Raf

Source: http://www.cortright.org/sit.htm

So, if I'm hearing you right, you don't want someone to just drop the list right into the middle of a sente The Benefits of Speaking In Tongues: To edify you - 1 Corinthians 14:4, Jude 20 To speak to God divine secrets - 1 Corinthians 14:2 To speak the wonderful works of God - Acts 2:11 To magnify God - Acts 10:46 To pray perfectly - Romans 8:26,27 To give thanks well - 1 Corinthians 14:17 To have the Spirit bearing witness with our spirit - Romans 8:16 To know you are a joint-heir with Christ - Romans 8:17 To strengthen you with might in your inner man - Ephesians 3:16 To be a sign to unbelievers - 1 Corinthians 14:22; Mark 16:17 Rest to the soul - Isaiah 28:11,12; 1 Corinthians 14:21

Really? That's your takeaway from the story? Just wow.

Well, now, someone HAS to post it now!

I had to dig up my copy of The Cult That Snapped by Karl Kahler, one of the best biographical treatments of TWI out there (because it blends a reporter's gathering of information with his personal experiences). It had to be 2000 or 2001 when I got the book. p.28 (his first time taking PFAL) p. 54 Reading those words, and later conflating them (though I'm certain Karl would agree that such a conflating of ideas was a valid expression of his point), convicted me, as some Christians would say. "You make it all up." Back when I was in elementary school, I pretended to speak a foreign language once. I knew I was making it up, but it was harmless. More than a decade later, I was being led into SIT for the first time. Nothing was coming out. I kept waiting, and nothing. Finally, I started speaking. And it felt exactly the same as when I'd made up that language in elementary school. I was faking it. I knew it. "Don't let the devil talk you out of it," my 'coach' said. Those weren't his exact words, but I'm sure he'll agree that he said something along those lines. And I eventually convinced myself it was real. It was what the Bible promised. It was available. And it worked for so many other people. This was real. This was real. This was real. And suddenly I was confronted with this book: someone who never believed in the resurrection spoke in tongues. And admitted making up interpretations and prophecies. He wasn't a Christian. Not by any logical definition of the term. He tried. But he never believed. He should not have been able to speak in tongues, but he did. How? He faked it. Just like I did. No! I didn't. My experience was sincere. And it lined up with the Word. A few years later, I learned about renowned skeptic James Randi and his offer of $1 million for proof of the supernatural. Weren't we taught that SIT was that proof? I knew that I could walk to James Randi's headquarters from my office (it was that close), speak in tongues in front of a linguist, and collect my check. I never did it. I never tried. Because I knew what the result would be. I knew I was faking it all along. The knowledge I buried came roaring out, and I would never recover. "No one would ever admit it..."). To myself, I finally admitted it. I never spoke in tongues again without knowing it was a fake. I never spoke in tongues while praying. I just stopped. I don't think anyone meant to lie. I didn't mean to lie. I meant to claim the promise of God. But looking back, I recognize that I faked it from day one. I taught others to fake it. I suspected we all faked it. It wasn't until I was challenged to prove everyone faked it that I gathered the evidence to present my case in a systematic way. The Bible's claim about SIT is pretty clear to me (I'm done arguing about that. If you guys don't see it the same way, we have nothing to discuss. But I will restate that it seems odd I'm the only one allowing the Bible to speak for itself on the subject). I can't prove everyone is faking it, but anyone can prove me wrong by producing a language. Poythress and Samarin provided articulation of the mechanism for "faking it" (as I call it. They use different terms). The more I studied, the more the hard evidence fell into place. There is no dragon. So, in short answer to your question, Steve, yes, you misunderstood me. Part of that is my fault because of the words I chose to use ("lies," for example). But part of it is because you did not carefully read what I originally wrote. It was an emotional thread, and again, MY fault for choosing inflammatory words that inspired defensiveness. You say you DO speak in tongues. Fine. From where I sit, you have not established that you produce anything different from what I produced when I faked it, and until you do, I see no reason to believe your claim. Your sincerity was never in doubt. I don't think you are lying or deliberately faking it. But until you produce a language, I have no reason to believe you're not. Nothing personal. When two people hold mutually exclusive positions on a statement of fact/truth, one of them has to be wrong. I don't think you're a liar. I don't think any of you are liars. I think you're wrong. I've explained in excruciating detail how you can be wrong and still think you're right. You think I'm wrong. The difference between you and me? I can't prove you're wrong. But you can prove I am. Document the language. Until then, I think I'm a few years past done arguing about it.

You're thinking of the Benefits of PFAL list, WW. They're talking about SIT: What It Is For...

