jejones@ea.UUCP (11/19/84)
Just as showing how one can bend spoons surreptitiously doesn't *prove* that Uri Geller does it that way, I admit that the items I cited don't *prove* that "speaking in tongues" doesn't occur. However, in the absence of well-documented, controlled tests, I make the same conclusion about both alleged events, namely that they are not worth bothering with. (I'm glad that Mr. Rosen doesn't actually own Occam's Razors, Ltd....think of the royalties! :->) I hope that this attempt at optimizing the payoff of one's mental labors is not considered closed-mindedness. Of course, glossolalia isn't purely random--I'd bet it would come fairly close to the performance of a third or fourth order <native language of speaker> phoneme monkey. (This implies that I'd be particulay impressed if you could cite evidence of a verified monolingual English speaker heard to speak fluent Xhosa, clicks and all, under the alleged influence of God.) Actually, it might be better, since the human will probably repeat some pseudo-words. Hasn't someone already done studies of this sort? James Jones