Steve Lortz

In the drunk story, Wierwille was projecting humility and compassion that were as phony as everything else about him. I don't remember clearly, but that may have been part of Wierwille's campaign to shift attention from sin itself to sin-consciousness as the problem in our lives. Love, Steve

Thanks, WordWolf! Love, Steve

A Word About A Word Tolerance is necessary for articulation. A hinge is an articulated device. One plate attaches to the door, the other plate attaches to the doorjamb, the two plates are joined together by the hinge pin, and the two plates can move in relation to each other in order to serve their purpose. Each plate has a hole (or sequentially coaxial holes, if there are more than one) for the pin to pass through. If the inside diameter of the plate hole and the outside diameter of the pin are the same, that is, if they are absolute (free of imperfection), then, not only will the plate not move in relation to the pin, it will be impossible to drive the pin into the plate hole. In order for the parts to move in relation to each other, or in order for the parts to even go together, there has to be a difference between the inside diameter of the plate hole and the outside diameter of the hinge pin. The hinge pin HAS TO BE slightly smaller than the plate hole. This difference is called "tolerance." Tolerance is necessary for any parts, of any machinery, to move in relation to each other. Tolerances (imperfections) are designed and calculated into the specifications of parts. Actual tolerances are measured by machinists using feeler gauges... If a machinist screws up the tolerance while adjusting the machinery, the machinery will seize up, if it works at all. The same is true when it comes to articulating thought. If the definition of a word is absolute, free of imperfection, then that word can be used in ONE and ONLY ONE sense. The word has been stripped of all other possible meanings. It has been stripped of its ability to articulate with words in any way but one. The sign has become a mathematical symbol, and it makes sense only in a mathematical equation. In order for words to be articulable, their definitions have to be tolerant of imperfection, their definitions have to be poetic. (If I had the stamina to go for a doctorate, this would be the gist of my dissertation.) ----- So... how do words get their meanings, anyway? They all start out as nonsense sounds... Let's look at the word "spirit" since it figures so much in the discussion of 1 Corinthians 12-14. Our English word "spirit" comes from the Latin spiritus, literally "breath", from spirare, "to blow, breathe". Spiritus is the word Jerome used to translate the Hebrew ruach and the Greek pneuma into Latin. The basic, literal definition of both words is "air in motion." Back in antiquity, they didn't have life monitoring equipment like we have in our hospital rooms today. They didn't even know what the pulse was, or meant. The only way they could tell the difference between an unconscious person and a dead person was by whether or not air was moving in and out of that person. Because of its close association with the difference between life and death, air in motion (wind, breath, ruach, pneuma, spiritus, spirit) took on the figurative meaning of "life-force" or "that which makes alive". All other meanings of the word "spirit" derive from this one. The absolute (free of imperfection) definition of the word "spirit" is "air in motion". All other definitions are poetic (tolerant of imperfection). Today, we think of spirit as a substance, the ectoplasm Wierwille plagiarized from spiritualism. We think of spirit as the substance of "Heaven." But neither of those things were so at the time Paul was writing I Corinthians. In the first century, spirit was not a substance. The substance of spirit was the element air intermixed with the element fire. The air was the substance, the fire impelled it to motion. Spirit permeated throughout the cosmos and performed the following functions: hexis or habit which gave form and persistence to ALL things, phusis or nature which gave growth-life and the ability to reproduce to everything from plants on up, psyche or soul which gave sentience and the ability to move around to everything from animals on up, and nous or mind which gave intelligence to human beings (earth elementals), the daimon (air elementals) and the gods (fire elementals). The inward (eis) motion of spirit relayed sentience from the periphery of the cosmos to its guiding heart (hegemonikon). The outward (ek) motion of spirit transmitted all design and operational information from the guiding heart to the "all things" of the periphery. The information flowing outward was called logos. Paul says the exact same thing in 1 Corinthians 8:6, except he substitutes One God the Father in the place of the hegemonikon and One Lord Jesus Christ in an intermediary place between the center and the periphery. He does not write in 1 Corinthians 8:6 of the One Spirit of 1 Corinthians 12:13 because, even though the terminus of the spirit-motion in the center is singular, the termini of the spirit-motion in the periphery is plural. The heavens were nothing more than what you see when you look up outdoors. The heavens were the realm of fire, and they were inhabited by the fire elementals (the Sun, Moon, planets and stars). Everybody knew that the air extended only to the sphere of the orbit of the Moon because you never see clouds (air) behind the Moon. The word spirit didn't take on the widespread meaning of "the substance of Heaven" until sometime in the third century, a couple of hundred years after Paul wrote 1 Corinthians, and about a hundred years before the councils tried to make all the definitions of Christianity absolute (free of imperfection). When Paul used the word "spiritual" in 1 Corinthians 2, what did he mean? When Paul used the word "spirituals" in 1 Corinthians 12:1, what did he mean? When he used the word "spirituals" in 1 Corinthians 14:1, did he mean the same thing he meant in 1 Corinthians 12:1? If he didn't mean "the substance of Heaven" then what DID he mean? If we read through Paul we frequently see the theme that the spirit and the flesh are in contrast, in conflict with each other. We think, "My spirit is the invisible, immaterial substance in me and my flesh is the visible, material substance of me. The invisible and the visible parts of me are duking it out every day." We read I Corinthians 15:44 to mean that there is a visible, material body and an invisible, immaterial body, but that's not the case at all. There are two, and only two, ages described with enough detail in the Bible to distinguish, this age and the age to come. This is the truth that people miss when they mistakenly attribute the meaning of "a period of time" to the word oikonomia. There is a good Greek word that means "a period of time". It is the word aion. If you track the uses of the word aion through the New Testament (and olam though the Old), you will find some dramatic and remarkable things about the way God has designed the ages. These things are not obvious in the King James Version because it translates aion as "world" and eis aion ("into the age") as "forever". The Bible doesn't say that we live in a mysterious, parenthetical age where everything that happened before the Day of Pentecost and everything that will happen after "the rapture" (a non-Biblical supplanter of "the gathering together") is suspended, null and void, to and for the Church. Through the use of the word aion, the Bible says we are living in the overlap of the ages. The age to come began when God raised Jesus from the dead. What Paul calls "this present evil age" in Galatians 1:4 will not end until Jesus Christ returns. In the meantime, we find ourselves to be composite beings. Some of our parts belong to the present evil age. Some others belong to the age to come which is not yet fully here. The age to come is called the age of the Spirit, because the Old Testament characterizes it by the outpouring of Holy Spirit. When Paul writes about "spiritual" things, he is writing about things that belong with the age to come instead of things that belong with the present evil age. Those things Paul calls flesh. "Things pertaining to the age to come" is what Paul meant when he used the word "spiritual" in 1 Corinthians 2, and that set the foundation for his use of the word "spiritual" in 1 Corinthians 12-14. But can we take this as an absolute definition? As we are going to see, Paul plays a word-game with "spirituals" between 1 Corinthians 12:1 and 14:1 that blows all hopes for absolute definitions out of the water. This is all I have the strength to post for now. We will finish examining Paul's use of poetic language with regard to the word "spirituals" before we begin looking at how he used the word glossa. Love, Steve