Yes. We have discussed that on this board many times. Wierwille got "all author exception v. all without distinction" from Bullinger, among other ideas.

Not discussed, and I wouldn't agree with that statement. For a claim to be testable, it has to be falsifiable. That is, you have to come up with a set of criteria that, if true, would invalidate the claim. I suppose you could run all sorts of studies comparing hte overall health of people who SIT to people who don't, but so many other factors come into play with health that it would be impossible to pin anything on the presence or absence of SIT in someone's life. "When I speak, it will be a language" is testable. You're either producing a language or you're not. We can argue (and OH WE DID) about whether the language can be detected for any number of reasons, but somewhere along the line, someone's got to be able to produce a language and put the matter to rest. My position, "it's all faked," is also testable. There's an obvious criteria that makes it falsifiable: produce an identifiable language. Boom. Our work here is done. "Enhances your physical and mental abilities"? I don't know how we can test for that.

Then you see why there was some reluctance to resurrect the thread after all this time. ;)

Don't you miss these chats we used to have, chockfull?

TLC, Don't be hesitant to chime in. The reason for this thread is to bring you, MRAP and any other interested parties a chance to catch up on the previous discussion without having to sift through 100 pages of back-and-forth that turned vitriolic from time to time (although there was a truckload of substance in there that gets lost in the summary, I'd wager that little of it is necessary for any purpose other than to point out we had indeed considered numerous different angles). It's practically an invitation for you to weigh in.

Permission granted.

Thanks, chockfull. We were posting at the same time. My one quibble with your recap, and it's just a quibble, is that Samarin was not a theologian. He was a linguist. Other than that, I think you have accurately summed up your part of the argument. It was 100 pages. We both left things out. Here's another one: Terminology became an issue because we could not agree on what various things meant, and we were all over the map about it. "Biblical SIT," "modern SIT," "free vocalization" and "glossolalia" were the terms in dispute. It didn't help that Poythress used "free vocalization" in ways that made perfect sense to him but became confusing when we tried to apply it to this conversation. For example, strip SIT (as we practiced it) of any spiritual claims, and Poythress calls it "free vocalization." Add the spiritual angle, and he calls it "T-speech." He demonstrates, I think, that T-speech is free vocalization practiced in the context of worship. They are, he claims, the same thing, mechanically. But he leaves open the idea of whether they produce different results, leaning toward saying "yes, they produce the same thing" but stopping short because to do otherwise would be to deny the possibility of God's intervention. It starts to look like "free vocalization" is a term he made up to deny SIT. That would make sense if he denied SIT, but he didn't. "Glossolalia" is what linguists call SIT. They're supposed to be synonymous. But linguists, not being bound by Biblical definitions, are free to apply the term to non-Biblical practices. So it became a little confusing for us, because we needed to be sure that linguists were talking about the same things we were. I do think we ended up agreeing on Samarin's distinction between SIT/free vocalization/glossolalia and "gibberish" [the former aim to approximate what a language should sound like; the latter does not].

I really feel underqualified to recap the other side of this argument, but I'll give it a shot. 1. Calling us all "liars" was offensive and out of line. [Conceded]. Making a blanket declaration that we all faked it overstepped the bounds of what I could possibly "know," and to state it as fact is, by implication, calling us all liars no matter how nicely I try to put it. [Conceded to a point: Calling someone a "liar" is accusing them of deliberate dishonesty. I do not believe there was anything deliberate about it. I think it was a combination of a lot of factors, including peer pressure and a genuine hunger to produce what we believed the Bible promises]. 2. "Testing" the claims of SIT assumes I am right about the claim being testable. I don't think we ever reached consensus on that. There are verses that indicate SIT will not be understood by those present, and those verses do not make exceptions for linguists. So the failure of linguists to identify languages in SIT does not prove that languages are not being produced. [All true, but I sincerely believe the claim is testable. Again, this part of the argument gave rise to the doctrinal threads, where we discussed what SIT was Biblically and whether the claim really is testable. Because it's a doctrinal difference, I concede that we cannot reach objective agreement about whether I am right about the claim being testable. The "no one understands" verse/verses were also a point of continued disagreement: there are other verses where people who witnessed SIT did understand what was spoken, so a verse that says "no one understands" cannot be applied in a blanket fashion. Understanding SIT would have to be possible, but not universal. We failed to reach agreement on this question]. 3. The value of anecdotal evidence remains in dispute. We have all heard of instances in which someone did understand what was spoken during SIT. That's evidence. [My position: that is not evidence. That is a claim that requires evidence to prove it. What we find in these anecdotes, almost universally, is that the people involved typically vanish, making confirmation impossible. Again, I believe we failed to reach consensus on this]. 4. Subjecting SIT to a test belittles God's flexibility in giving us languages that will evade detection. Many languages have gone "extinct," and we have no way of knowing what they sounded like. Even the best linguist would not be able to detect it. [My counterargument was that this could account for many instances of SIT, but could not account for all of them, and it only takes one to disprove my position. I'm sure I left some good points out.

