Coming from an evangelical background I've seen plenty of examples of christians supposedly speaking in tongues or "being slain in the spirit". What do you think explains this behavior? Unless you're clinically psychotic it's almost impossible to actually believe this is real. Moreover, if you're actually taking part in it, you have to realize that it's YOU making these unintelligible noises and thrusting your body around the church and faking convulsions, not any sort of God. It seems like putting on such a show is the functional equivalent of admitting to yourself that gods not doing it and probably can't.
When pressed, I've heard christians say that you have to be open to it, but that some people just aren't blessed with the "gift of tongues". This obviously a convenient set rules.
Anyway, why do you think this behavior still exists? What's going through their heads? Even though I was indoctrinated into to the faith as a child I never once had any interest whatsoever in taking part in this sort of circus.
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Peer pressure.
There have been scientific linguistic studies of this behavior (glossolalia. One conclusion was that all of the speakers exclusively used phonemes, rythms and intonation from their own languages. So you won't hear English babblers suddenly producing French "j" sounds or Chinese tones. Also, if they were really speaking genuine languages, you'd also expect to hear regular repetions of grammatical words equivalent to is, are, was, will, etc., in English. Instead you just hear random bibble. ("Bibble" is a word I just created meaning biblically inspired babble.)
Glossolalia and twitching are quite funny, but for sheer entertainment value, I think snake handling is the best.
Bibble. I might just put that one in my pocket!
This phenomenon is all fake.
I agree. Pretentious bullshit.
The funny thing is that the evangelicals that practice "speaking in tongues" misinterpret the meaning of it in the first place.
The references in the bible are: http://biblehub.com/1_corinthians/14-2.htm.
This doesn't describe flailing about spewing spittle or anything of the sort. Actually speaking in tongues would be completely silent among mortals that didn't possess the "gift." It assumes that there is a separate language that only god knows and anyone that he allows to understand him.
It is of course utter bullshit.