So here we sit... ...asking ourselves "What does glossa mean in 1 Corinthians 12-14?" Raf says it means one thing... I say it means another... Is Raf right? or wrong? Am I right? or wrong? Are we both right? Are we both wrong? (I will answer this question eventually.) This is a nearly perfect exercise in hermeneutics, the art of obtaining meaning from text. But before we can get into the specific problem at hand, we have to think about some general ideas that are fundamental to the process. WordWolf has already started by asking the question, "What is language?" on the open forum. On this thread, I am not going to address that particular question any farther than by stating a technical definition: A language is a communication system, mostly spoken, sometimes written, that consists of a limited number of signs (usually several thousands) made up of an even more limited number of nonsense sounds (usually less than 100). This feature is called "double articulation." The other feature of language is "syntax," a system that allows the limited number of signs to be combined in an unlimited number of ways, producing an unlimited number of meanings. ----- A Word About a Word... We are going to see the word "articulation" and variations of it again in a number of similar but slightly different applications. It's a good idea to become familiar with it now. "Articulation" comes from the Greek word arthron which means "joint" as in elbow or knee. To say that a thing is articulated means is has parts that are joined (jointed) together. Sometimes, though not in every case, to say that a thing is articulated means that the connected parts can move in relation to each other. A switchblade could accurately be called an articulated knife. The "double articulation" of language means that first, the nonsense sounds are joined together to form signs (syllables and words) and second, the signs are joined together into sentences to convey meanings. We also say we "articulate thoughts." This means we put the words (signs) together (we join them) so that they express our thought. ----- Next we need to examine the two major ways that language is used, poetically and absolutely. Poetic language expresses information in the form of simile and metaphor. It compares two or more items and asks us to see what is similar or dissimilar about the items. Absolute language makes a direct statement regarding the relation between two or more items. The word "poetic" was chosen because of the use of similes and metaphors in poetry. There may well be better ways to conceive of this use of language, but we are stuck with the descriptor "poetic" because that's what so many students of linguistics have used for so long. The word "absolute" means "free of imperfection." The use of absolute language tries to eliminate the inherent uncertainty of poetic language. Absolute language strives to be free of imperfection. Poetic language is tolerant of imperfection, because the items of no simile, of no metaphor, ever have 100% exact correspondence. Absolute language tends toward its most extreme form, mathematics. ----- Example from post #332 of this thread: "When the POGY was at Guam, some of us went up to a little bar called My Elena's. We deliberately decided to go there because we heard it was a quiet place, and we just wanted to relax. "We were sitting there sipping our beers when one of the locals broke a pool cue on Thurlo, and a chair bounced off of my face. Mayhem ensued. It was a barroom brawl... just like in the movies. "This thread is the closest thing I've seen to a barroom brawl since then. "Last night, I found it depressing... this morning, it's exhilarating! "You never know where the next punch is going to come from! You can't hit everybody, so you just hit the person nearest to you! You keep on fighting till one side or the other runs, or until the MPs show up! "This is chockfull's thread! Somebody broke the mirror over the bar, but I swear it wasn't ME! "I'll be ready to come back swinging later in the day, but for now, all I'm going to say is... "Keep Calm and Carry On" This was a moderately extended simile even though I didn't use the words "like" or "as." "This thread is the closest thing I've seen to a barroom brawl since then" indicates that this is not a metaphor. I am not calling this thread a barroom brawl, but it reminds me of one. How is that? I stated the similarities, "You never know where the next punch is going to come from! You can't hit everybody, so you just hit the person nearest to you! You keep on fighting till one side or the other runs, or until the MPs show up!" On this thread, I can't tell who is going to post next, or what the topic of their post is going to be. I can't answer everyone, so I have to make relatively snap decisions about who to answer. I feel like I can't quit. The only options seem to be that I might give up and go away, that other people might lose interest in the question and go away, or that the moderators might shut the thread down. Another option, that was not in my thinking when I wrote that post, was that we might all just stop punching, buy each other beers, and go on with a friendly, orderly discussion, even though the topics are highly controversial. Then I switched to a metaphor, "This is chockfull's thread! Somebody broke the mirror over the bar, but I swear it wasn't ME!" This was intended to be a light-hearted way of pulling the post toward a close, relieving the seriousness of the feelings being generated, and to admit my part in the fracas by making a tongue-in-cheek denial. ----- I have explained to you one of my posts, showing you what were the meanings I intended as author. I have demonstrated how those meanings might have been obtained by you, as readers of the text, from the poetic language I used. I am not using absolute language, but rather conditional language about the meanings you may have obtained from my text, because there are no "laws of hermeneutics," like Boyle's gas law. None of you will have obtained the exact same meaning I intended when I wrote. No two of you will have obtained the exact same meanings from what I wrote. All for now... tomorrow we will examine other things... Love, Steve

