by an independent third party" is based on a false premise -- that the experience of Israel being cited is true. It's not. It's no more true than Perseus beheading the Gorgon. It's no more true than Joseph Smith translating the golden plates. It's no more true than Muhammad mounting a flying horse and taking off for heaven. Citing the example of these stories as if they are history to prove that I would not accept the result of the objective testing of a testable claim is just a way of chickening out of testing the claim. If you had real faith in the claim, you wouldn't hesitate to test it. Instead you redefine the claim to make it untestable.

Bolshevik, I don't disagree with you, but I submit that different conversations are taking place here. Yours is honest and intellectual. TLC's is trolling. So I'm hesitant to explain myself to you because I'm tired of the way comments are taken out of context by other participants (TLC) to deflect from the main point of this thread. Proving the supernatural does not prove God. But it's a significant step. So if I oversimplified it, mea culpa. The point remains the same. Biblical SIT would prove the supernatural. Because it fails to do so, people feel the need to redefine Biblical SIT. Oh, it's not a known language (yes it is). It's tongues of angels (no, it's not). It has been proven numerous times (no, it hasn't). It hasn't been disproven (it doesn't have to be. It has to be proven). Blah blah blah. I think there's a big difference between ... wanting to believe something, taking a step, getting encouraged by a bunch of people who want the same and best for you, you believe God, you want to please him, and folks are telling you that your doubts are of the devil, so you believe it and it gets easier and easier and easier and you're constantly reinforced by people who love God and love each other that it's a real and beautiful thing ... and lying. I agree with you on the SIT argument. Disease? "I'm a faith healer." (No, you're not). "The Bible says I am." (Ok, fine, let's head to the hospital and take care of some folks). "It doesn't work that way." (Oh for Pete's sake...)

I meant to imply I WAS caught up on Supergirl.

No, a million bucks does not make you a better person. Sheesh, it's like you deliberately miss the point of the significance of objectively proving the supernatural. Like that's some small, insignificant feat. There were no signs, miracles and wonders given to Israel. Those are made up stories, as reality-based as the myths of Perseus, Pandora, Hercules and Icarus. To call them miracles is to call them history, and they are not history. The evidence that would be there if they WERE history doesn't exist, and it is not merely an absence of evidence, but evidence of absence. And, uh, yeah, proof of the supernatural -- objective, indisputable proof -- would actually "end" atheism, since lack of belief in the supernatural based on lack of evidence for it is a major reason people are atheist. It all boils down to this: You are making a claim, Speaking in Tongues. All I'm asking you to do is prove your claim, and all you're doing is coming up with one excuse after another why you can't. You can't prove your claim because your claim is false. You're faking it. You KNOW you're faking it at this point. But for some reason it makes you feel better to act as if the burden of proving you're faking it is mine and what difference does it make anyway. It makes all the difference between having confidence that you are doing what God promised you can do (which has Biblical definitions and logical repercussions) or you knowing full well that you're faking it as surely as I was. I'm done arguing with nonsensical arguments. Document your language or STFU already.

I'm only behind on that Flash episode and three behind on Legends. Arrow... haven't caught the 2nd half of the season.

Okay.

Ok. I still have "Star Crossed" to watch for Supergirl, and I'm two episodes behind on Legends. Have not started Iron Fist yet. But for the record: High marks to Daredevil season 1 and season 2, Jessica Jones and Luke Cage. Even if Iron Fist ends up being a weak link, The Defenders looks like it stands every chance of being a winner.

Far behind on Arrow. SHIELD... let's just say I'm looking forward to catching it on Netflix. Not watching powerless. Should I regret that?

My name begins with the letter R. Disagreeing with the premise that my name begins with the letter R results in wrong conclusions. I don't see how you can disagree with the premise that my name begins with R. But if that's what you choose to do, I'm not going to stop you. However, if you expect me to somehow agree to disagree on whether my name begins with R, and allow your conclusions to carry equal weight with my conclusions, then no. My conclusions are based on the fact that my name begins with R, and your conclusions are wrong. If you insist on maintaining that position, FINE. I have no reason to argue with it. But ok. Now, you come along and say my name doesn't begin with R, and that it's small minded of me to fail to see things your way, and I'm just going to give you funny looks and tell you your premise is nonsense. Because my name starts with R. There's really no debate about it, and your false premise does not carry the same weight as my premise, which is supported by the evidence.

TBone, the Disney Cruise was the best, wasn't it? I enjoyed the bejezus out of my family's!

It's almost impossible to believe this is an honest question. What good would it do to objectively prove the supernatural? He seriously asked that question. First off, it would win the person who proved it a million bucks. Secondly, it would in all likelihood end atheism for good. Other than that, can't think of a thing. How can anyone take this question seriously? "What practical difference" would it make. Sheesh.

That's nice, but there is no evidence, not even the tiniest scrap, that you're doing anything that you cannot do with your own ability. You can credit God if you want. You can credit Stan Lee or Siegel and Schuster for all I care. But until you produce something that cannot be explained naturally, then the fact that it impresses you only shows that you're easily impressed. You are not doing anything I didn't do when I faked it. Because you're faking it too. If you weren't, you'd be producing a language. You're not. So you're not.