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Okay, let's rock. I have asked Christians to explain certain happenstances that contradict the Bible, and now I'm going to get stories from the other side of the fence.
If you are providing an answer to this question, I expect that you will not identify as Christian.
So how would you explain:
1) People speaking in tongues at church? (I've seen this happen.)
2) "Heaven Is For Real" - Colton Burpo's near-death experience as a 4-year-old, having "gone to heaven"? (A 4-year-old won't concoct a story like that for personal gain, he didn't even come out with the story until his father asked him about it, and the vivid nature of his story is not typical of what a 4-year-old's mind can create and what a 4-year-old's memory can recall.)
3) "90 Minutes In Heaven" - Don Piper's experience where he was clinically dead for 1 1/2 hours after an automobile wreck and then automatically self-revived with no brain damage? (The elapsed time between the wreck and his auto-revival could surely be proven by reading the time stamps on the reports - the time of the first 911 call, the time of arrival of EMS personnel and/or police, the time of transport to the hospital, the time of transmission of any and all communication between EMS / police and their dispatchers, etc.)
4) People who claim to have had direct encounters with God?
5) The staying power of Christianity and the high concentration of churches in America even to this day?
People speaking in tongues at church? (I've seen this happen.)
I've never seen it happen. What I was told about by a relative who attended a backwoods church where this happened sounded like toddler babbling to me.
When somebody stands up and starts testifying in Manderin Chinese and a Chinese guy stands up and asks how that lady learned his native language, THAT will be something to talk about. No other way is verifiable as "speaking in tongues," defined as spontaneously communicating in a language previously unknown to the speaker.
Each incident would require a specific investigation into its circumstances. For example, the speaking in tongues. Was this someone suddenly speaking something sensible in a known language that they could not possibly have studied or known? Or was this someone like W.V. Grant going "Brack smegla snarzy blip cazmarzia...etc?" which was just mumbo jumbo nonsense syllables and noises he made when he wanted people to think he was speaking in tongues?
The only one of your scenarios which does not require an investigation to answer is # 5 because it isn't a specific claim or incident. The answer to # 5 is to simply substitute anything which has triumphed over the competition and established staying power. Explain the staying power of Islam. Explain the staying power of McDonalds or the TV series "Gunsmoke." Explain the staying power of England's royal family. Explain the staying power of voodoo or belief in ghosts. Longevity and validity are not interchangeable.
Okay, let's rock. I have asked Christians to explain certain happenstances that contradict the Bible, and now I'm going to get stories from the other side of the fence.
Fair enough. So here we go...
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Originally Posted by RomaniGypsy
So how would you explain:
1) People speaking in tongues at church? (I've seen this happen.)
First, we need to understand that ecstatic utterances are not limited to Christianity. Other religious traditions have similar phenomenon. My experience when I was a believer, and spoke in tongues was that it was a product of very intense emotional experiences and an expectation that it would or should happen. While I was able to achieve this, I was never 'slain in the spirit', I simply could not let go enough to allow my preconceptions to manufacture that kind of physical response.
After having left Christianity, I realized that I could achieve the same state of intense emotion through a moving song, or an intense shared experience with others. It was not the spirit of God manifesting through worship and fellowship with believers, if was simply the power of investing emotionally in an experience, sharing it with others, and allowing my mind ot manufacture the expected experience.
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Originally Posted by RomaniGypsy
2) "Heaven Is For Real" - Colton Burpo's near-death experience as a 4-year-old, having "gone to heaven"? (A 4-year-old won't concoct a story like that for personal gain, he didn't even come out with the story until his father asked him about it, and the vivid nature of his story is not typical of what a 4-year-old's mind can create and what a 4-year-old's memory can recall.)
3) "90 Minutes In Heaven" - Don Piper's experience where he was clinically dead for 1 1/2 hours after an automobile wreck and then automatically self-revived with no brain damage? (The elapsed time between the wreck and his auto-revival could surely be proven by reading the time stamps on the reports - the time of the first 911 call, the time of arrival of EMS personnel and/or police, the time of transport to the hospital, the time of transmission of any and all communication between EMS / police and their dispatchers, etc.)
4) People who claim to have had direct encounters with God?
All of these I have little direct knowledge of the specifics, but a couple points, if we accept the personal experiences of one religion as proof of its veracity, we have to accept all of them. What do we do if they are contradictory? Even within a single religion, there is very little agreement based on these things. Depending on who you ask, these visions of heaven or experiences of God are either absolutely true, or they are the work of demons trying to decieve, and these divergent opinions can come from within a singe faith.