I will point out to you, Raf, something I wrote on the previous page, BEFORE the barroom brawl simile occurred to me... As long as nobody is taking this stuff personally, and getting bent out of shape, this is more fun than I've had in a long time. It's always fun until somebody gets an eye put out! The pace has been exhausting to me, too, especially given my debilitated condition, but I REALLY want to continue this discussion at a livable pace. This is a wonderful opportunity to examine hermeneutics, the art of obtaining meaning from text, under nearly perfect "laboratory" (or should we say "atelier") conditions. We can examine text that we ourselves are generating as the performance (it is an art, NOT a science) progresses! Love, Steve

When the POGY was at Guam, some of us went up to a little bar called My Elena's. We deliberately decided to go there because we heard it was a quite place, and we just wanted to relax. We sere sitting there sipping our beers when one of the locals broke a pool cue on Thurlo, and a chair bounced off of my face. Mayhem ensued. It was a barroom brawl... just like in the movies. This thread is the closest thing I've seen to a barroom brawl since then. Last night, I found it depressing... this morning, it's exhilarating! You never know where the next punch is going to come from! You can't hit everybody, so you just hit the person nearest to you! You keep on fighting till one side or the other runs, or until the MPs show up! This is chockfull's thread! Somebody broke the mirror over the bar, but I swear it wasn't ME! I'll be ready to come back swinging later in the day, but for now, all I'm going to say is... Love, Steve

