Raf

Holy cow.

Mocking my comments does not discredit them. If you're familiar with a phoneme, you can incorporate it into SIT without a supernatural explanation. That is perfectly sound logic, and to treat it as a "gotcha" makes no sense. Of COURSE you can incorporate phonemes you're aware of, even if they're part of a language you don't speak. The issue is you're aware of them, and this is in the literature. It's not "made up" to account for anything. If two languages share a phonemic inventory, and a sample of SIT fits that inventory, then it should be a piece of cake to determine whether the SIT matches any of those languages. So far, hasn't happened. Still waiting. Not holding my breath. Assuming you are correct and there are languages that share phonemic inventories, dandy! We still have ZERO documented examples of SIT producing a known language (barring unverifiable anecdotes whose participants are conveniently a. anonymous and b. half a world away). You can ask for the checklist that you've already reviewed many times, if you'd like. I don't see why you're arguing with me on a point on which we agree: the "what makes it a language" checklist did not apply to our discussion. You are correct. Now you want me to prove that you're right? Why? For you to accuse me of "making it up..." damn, bro, that's false and you KNOW it. Especially after I just agreed with you on the subject. I didn't make up jack, and I can't help it if you don't remember the very checklists we discussed and agreed were irrelevant to our discussion. That's YOUR faulty memory, not mine. Do not accuse me of making s* up just because your memory failed. Convenient. Cop out, though. Sorry, it is. It is exactly the kind of explanation you expect from someone trying to explain why you should not expect to find evidence for your claim. It's the dragon in the garage principle. "I have a dragon in my garage." Oh yeah? Let me see it. "It's invisible." Ok. Let me feel it. Let's throw a blanket over it or something. "It's incorporeal. That won't work." Fine, let's use infrared. "That won't work either. It's non-thermal." Joo no, I's starting to sink joo no has a dragon in joo garage. [Concept stolen from Carl Sagan]. Look, you make a testable claim, and then when someone tests it, you start going through logical somersaults to avoid the test. It's not a human language. The connection is shut off when people are watching. It's non-thermal. Meanwhile, the people being recorded don't think they're faking it when they're doing it "while you are filming," which means by your definition they are faking it without realizing they are faking it, which is exactly my thesis in the first place. I say we all did that and you're all doing it! Not that you lack sincerity. Not that you're bad people. You're just not doing anything supernatural. If you were, you'd be producing languages. You're not, because you're not. So, to mix humor from another thread, maybe it's time for people to get out of the Nile!

See if I've got this right. The Bible can say "THIS HAPPENED!" And when we look for the evidence that this happened and see quite clearly that it did not (there was no global flood, there was no exodus of 2 million plus people from Egypt), we can say definitively THIS DID NOT HAPPEN. And that doesn't undermine the credibility of the Bible's central thesis? Wha-wha-what? Are you for real? I can understand Jonah and Job, but Genesis and Exodus are kind of crucial. If they didn't literally happen, Israel has no articulated claim to be "chosen" and man has no need for a redeemer. In the context of testing the God hypothesis, if a claim is made that God did ABC, and we are able to definitively determine that ABC never happened, then the hypothesis fails. So yes, that DOES disprove the existence of the Christian God. At the very least, it disproves that the people who made the claims were speaking for Him. Without those claims, there is nothing to support the assertions of the later people who claim to be speaking for Him, all of whom relied on the authority of the of those who spoke for Him before. Moses never existed. He's as much a part of Israeli history as Paul Bunyan is a part of American history. This isn't some trivial distinction.

"The Bible says there is a river Nile in Egypt." Seriously? SFW!? The Hobbit says there were men on earth. That doesn't make it a history textbook, nor does it mean Sauron exists!

By all means, bring on the "future."

Yes, it sounds like that. At first I thought You were making the old "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" claim. I see now that you were not. Good. You see, if an assertion is made that leads one to conclude that evidence should exist, but that evidence does not exist, that is evidence that the assertion is not true. It's not PROOF, but it is CERTAINLY evidence. If I told you my house burned to the ground yesterday and you went to my house and did not see the charred remains of what used to be a standing structure, but instead saw a house that was still standing, you could safely conclude that I lied. If I told you a snowstorm kept me from leaving Fort Lauderdale on May 13, 1986, and you checked weather reports from May 13, 1986 and found no evidence that it snowed that day or any day before or after, then you could safely conclude that I lied. And if I told you that 5,000 to 10,000 years ago the human race was reduced to 8 people, but genetic research revealed no bottleneck that severe, or anywhere within 15,000 years of that time period, you could safely conclude that's an actual error. Come. On. People.

What I mean is, I made a fairly straightforward comment. If the human race was bottlenecked to 8 people at the time of the Flood, genetic research would show it. I never said there have been no bottlenecks ever in the entire history of the human race. My comment has to be taken in context. If the human race bottlenecked to 1,200 people 40,000 years ago, that's fascinating, but it has f-all to do with the flood account in Genesis. So if your rebuttal to my comment does not support a Genesis-era bottleneck bringing the human race down to 8 people, then in the obvious context of this discussion, it is irrelevant. See, this is why I get so painstakingly nitpicky in some of my posts. Because people strain at every single sentence, often out of context, to disprove an assertion not being made.

Why would I cite a study that doesn't exist? Come on, this is trolling, not dialogue!

So in response to my post saying genetic research shows no evidence of a bottleneck of 8 people in a flood that took place 5,000 years ago, you cite an event that meets neither criteria. Come on guys, seriously?

The way it works is, you make an assertion, you prove it. You don't send somebody else to prove the assertion that you're making. In other words, you Google it. I am looking forward to evidence that the human race was bottlenecked by 8 people roughly 5,000 years ago. Give or take 5,000 years.