Secondly, in all three of these items, these things are not independantly verifiable. We know for a fact that human being can be mistaken, or even delusional. People see and hear things that are not there or are not true all the time. If we would not (and should not) accept uncorobborated eyewitness testimony in court about things that we know are physically possible, why would it be any more convincing if it was relating to things that are fundamentally unverifiable and unreproducible?
I also had experience during my time as a believer that I thought were absolute confirmation of God's existence. Post-Christianity, I reexamined my experiences and realized that they were either simple coincidences, or simply my mind trying ot attribute cause or intent where there was no evidence that any existed. For example, I was wrestling with feelings of guilt and inadequacy on a 4 hour drive, and listening to a gospel radio station, and at one point heard a song (again music is a huge emotional trigger for me) that spoke to those feelings. I was convinced it was a message from God. But really, why should it have boon? I mean 4 hours of gospel music, surely one song is bound to address someone feeling unworthy of God's love (It is a pretty common theme ). Me being in an emotional state, and responding to it was all a product of my own mind, but at the time you would never have been able to convince me that God did not orchestrate, from the foundation of the universe, that song at that moment to speak to me... In hindsight it makes no sense.
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Originally Posted by RomaniGypsy
5) The staying power of Christianity and the high concentration of churches in America even to this day?
So the staying power of Christianity, I attribute to a couple of things. First is historically its ability to tie into politics and spread itself through conquest and colonization. If Christianity had not been exported at the point of a sword, it would probably be gone today. Second, its ability to morph and follow ( however slowly) the prevailing moral zeitgeist has been indispensable. When it can up against the Enlightenment, it did not crumble, it evolved from a religion of nations and cultures to a religion of individuals. It took what it could from the Enlightenment, and declared it had always been this way, just as it did with Slavery, Women's suffrage, Child Labor, social welfare, and a host of other issues.
As far as its influence in America, I think we have the secular nature of American government to thank. Unlike many other majority Christian nations, we expressly prohibit government entanglement with religion. In the absence of a tax funded church, each religious group has to compete for influence, dollars, and butts in pews. This 'free market' religion has lead to an incredible variety of religious views, and vigorous competition between religious groups for influence, which translates to an emphasis on advertising and marketing, or 'Evangelism'. It also means that churches are not content to have passive members, they press for huge personal investments of time and energy as well as money. It translates to a culture that is saturated with religion and often divided over the smallest points of doctrine.
Anyway, this is an interesting set of questions. Thanks for posting it.
-NoCapo
People speaking in tongues at church? (I've seen this happen.)
I've never seen it happen. What I was told about by a relative who attended a backwoods church where this happened sounded like toddler babbling to me.
When somebody stands up and starts testifying in Manderin Chinese and a Chinese guy stands up and asks how that lady learned his native language, THAT will be something to talk about. No other way is verifiable as "speaking in tongues," defined as spontaneously communicating in a language previously unknown to the speaker.
Are you a Baptist? That is generally the stance of more traditional evangelical groups, tongues only counts if it is miraculous speech in a 'real' language that the speaker doesn't know.
Charismatics, and the Pentecostal family of denominations make a distinction between the gift of tongues ( which is what you describe) and speaking or praying in tongues, which is not required too be in a 'real' language. It is considered a prayer from one's spirit directly to god, bypassing human language in favor of a spiritual or angelic language.
Never mind that it is entirely individualized and has none of the linguistic characteristics or structure of language...
Are you a Baptist? That is generally the stance of more traditional evangelical groups, tongues only counts if it is miraculous speech in a 'real' language that the speaker doesn't know.
Charismatics, and the Pentecostal family of denominations make a distinction between the gift of tongues ( which is what you describe) and speaking or praying in tongues, which is not required too be in a 'real' language. It is considered a prayer from one's spirit directly to god, bypassing human language in favor of a spiritual or angelic language.
Never mind that it is entirely individualized and has none of the linguistic characteristics or structure of language...
-NoCapo
In other words, anybody at the Pentecostal church can stand up and babble like a 6-month old baby and everybody in the church is "moved" by his testimony, and nobody walking the face of the earth can tell the difference between his babbling and Prince George's (you know, Will and Kate's kid) babbling. Am I right?
In other words, anybody at the Pentecostal church can stand up and babble like a 6-month old baby and everybody in the church is "moved" by his testimony, and nobody walking the face of the earth can tell the difference between his babbling and Prince George's (you know, Will and Kate's kid) babbling. Am I right?
Pretty much.