I didn't "twist and distort the meaning of 'tongues'". I stated the definition Paul used when he wrote I Corinthians 12-14, "The ancients had no correspondingly detailed definitions for glossa. Liddell & Scott's Greek-English Lexicon simply says ""tongue...by word of mouth... language or dialect" All of the definitions we have for Greek words come from study of their use in context. We don't have any ancient dictionaries. We have practice tablets where students exercised their ability to write letters and words, but none of them record definitions. I stated the modern, linguistic definition, a communication system that exhibits double articulation and syntax. That means the system is composed of a limited number of signs made up of an even more limited number of nonsense syllables, that can be put together in such ways as to produce and unlimited number of meanings. The modern definition doesn't change the definition Paul was using. The tongues that I speak conform with both Paul's definition and the modern definition I use when I affirm that I speak in tongues. I have nowhere introduced the idea of an undecipherable code. You injected that into the conversation, not me, Raf. Why? By saying that the word glossa means "a known language and ONLY a known language" you have changed the language Paul was using. You have made Paul's use of glossa absolute (free of imperfection), because language which is not absolute cannot be used in a syllogism. If language is not absolute, a person can't use it to "prove" anything. You CANNOT prove from what Paul has written in I Corinthians 12-14 that I am not speaking in tongues... or anybody else for that matter. You say I am required to prove that I am speaking in tongues because I affirm that my interpretation of my experience is that I am speaking in tongues. Why should that be so? Can't I say that you are required to prove that you spoke a made up language as a child because you made that claim? Wasn't that also your interpretation of your experiences? Neither of us have to justify our interpretations of our experiences to each other. We couldn't if we wanted to! You make your reasoning sound so logical, Raf, but logic isn't the be all, end all. The soundness of logic is built on the truth of the propositions, and the degree of truth of a proposition is the same as the degree to which the proposition accords with objective reality. As objective reality turns out to be, there is a degree of uncertainty inherent in EVERYTHING. You can't make absolute statements that accord 100% with reality. Not about your interpretation of your experience... not about my interpretation of my experience. Love, I feel like I'm sitting in the newsroom of the Anderson Herald about 55 years ago... Steve