I am totally humming the music to Les Miserables right now.

You can claim it all you want, and as long as you don't expect me to believe it, we're cool. You want to claim it by faith? I can't argue with that. But the moment you change "I can" to "I DO," you venture from a statement of faith to a statement of fact. It's not a fact. It's a claim. A testable one. And no amount of redefining speak, redefining tongues or redefining language can change the fact that the claim you're making is testable. The only thing you guys accomplish when you deny the testability of the claim (by coming up with all sorts of excuses as to why a language won't be detected) is demonstrate a profound lack of confidence that you're producing a language. But a language is what the Bible promises. That's the point of the dragon analogy: starting with a testable claim and then resorting to all sorts of mental gymnastics to make it untestable.

Apparently I didn't hammer the dragon analogy hard enough, because you somehow missed the point. "I DO speak in tongues" = "I DO have a dragon on my garage." You're making a testable claim, and until you demonstrate that you're producing a language, your claim has not passed the test. A claim is not validated by the intensity with which it is asserted. Why should I believe you DO speak in tongues when what you produce is no different than what I produced when I was faking it? Do you not agree that I have no basis to believe your claim until you produce the Biblically promised result, which IS a language?

Reading through WordWolf's summary of his own involvement in the original thread, I seem to recall a general agreement that the Biblical results of TIP would not be "testable" in the same sense that SIT was, so while we discussed it, we really didn't argue about it all that much. At least, in comparison. There was a lot of disagreement over whether SIT is a testable claim. That's what gave rise to the doctrinal threads that were supposed to be about what Biblical SIT actually is.

No pressure. Dag.

Personally disappointed in my failure to overcome my bias. I'll add more when I have time.

Equivocation is FINE as long as you're not doing it maliciously and you're clear enough so that everyone can follow along. I equivocated in the opening post. The writer of Proverbs equicovated in the "Answer/Answer not a fool" verses. It can be a clever way to get people to think. Here's my personal favorite: I have no problem with public displays of religion, but I do have a serious problem with public displays of religion." If you don't know I'm equivocating, that sentence makes no sense. [interpretation: I have no problem with people proclaiming their faith wherever they see fit, on street corners, on the bus or train, CERTAINLY inside AND outside churches, etc. I only have a problem with government displays of religion. Government has no business promoting one religion over another. I won't post a "There is no God" sign at a government run hospital. Keep your 10 Commandments out of a government run courthouse. See what I did there? Changed the meaning of the word "public" from the first sentence to the second].