People who are into this are well aware that for "speaking in tongues" to count as a real miracle, someone somewhere has to identify it as a real language, so they often tell stories of some listener recognizing a real language. AFAIK, no documented evidence of this exists.
Ecstatic utterance, on the other hand, is just one of the ways a person can display a passionate mystical experience. People who have these experiences are convinced they are from god, since that is the context in which they experience them. However, non-religious people can and do have mystical experiences, which they attribute to human nature, since these experiences are found among people everywhere.
In other words, anybody at the Pentecostal church can stand up and babble like a 6-month old baby and everybody in the church is "moved" by his testimony, and nobody walking the face of the earth can tell the difference between his babbling and Prince George's (you know, Will and Kate's kid) babbling. Am I right?
Pretty much. The only quibble I have is that no one pretends to understand what is being said when someone is "praying in the spirit", it is assumed to be between that person and God, not for the "edification of the body". The Glossollalia article on Wikipedia does a reasonable job of looking at the phenomenon, and distinguishing between the two kinds of tongues.
Of course, at this point in my life I find it entirely unsurprising that aside from third and fourth hand anecdotes, the only speaking in tongues one encounters is the incomprehensible kind...
So, to address the OP's post, to be sure we have no lock -down explanations and more research is required, but we do have sound and serious reservations about the claims made for the meaning and significance of these experiences or displays (in the case of glossalia) by the believing side.
We can't of course say in respect of NED's OOB's :
"No, this cannot possibly be something relating to the Soul/afterlife/or the divine; who knows, after all? But speaking in tongues, there is something we can check and the results (meaningless babble) fall far short of the extravagant claims made for for its significance.
And of course in respect of any one of the religions or their personal gods, this sort of thing is no evidence for the truth of any particular one of them
Last edited by TRANSPONDER; 08-05-2014 at 12:23 PM..
Okay, let's rock. I have asked Christians to explain certain happenstances that contradict the Bible, and now I'm going to get stories from the other side of the fence.
If you are providing an answer to this question, I expect that you will not identify as Christian.
So how would you explain:
1) People speaking in tongues at church? (I've seen this happen.)
The same way I explain tongue-speaking in non-Christian religions, or such phenomenons as the flagellants of various religions - certain religious people whip themselves into strange religious fervors. It is amusing that you find this a compelling argument for any religion, all the moreso that you do so only for Christianity (and not the religions of its non-Christian practitioners).
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2) "Heaven Is For Real" - Colton Burpo's near-death experience as a 4-year-old, having "gone to heaven"? (A 4-year-old won't concoct a story like that for personal gain, he didn't even come out with the story until his father asked him about it, and the vivid nature of his story is not typical of what a 4-year-old's mind can create and what a 4-year-old's memory can recall.)
Yes. If a four-year-old claimed it, it must be so...
Quote:
3) "90 Minutes In Heaven" - Don Piper's experience where he was clinically dead for 1 1/2 hours after an automobile wreck and then automatically self-revived with no brain damage? (The elapsed time between the wreck and his auto-revival could surely be proven by reading the time stamps on the reports - the time of the first 911 call, the time of arrival of EMS personnel and/or police, the time of transport to the hospital, the time of transmission of any and all communication between EMS / police and their dispatchers, etc.)
God Of The Gaps - "I can't explain X, therefore the Christian God exists!"
Do you seriously need the problems with this feeble attempt at 'logic' explained to you?
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4) People who claim to have had direct encounters with God?
The same way I explain the countless people who claim to be UFO abductees, or the mother who claimed God told her to drown her five children.
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5) The staying power of Christianity and the high concentration of churches in America even to this day?
I don't confuse popularity with reality. Your mileage clearly varies. If I were to point out that the Communist Manifesto and Mao's Little Red Book (along with the Bible - and quite fittingly), you'd probably have to reconsider your facile notion that the abundance of an idea has no bearing on whether or not it has any basis in fact.
What's impressive is that this list of remarkably shallow sophistry is presented as though it is among the most compelling arguments for Christianity. I guess that's what comes of having no coherent and logical arguments at all.
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). Me being in an emotional state, and responding to it was all a product of my own mind, but at the time you would never have been able to convince me that God did not orchestrate, from the foundation of the universe, that song at that moment to speak to me... In hindsight it makes no sense.
The only quibble I have is that no one pretends to understand what is being said when someone is "praying in the spirit", it is assumed to be between that person and God, not for the "edification of the body". The Glossollalia article on Wikipedia does a reasonable job of looking at the phenomenon, and distinguishing between the two kinds of tongues. 