You're right about THAT, TLC! One of the reasons Wierwille was so woefully wrong about SIT was because he COULDN'T explain from the scriptures what God's PURPOSE was in giving his people who are living in the time between the ages the ability to speak in tongues. Wierwille was blind to God's purpose because he misread the Bible from the get go. First, the Day of Pentecost recorded in Acts chapter 2 was not the "birthday" of the Church. The events of Acts 2 were the actualization/fulfillment of promises/prophecies made to and for Israel throughout the Old Testament, particularly in Deuteronomy 16:9&10: "9You shall count seven weeks; begin to count the seven weeks from the time the sickle is first put to the standing grain. 10Then you shall keep the festival of weeks to the LORD your God, contributing a free-will offering in proportion to the blessing that you have received from the LORD your God." At the feast of weeks, God's people (the people of the covenant) were to make spontaneous, voluntarily-given offerings to express their gratitude to God for the things he had given them. The offerings were to be in kind, that is, the offerings were to consist of the same stuff that God's blessing had consisted of. Tradition grew up that the feast of weeks was also a celebration of the giving of the covenant from Mount Sinai. From Jeremiah 31 forward, and especially in Ezekiel 36, God promised that he was going to institute a renewed covenant with the remnant of his people. One of the features of this New Testament would be that the LORD would write his law on his peoples' hearts by putting a new Spirit in them. In Joel, the LORD promised to pour out his Spirit on his people. In Acts 2:16 Peter said "this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel..." In PFAL Wierwille taught that Peter did not mean what he said, but rather "this is LIKE that which was spoken by the prophet Joel" WIERWILLE COULD NOT HAVE BEEN DEADER WRONG! On the Day of Pentecost, Jesus established the New Testament by pouring out God's gift of the Holy Spirit! The people of the covenant (everyone who called on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ) received a blessing from God. That blessing was not Wierwille's little button on a string. It was a partial measure of the life-force of God the Father heterodyned with the human personality of Jesus Messiah. The Spirit is not individualistic, it is the means by which we all, who have made a decision of humility toward Jesus, are entangled with him and with each other. Those disciples of Christ who spoke in tongues on the day of Pentecost were offering spontaneous, voluntarily-given expressions of their gratitude to God for his blessing, by means of that same blessing... Spirit. When we are speaking in tongues we are freely thanking God the Father through the Lord Jesus Christ by means of the Spirit, and I Corinthians 14:17 says we are doing it beautifully. But... but... but... why does it have to be in words that the Holy Spirit gives? Why can't we just say what we want to say? One of the requirements in the Old Testament for a thank-offering was that it had to be made of unleavened bread. This symbolized that our thanksgiving should not be tainted with hypocrisy. We live in the time between the ages... some aspects of the coming Kingdom are already in place, some are still to eventuate when the Lord Jesus returns. Jeremiah 17:9 says the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. The desperate wickedness of my heart is that I want to be my own boss. I don't want to be lorded-over by anybody. Ezekiel 36:26 says that as part of the New Testament God will give me a new heart along with the Spirit of Resurrection Life, when the new age fully arrives. The gift of the Holy Spirit first poured out on the Day of Pentecost was not the Spirit of Resurrection Life... it was my earnest of that inheritance. So here I sit, between the beginning of the new age that began when Jesus was raised from the dead and the end of the old age that will end when he returns. I have, as my guarantee that I am his, the gift of the Holy Spirit. But I also still have a heart that is thoroughly tainted with hypocrisy. Out of the abundance of the mouth the heart speaks. How can I offer to God thanksgiving that is suitably free of hypocrisy? With my mind, I can't! But by speaking as the Holy Spirit gives the utterance, I CAN! It's a gift... a charisma. THAT is God's purpose in giving people the ability to speak in tongues. God NEVER requires people to speak in tongues, because it is supposed to be a spontaneous, voluntary thing. In giving the impression that speaking in tongues is ever REQUIRED for anything, Wierwille was... how can I say it any stronger?... wrong. That's why genuine speaking in tongues always feels like we are making it up. It is totally free-will. That's why ALL the benefits of speaking in tongues Wierwille listed were so much CRAP! There is NO SELFISH BENEFIT to be received by speaking in tongues... not even the pride of saying "I speak in tongues more than you do"... all baloney... all of it! I am personally inclined to think I might not be speaking in tongues if I don't have a conscious attitude of gratitude in my heart, but KNOW I am not so powerful that I can defeat the Spirit of God! When Paul wrote in I Corinthians 14:4 that those who speak in a tongue build themselves up, it means that a person who deliberately speaks in tongues strengthens her confidence that Jesus really was raised from the dead, and that she really did receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, and that she really will be raised from the dead when Jesus returns. That's all... All for now. I hope this helps people recognize what Wierwille couldn't even conceive of, the real purpose of speaking in tongues. Wierwille abused speaking in tongues. That doesn't mean Stiles did, or Gordon Fee, or my brother-in-law whose only experience of TWI is hearing the stories my sister and I tell. Love, Steve