I did this on my own, without consulting the other mods. They can smack my hand if I'm out of line, but let me outline my reasoning. 1. The original thread is here: LINK! It is too long for anyone to reasonably be expected to read it all and catch up on it, and recapping after more than 100 pages is only useful if you know where the recap is. The recap will be in this post, with the opportunity for others to recap if their memories differ from mine. 2. The original thread got ugly. Recapping here allows us to remove the ugliness while keeping the many salient points that were made on both sides. The Recap The thread started with me confessing that I'd faked SIT all along. In addition, I said I made up interpretations and prophecies on the spot. I referred to it as "reinforced self-deception," where TWI encouraged us to participate in a fundamentally dishonest practice to build community. We all did it. My choice of language was highly divisive. Folks thought I was accusing everyone of lying. In actuality, my feeling was that we were all deceived and walked out on it, in good faith believing that what we were doing is genuine. But I used the word lie, and I own that. So to clarify: I think we fooled ourselves, were encouraged by others to fake it [in good faith: most of them thought it was real, too], and were told that we weren't faking it as part of the initiation. TWI made a compelling Biblical case, and we wanted what the Bible promised. As the conversation progressed, people felt a need to defend their faith, practice and integrity. They also disagreed with me on whether everyone was/is faking it. From there, it became a question of who had the burden of proof. Is it the person claiming to produce something supernatural, or the one claiming it's all a fake? To this day, I don't think we reached a consensus. But I think there was general agreement about my observation that my thesis, "It's all fake," cannot be proved. To do so, I would have to record every instance of SIT, ever, and prove beyond a doubt that it's not a language. It is not reasonable to expect me to do that. BUT!!!!! Disproving my thesis should be easy. Produce a language. You do that, and I'm wrong, end of story. As far as me demonstrating my position (not proving it), we got into a lengthy discussion about scholarship on the subject. Many works were cited, but the two that drew the most comments were from linguist William Samarin and another gentleman whose credentials I no longer remember. His name was Vern Poythress. Poythress was fascinating because he is (was?) a believer who never discounted the possibility of genuine SIT. Samarin's position was secular. Summarizing him is easy: SIT does not produce languages. What it does produce is similar to language in a number of ways, but the similarities are superficial. It's not gibberish (goo-goo-ga-ga, bliggety, bloggety, boo!). It is supposed to simulate language, and as such, it will have a diverse "vocabulary" and pauses similar to what you would encounter while reading and coming across a comma or period. SIT produces not just words, but sentences and paragraphs. But, he said repeatedly, it doesn't produce language. There was lots of disagreement, some of it contentious, about what Samarin was and was not saying. Poythress took Samarin's work a little further and described a typical "first experience" with SIT. What he described was remarkably similar to Session 12 of PFAL. Relax. Speak. Uncomfortable at first, but soon it will be as easy as riding a bicycle. And this was very important: the instructor would tell the speaker not to doubt. "If he says, 'I seem to be doing it myself,' the 'coach' replies, 'That’s the devil trying to make you doubt the gift that God has given you.'" It was Poythress who coined the term "free vocalization," which I subsequently adopted. I'll let him define it: Again, it needs to be stressed that Poythress was/is not a doubter. He merely considered SIT a testable claim and found that it didn't produce languages. I'm leaving a LOT out for the sake of brevity (100-page thread, people!). Here's Poythress' article. Go to town. I don't think it's necessary to go into more than that for the sake of summary, but again I must insist: I have not done Poythress justice. He refers to my position as "unbiblical." I actually disagree with that. Which brings us to the issue of presuppositions and why I did not reveal during the course of this thread that I am no longer a believer. There are numerous Christian denominations that teach SIT is a thing of the past and not possible today. There is no difference between what those Christians believe about modern SIT and what I believe about it (with the exception that those Christians might believe there's something demonic at work, whereas I most certainly do not). Point is, you do not need to be a non-Christian to conclude modern SIT is a $3 bill. I wanted this issue discussed on the merits. My lack of faith in other areas was not relevant. In fact, I had come to my conclusion about SIT years before I lost my faith in other aspects of Christianity. I chose to save atheism for a later discussion. SIT could be discussed on its own, on the merits, without a loss of faith in those who came to agree with me. A couple of other brief points before I wrap up this summary: I cannot prove everyone faked it. I never tried. I only tried to document the claims I was making, and in doing so encountered a mechanism for "faking it" that I think holds up to scrutiny. I think the mechanism for faking SIT is free vocalization as described by Poythress, which anyone can do. I think the mechanism for faking interpretation and prophecy is extemporaneous speech, which, again, anyone can do. With a little practice, you can get very good at it. It doesn't mean you plot out every word you're going to say. It just means you know your subject matter and you're able to speak about it without pre-planning. People do this in speech classes all the time. The reason this was in About the Way and not in doctrinal was outlined in the first post: I believe these "manifestations" were TWI's way of creating group cohesion through a shared experience that appeared to be supernatural but on closer examination was anything but. Throughout anything I said in the previous thread or here, if I have stated anything as fact when it is merely my opinion, I apologize. I am declaring all of this to be my opinion. This summary is unintentionally one-sided. Nobody's perfect. I invite any original thread participants who want to elaborate on their opposition to my thesis to please do so.

Biblically, "The Great Principle" is neither great nor a principle. There's nothing in the Bible to articulate it or substantiate it. If our spirit can communicate with your mind, then God's spirit can communicate with your mind.

I have faith in lots of things. None involve religion. I have faith in my wife's loyalty, for example. Can't prove it, but don't need to. In my experience, it got to the point in studying the Bible that I came to the conclusion that having faith and believing in something were synonymous terms. They're not. I believe the sun will rise tomorrow. That doesn't take faith. So many disasters would have to take place for me to be wrong about that, the fact that I was wrong would be the least of our worries. Not necessarily. Having faith in Islam and shifting to Christianity would take faith. Having faith in Islam and dropping it does not require shifting faith. It requires abandoning it. You don't "have faith" in things you can prove or demonstrate. You just know those things.

If I put my mod hat back on right now, I would totally declare a mic-drop and lock the thread right there.