emjej@uokvax.UUCP (11/25/84)
/***** uokvax:net.religion / pucc-h!aeq / 3:19 am Nov 20, 1984 */ OPEN MIND??? I know I'll get flamed for this one, but boy, have you been fooled by one of Satan's greatest masterpieces of propaganda! You deny anything that doesn't fit into your tidy little limited stuffy boxes of scientific rigor (mortis), and you call that keeping an open mind? You're not hurting yourself; you're suffocating yourself inside your scientific prejudices. /* ---------- */ I don't see the person to whom this was a flame as having denied *anything*; he merely stated what would convince him that the phenomenon in question does occur. He may share my opinion that speaking in tongues as you describe it (i.e. being caused/allowed by God to speak intelligibly in a language one does not know) is "unlikely" (a loose usage of the term, admittedly), and that one might as well conduct one's affairs as if it were false. What *is* that masterpiece of propaganda? James Jones
emjej@uokvax.UUCP (12/01/84)
Sigh. Here we go again...I don't like including long stretches of stuff, but it's hard to avoid. (Anyone for implementing keyword-based hypertext netnews?) /***** uokvax:net.religion / pucc-h!aeq / 12:14 am Nov 30, 1984 */ >1. Yes, I do believe. Belief surpasses knowledge. Of course, for that > matter you could say I know I can repeat it, because I know God, and > I know He doesn't fail. Sigh. You mean you *believe* God doesn't fail, and you interpret all events so as to salvage that belief (not to mention the prerequisite belief that the Christian God exists) no matter what. >2. People who, from my general personal knowledge of them, had trustworthy > characters, have said they experienced this phenomenon, sometimes in my > presence. Read Philip Klass's *UFOs Explained* for lots of examples of pillars of the community who have misinterpreted what they saw. >3. I find it hard to believe that the mere act of a man's laying his hands > on my shoulders and saying a few words could possibly physically change > me so that now, over 12 years later, I can still speak in tongues! Your > (apparent) assumption that this phenomenon is physically caused is more > absurd than my belief that it is caused by God. Nobody made that claim, in the sense that dualists (or Olivia Newton-John? :->) use the term "physical." What changed was your internal (mental) state (which of course requires physical changes that go with the hacks to the data structures). For some reason you attribute that to some supposed external being (other than the internalized roles of a particular flavor of Christianity, which expects you to vocalize and calls it "speaking in tongues"). >Speaking in tongues happens. That's a fact, regardless of the world view >with which you interpret it. Your world view states that those who believe >as I do are lying, as far as I can tell. No, the "fact" is that people *say* they speak in tongues, i.e. they claim that certain sounds they emit are caused by God and are valid utterances of some language unknown to them. Such people need not be lying, even if one doesn't think that anyone speaks in tongues in that sense. Lying requires that one make a statement one knows is contrary to what one thinks to be the case, and I have yet to detect that you have done so. I merely think that you judge wrongly when you say that you speak in tongues. >The last sentence is the real key. Your standard of proof is limited, being >relative *only* to the physically perceptible world. When we start talking >about God, things don't always work according to humanity's standards of >proof or logic. (Both Testaments are full of examples.) Perhaps, but the standard of proof that I think I share with rlr and rsk is (1) sufficient so far for the physically perceptible world, which is the *only* world that most people at least agree has to be dealt with, and (2) has at least some predictive power in that realm. God as a hypothesis has infinite explanatory power but no predictive power, and I, for one, join Lagrange. James Jones /* ---------- */
emjej@uokvax.UUCP (12/02/84)
Sigh. Pardon my error; I should have said Laplace. Sheepishly, James Jones