On September 12th, 2012, Raf announced "I lied about it all" when he initiated the thread "SIT, TIP, Prophecy and Confession." Eight days later chockfull started THIS thread for the reasons stated above. When Raf said "I lied about it all" he was making a claim based on his interpretation of his own experience. It's a wonderful thing that we are free to do that, instead of being manipulated into accepting Wierwille's interpretation of our experiences. It is Raf's right and responsibility... his duty... to interpret his own experience... and that applies to the rest of us, as well. After careful consideration, I came to an interpretation of my experience different from Raf's interpretation of his. I make the claim that I DO speak in tongues, genuine Biblical speaking in tongues, that are in accordance with I Corinthians 12-14. If I am recalling and analyzing things correctly, Raf puts forward an argument to the effect that "modern" speaking in tongues cannot be in accordance with the phrase "speaking in tongues [glossai = languages]" used in I Corinthians 12-14 because modern SIT does not produce a language. Raf dismisses all anecdotal evidence that SIT can produce a known language, which is his right, and relying on anecdotal evidence can often be unwise. Raf seems to suggest that if we believed SIT produces "actual" languages, we should have a number of trained linguists study examples of SIT to determine what languages they are. I would hazard the guess that, whether or not the linguists could identify specific languages, they would not be able to categorically deny that "modern" tongues produces actual languages. And my guess is based on the actual definition of what a language actually is... Here is a wikipedia definition: "Language is the ability to acquire and use complex systems of communication, particularly the human ability to do so, and a language is any specific example of such a system. Here are some more technical considerations, the kind trained linguists pay attention to: "[Language] is a system of communication based upon words and the combination of words into sentences... "Among the characteristics that make a relatively clear distinction between linguistic and nonlinguistic communication meaningful, two are particularly important: double articulation and syntax... "Languages have tens of thousands of signs, and the term double articulation refers to the fact that the formal sides of these sign are built from a relatively small repertoire – usually between 10 and 100 – of meaningless sounds... "The ingenious invention that enabled human beings to talk about everything they can imagine, is syntax. Syntax is used to put together signs expressing relatively simple meanings into sign combinations expressing more complex meanings. "Syntax is a mechanism that enables human beings to utter or understand an infinite number of sentences constructed from a finite number of building blocks. Without syntax, we would not be able to express other meanings than those associated with isolated signs, and the number of different meanings we would be able to express would be equal to the number of signs in the 'language'." (Those quotes were from this https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=how+do+linguists+define+%22language%22 I don't know how to cite it any better than this) The ancients had no correspondingly detailed definitions for glossa. Liddell & Scott's Greek-English Lexicon simply says ""tongue...by word of mouth... language or dialect" All of the definitions we have for Greek words come from study of their use in context. We don't have any ancient dictionaries. We have practice tablets where students exercised their ability to write letters and words, but none of them record definitions. I suspect that if a trained linguist were to study an example of a person speaking in tongues, and the linguist did not recognize it as a known language, the linguist would ask the question, does this thing exhibit double articulation? that is, does is consist of a number of signs made up of a number of meaningless sounds? The answer would have to be possibly so. The linguist would then ask does this thing exhibit syntax, that is, can the limited number of signs be combined to produce an unlimited variety of meanings. Again, the answer would have to be possibly so. We cannot categorically deny the ability of "modern" tongues to produce an actual language, even if that specific language is not understood by anyone present. The ONLY requirement on understanding imposed by I Corinthians 12-14 is that the SPEAKER not understand what she is speaking. This raises questions in my mind about improvisational actors. Would the fact that they UNDERSTAND that they are producing nonsense syllables short circuit speaking by the Spirit? I don't have an answer for that. Raf introduced Sagan's analogy of the hypothetical dragon in the garage. We aren't dealing with a hypothetical dragon in a garage. I Corinthians 12-14 describes the actual audible production of something exhibiting double articulation and syntax, not understood by the speaker. Not only is it foolish to assume that another person's interpretation of their experience needs to conform with your own, it is foolish to assume that another person's experience is in the same box as your own. If I claimed there could be a dragon in my garage, all I would have to do to prove it would be TO STAND IN MY GARAGE! I AM a Golden Dragon! I can't tell you when I became one, because for us, the day that the POGY crossed the International Date Line NEVER EXISTED! Love, Steve

I just went back and re-read chockfull's first post on this thread, and I don't think anything you've written here has been off topic. I can relate the discussion you and I have been engaged in right back to the stated topic of the thread, but not tonight. It's not all that complicated, but my time suddenly comes at a premium. And don't beat yourself up on your ability to write and be understood! Ordinary communication requires feedback that enables the sender to find out if the message was properly transmitted to the receiver, and if the receiver properly decoded the message (or the "massage" as Marshall McLuhan would have said). That was one of the real deficiencies of TWI teaching. Nobody could ask any questions. The talking heads could never be sure they were communicating... That may be part of the reason for Rainbow Man's over the top delivery style. That's also one of the reasons why genuine speaking in tongues is not to be understood by the speaker. WE CAN'T SCREW IT UP! EVEN IF WE'RE KIDS! Love, Steve

WORD! I was born in 1949... The audiences of people brought up after the '50s would not have recognized it as such, because the Civil Rights Movement of the early-'60s changed cultural sensitivity to such things. Love, Steve

In TWI and in CES afterwards, there was much hoo-hah about whether or not we would be praying to God if we were praying to Jesus. My conclusion was this: God and Jesus know how to sort mail better than we do. A few years ago there was a Coptic Christian from Egypt taking classes at the School of Theology. He said that "Allah" is the same word they use for "God" in Coptic Christianity as well as in Islam. God can figure out whether a specific person is praying to Her/Him/It, whether we can or not... A Sioux can pray to the Great Spirit, and if that Sioux intends her prayer to reach the Creator of the Heavens and the Earth, it will. Love, Steve God IS NOT, NEVER HAS BEEN, and NEVER WILL BE, limited to us.

