chrism@orca.UUCP (Christopher Minson) (02/13/84)
I have seen several references to "speaking in tongues" recently in
this newsgroup. These references reminded me of an amusing bit of
applied religious research I did during my undergraduate days at
Berkeley.
A born-again fundamentalist roommate introduced me to the concept of
speaking in tongues. According to him, when the Holy Spirit (whatever
THAT is) "moves" within a person, that person often begins to speak
in long-lost languages. Indeed, the fact that the person can speak
these languages is proof of his oneness with God, and by implication,
the validity of his religious beliefs.
Wow, I thought. What a tool for research we have here! To think that
language experts spend decades trying to decode ancient tongues, when
all they really have to do is scamper over to the nearest church and
hear these languages spoken fluently by the local population.
Why wonder what ancient Aramaic sounded like, when an auto
mechanic, inspired by religious ectasy, speaks it every Sunday?
However, being the skeptic that I am, I wanted to see this miracle at
close hand. So I borrowed a somewhat gaudy bible from a friend, pasted
a pious expression to my face, and found my way to the nearest nest of
fundamentalists.
Well, needless to say, I got an earful of "tongues". It was an amazing
and somewhat scary thing to see almost normal people explode in a frenzy
of incomprehensible talk and chanting. Nonetheless, it was very interesting,
and my scientific curiousity was aroused. Were the "tongues" true
languages or simply gibberish?
Having found God, I attended church again next week, except
this time I concealed a small and very sensitive tape recorder in
my coat. I systematically taped the chanters nearest to me, and
more importantly, got a fairly good recording of the minister, who
seemed to be the most fluent of the bunch. This was not done without
some risk, since my recorder made a small but identifiable whirring
sound, and I had visions of being discovered. There were some rough
types in the congregation; the kind of people who drive pick-up trucks,
collect automatic weapons, and take a dim view towards hidden recorders.
Martyrdom was only an automatic rewind away.
Fortunately I was not discovered, and I made it back safely to my
lair with the tapes. I invited over a somewhat bemused linguistics
graduate student, and the analysis began.
The results were fascinating although very incomplete. To
begin with, the three chanters nearest to me were verifiable
frauds. Their "tongues" consisted of simple English
sentences repeated over and over, and jumbled via a simple
transliteration of consonants. Only by repeating this set of stock
phrases very fast were they able to mask the origin of
their "tongues". Of course, these three were statistically not very
significant; the rest of the congregation might have been babbling
an ancient Coptic liturgy for all I know. Maybe I picked the
three with the least amount of faith, or maybe they just had lust
in their hearts.
The minister was a different story. We could come to no satisfactory
conclusion about him, believe it or not. However, our analysis
was certainly not very methodical, and we decided that unless
we wanted to blow this up into a full research project there was
no way to generate a conclusive result, one way or another.
So this grand expedition into the black fringes of science came to
an abrupt end.
So, does anyone know of similar experiments? (Please don't flame
at me - I'm completely innocent).
Progress marches on,
Chrisstanwyck@ihuxr.UUCP (Don Stanwyck) (02/13/84)
One quick little note here -
A. Most of those who call themselves fundamentalists believe that
"speaking in tongues" put you in a league with the devil, and
that the "gift of tongues" has disappeared from the modern scene.
(See /The Corinthian Catastrophe/ for an example of Church of
Christ teaching on the matter.)
B. Those who practice the speaking of tongues are generally grouped
into Pentecostalists and Charismatics, not Fundamentalists. While
there are in fact many overlapping beliefs, many from each side
feel the others are not Christians ("They haven't received the
Spirit" or "They are filled with the Devil").
My credentials: I was raised a fundamentalist (Conservative Baptist), helped
found a Charismatic church (non-denominational), have attended many of each
and many in between (tongues are okay, but not for everybody). Where I
settled and what I believe now I will answer on request, but I need not spend
net-time doing it.
--
________
( ) Don Stanwyck
@( o o )@ 312-979-3062
( || ) Cornet-367-3062
( \__/ ) ihnp4!ihuxr!stanwyck
(______) Bell Labs @ Naperville, ILavi@pegasus.UUCP (02/14/84)
I still don't understand what all this stuff about talking in tongues is about? Why is talking without making any sense considered useful, or a gift from G-D? I can understand (somewhat) if people magically learn to use a new language. However, random sounds seem rather silly. In many societies, this was considered evidence of possession by a demon (not the UNIX(TM) kind) and many epileptics and senile individuals were killed. What do these tongue-twisters want? Do they wish to join the rabble babbling meaninglessly at the tower of Babel? Is there any effect similar to TM, or to hypnosis, when repeating nonsense syllables? I too speak many tongues, but they are all recognized in countries around the globe. They were also not granted as a gift -- I worked at them. I could probably pass in some of these churches, because I could chant a medley of words that would mean little to the average 1.2 language well-educated American. :-) P.S. It is hard to be a false prophet when you didn't really say anything. -- -=> Avi E. Gross @ AT&T Information Systems Laboratories (201) 576-6241 suggested paths: [ihnp4, allegra, cbosg, hogpc, ...]!pegasus!avi