Maybe I'm not looking hard enough, but I don't see a clear distinction drawn between "evidence" and "proof." Anecdotes ARE evidence by definition, but not all evidence is reliable. Joseph Smith said he translated the golden plates. Other people close to him swore they watched him do it, sort of. Those are anecdotes. That they're also horse hit is obvious to even the most gullible of people. But ask a Mormon. A smart one. One who has shown genuine ability in the real world requiring brains. Like Mitt Romney. He buys the evidence. And can anyone of us prove it didn't happen? You were there? Huh? Huh? More later.

I went looking for this post and was pleased to find it. It outlines why I believe the word "tongues" and the word "languages" are interchangeable in the context of this subject. Tongues in the Bible were always known human languages, whether or not they were understood by the speaker or audience.

Honest and for true, I'm trying not to get sucked back into ALL of what we already previously hashed out and left unresolved, but... My memory may be flawed, but I think part of the difficulty regarding "criteria" had to do with the fact that the criteria were inadequate to the question we were asking. That is, "SIT by definition is not used by one person to communicate with another person. Language is. Therefore, SIT is not language." Heck, even I can see the flaw in that logic, so I refuse to make the "criteria" argument without listing the criteria in question, some of which are simply not applicable because when we're talking about SIT, we're not talking about people communicating with each other. This goes back to what I discussed earlier with phonemic inventory, which does use the expertise of linguists with the express purpose of seeking to determine whether a person practicing SIT is producing a known language. The logic goes like this: Every language has a distinct phonemic inventory. Every SIT sample has a distinct phonemic inventory. Conceivably, we should be able to take the phonemic inventory of SIT and match it to a known language, THEN determine whether the actual words and sentences match the language. Presto! Evidence! It doesn't happen. Time and again, when such things have been studied, the phonemic inventory comes back to the speaker's native language, with allowances made for phonemes the person has encountered (Chappy Chanukah!). English speakers who SIT produce rearranged English phonemes, not distinct languages. Likewise for Spanish, French, etc. Chockfull's shower time notwithstanding. Yes, we can anticipate that not every SIT will be matched to a particular language. The SIT may match the phonemic inventories of multiple languages (the longer the sample, the fewer matches). But again, this goes back to something I said earlier: WE ONLY NEED ONE CONFIRMED MATCH OF SIT-TO-LANGUAGE FOR ME TO BE WRONG. One. A. Single. Match. There are plenty of reasons to expect that a particular sample won't match a language. There is no logical reason to think that hundreds, thousands of people SIT on a regular basis and no one can verify it except -- exclusively -- through tales of long ago involving people we conveniently can't find anymore. Here's a good rule of thumb: If you wouldn't accept an argument in defense of a competing religion's claims, do not expect me to accept the same argument in defense of SIT.

My Girl Jamie Lee Curtis Halloween

Before he married Lillith, and before he met Diane, Frasier was married to a children's entertainer named Nanny G, who shows up in three episodes, each time played by a different actress. The last incarnation was a super-horny Laurie Metcalf, who delivered the line in question on the last season of "Frasier." And yes, Kelsey Grammer was finishing his 20th season playing Frasier by that time (nine on Cheers, 11 on his own show). Which means you're up.

Imagine for a moment an empty glass. Saying it's half-full is faith. Saying it's half empty is incomplete. Saying it's empty is not fear. It is not doubt. It is not negative or pessimistic. It's an empty glass. Now I want you to imagine... there's no glass.

In a 2004 episode of this popular series, a character named "Nanny G." (a children's entertainer who's not a main character on the show) looks at her ex-husband (who IS a main character on the show) and says, " Do you know what it's like to play the same character for twenty years?" The audience got a big laugh out of that, with good reason.

Oh, I guess I'm up. Ish.

Nick Stahl Terminator 3: Fall of a Franchise Claire Danes

No shoehorn necessary! I think MY bottom line is that there are so many natural explanations that a supernatural explanation is by definition less plausible. But we can disagree. Wouldn't be the first time.

I could be mistaken, but I do believe we are not dealing with people who have no familiarity with the English language. Sorry. Think about it. They have literally sat through hours and hours and hours of information presented in English and translated for them, information that they are religiously interested in. SIT is what, two sentences? If someone told you this story to support Islam you would reject it before they reached the h in Allah. The natural explanations are all more plausible than "they spoke in tongues and it was English." 1. They knew more English than they let on. 2. They practiced, knowing they would be in the USA. 3. Someone's fibbing about the whole story. Knowing nothing else, I think a combination of 1 and 2 fits the facts quite neatly. By the way, whatever happened to "no man understandeth"? Is that only applicable in firsthand situations? Sorry, I had to. I know, I said I'd shut up. But I didn't expect a whole new anecdote when I said that.

And no motive to lie there!

Wait, THEY WERE IN THE ADVANCED CLASS? In Ohio? In... French?

Ok, so some men from Zaire who did not know English were in a believers meeting in the USA, which was in English? And they, not knowing English, spoke in tongues and it was English. And we do not know who these African visitors were or where they are now. Somewhere in the DRC. And we know they didn't know English because why would two foreign born followers of TWI visiting the USA and attending a believers meeting possibly have any prior familiarity with the English language? Got it

I'm not challenging your anecdote. I'm just trying to get it straight so that I understand it properly: Two people who you know // were in a meeting in Zaire// and they saw men who speak French and a native African language.// One of those men spoke in tongues and it was English. And you're no longer in touch with the two people that you know.So I guess it's knew. Have I got that right?