Funny, Bolshevik! FUNNY!!! Love, Steve

During the 1940s and '50s, the name "Snowball Pete" would have been recognized as a nickname for a person of African American descent. Love, Steve

Thanks, Raf! That helps me tremendously to see where you are coming from. My intentions about writing on speaking in tongues have never been to get you to change your interpretation of your experiences. That's why I'm not writing on the thread you re-booted, and that's why "Yet ANOTHER Thread on Speaking in Tongues" was subtitled "NOT an argument with Raf" and why discussion of your interpretation of your experience was the only thing off-topic on that thread. Your response assures me I was not mistaken in continuing to regard you as a friend, even if we disagree on SOME things! Love, Steve

I know what we (the teachers at The Summit Academy) meant by the difference between teaching "what" and teaching "how" according to the philosophy of classical pedagogy. I think Wierwille was aping that language, but he wasn't really doing it. He was teaching us "what" to think the Bible says (his own interpretation) by means of a very severely limited and dysfunctional repertoire of hermeneutic tricks ("to whom addressed", etc.) that made the Bible say "what" he wanted it to say. Love, Steve

Hey, Raf! I think I may have been misunderstanding what you've been saying for a long time. I remember you making a positive statement somewhere early on that you had been faking tongues all the time you were involved with TWI. I read this to mean that you had been deliberately, willfully faking SIT. It dawns on me that you may have been saying that during the time you were actually involved with TWI, you believed that you were genuinely speaking in tongues, but sometime later (probably in the time of the "actual errors in..." threads, if I'm not mistaken) you became convinced that you had been naively, unconsciously faking tongues all along. What's the scoop? Love, Steve

Raf! - I find your hypothetical dragon entertaining, but somewhat overbearing because of length and redundancy. Sagan was okay as a fabulist, but nowhere near as good as Tolkien! Unfortunately for your argument, this thread is not about hypothetical dragons. It is about actual speaking by the Spirit of God, as described in I Corinthians 12-14. In I Corinthians 14:24-25 Paul wrote, "But if all prophesy, and there come in one that believeth not, or one unlearned, he is convinced of all, he is judged of all: And thus are the secrets of his heart made manifest; and so falling down on his face he will worship God, and report that God is in you of a truth." The speaking by the Spirit of God described here is REAL, Raf, not hypothetical. I've experienced it from both ends. One time, years before I ever heard of TWI or conceived that I could read the Bible for myself with understanding, God spoke directly to the issues of my heart through a conversation between strangers that I overheard from a neighboring table in a restaurant. One time nearly two years after taking PFAL, I made an offhand comment to a friend of mine after a twig meeting. I remember it well. I looked at him and said "This world needs you." He almost flipped out. He told me that all day long he had been griping to God that nobody needed him. There was only one time I had that kind of experience in a "believer's meeting." I don't remember what I said, but one of the ladies in attendance broke down and started bawling. It couldn't have been because I'd said some kind of intermediate class crap... she was familiar with THAT stuff... After I left TWI, and especially the farther away from TWI I get, it seems, the frequency has been picking up. Dozens of times, people have told me God was speaking to them through me, many here on campus since I returned to school. None of those incidents have been in any kind of formal arrangement like chapel. Usually it happens when we are just sitting around shooting the breeze. It doesn't seem unusual to me now, and there are two people currently still on campus, who I see on a regular basis, who God has spoken to through me. God doesn't speak to them through me every time we have conversations. It usually doesn't happen more than once with a person... but there was a girl from Russia who told me I "speak with prophetic voice" on several different occasions. It seems to happen most often when I am wanting to give comfort to people. One time, I gave a brief impromptu oration to an entire class, and the prof later told me he thought I had been speaking to those particular students prophetically. So what Paul wrote about speaking by the Spirit of God in verses 24 and 25 is actual, Raf, not hypothetical. The Holy Spirit IS real. Speaking by that Spirit IS real. I have no reason to doubt the actuality of things Paul wrote about speaking in tongues. We have every reason to doubt everything that Wierwille ever taught about tongues. That's why we have to go back and re-examine everything about the topic from what the Bible actually says about it. You are right, the Bible doesn't say the things Wierwille taught. In many ways, the testimony of the Bible is much more powerfully in favor of speaking in tongues than Wierwille ever was, because Wierwille had no idea what he was really talking about. There are real reasons why it seems so much like we are faking it... but more on that later... it has to do with Paul's statement in I Corinthians 2:16b, "But we have the mind of Christ." I hope looking at some things in chapter 2 won't be too far off topic for this thread :) More later... Love, Steve By the by, Raf, I don't say I CAN speak in tongues. I say I DO speak in tongues...

BOY! You all have certainly been BUSY in the last 24 hours! ...and so have I... but with different things... SO MANY JUICY TOPICS... so little time... I will post some commentary on Smaug and the Holy Spirit, but not tonight. I love each and every one of you! Steve

That quote is from the first post on this thread. Everything we've been talking about on this thread has been based on awareness of actual physical breathing. This morning I had an episode. I didn't know what it was, but as it was in process, I was describing to Elizabeth what was happening inside my mind. I was very confused. The feeling was "I can't find things," because I couldn't. After I recovered from the episode, three words came to my remembrance "carbon dioxide intoxication." I had heard some medical person or another use those words once, when I was describing how I sometimes would feel confused when I woke up in the morning. I googled "carbon dioxide intoxication" and as I read the symptoms and the causes, I recognized exactly what had happened to me. Since then, the Lord has showed me more stuff than I can articulate yet. All for now, more later... Love, Steve By the way, TLC... dabar is a Hebrew word meaning "that which is spoken" or "word". The reason I used dabar is because the Hebrew carries with it connotations of "being", "doing" and "making" that "word" does NOT carry in Greek, German or English. Dabarim is the plural of dabar, "words". The word "articulate" comes from the Greek word arthron for "joint". To articulate means to put the pieces of a thing together in such a way that they can move in relation to each other. To articulate a thought means to put the words together in such a way that the thought can flow. I didn't use those words to impress anybody. I was trying to condense as much information as possible into my notes so I wouldn't forget what I meant later on. The track that my train of thought runs on is shorter than it used to be

I may have contributed to the discussion on the original thread. I don't remember what specifically. I've been writing some things about tongues in the doctrinal section. I don't think I'm going do much participation on this thread. I've been less interested in the TWI experience and version of tongues than I used to be. For the last year or so, I've been studying Acts and I Corinthians from more of a Wesleyan Holiness point of view. I have a copy of J. E. Stiles' The Gift of the Holy Spirit, and I will go to that if I need a research source. I wouldn't go anywhere near any of Wierwille's writings, not even with a ten-foot pole. His plagiarism is so toxic, it would pollute MY work if I used him as a source... Thanks for making this stuff accessible to a new generation of Greasespot readers, Raf! I'll be lurking. I've learned a lot already about important things that were suppressed while I was active in TWI, and things that happened after I left in '87, but if I have anything to post, it will probably be somewhere in Doctrinal. Aloha nui oi, Steve

Drive-by post between sleep and homework... Hula is a language... Love, Steve

At the School of Theology, all of our writing has to conform to the standards of the eighth edition of Kate Turabian's A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses and Dissertations. The manual is 448 pages long, and the whole thing is about avoiding plagiarism. Section 17.5.2 is dedicated to citing "The Bible and Other Sacred Works." So, yes... it is possible for a person to plagiarize the Bible itself, if that person copies something from the Bible and claims that she wrote it herself. And, yes... there are standards for citation in place to avoid plagiarizing the Bible, or any other sacred literature. Other organizations may use other manuals. The "hard sciences" use the APA style. Love, Steve

This is the Open forum MRAP. You can start a thread about anything you want here. What you want to post on a particular thread depends on the intent of the person who starts the thread (WordWolf in this case) and how well you respect it. This thread is a spin off of one of the "speaking in tongues" threads, but it's not WordWolf's intent to focus on speaking in tongues here, so it seems people are even intentionally avoiding those words. That's okay. I have a few thoughts regarding free vocalization, but if anybody wants to read them, they can always do so on the other threads where I've posted. I consider reading these threads useful, even if I don't actively participate, because they give me insight into how my friends think. I hope this helps. Love, Steve

Love, Steve