Raf

I'm trying not to post across threads on the same topic, but please... if you want ME to believe you don't fake tongues, then get a disinterested third party to authenticate your language. Otherwise, let's agree that we don't agree on this and just address different topics instead.

It is not odd at all that I found the evidence compelling. It has a perfectly natural explanation: I WANTED it to be true, so I talked myself out of the doubts that told me it was false, just like you did. We were literally in a cult that discouraged doubt. Doubt is bad. Doubt gets little kids killed by cars when their mommies aren't looking. Who wouldn't want it to be true? But where's the evidence? Glopping gloppleness is not proof. I agree. The evidence has not changed. It was nonexistent then and is non-existent now. Disagree? Fine. Have a disinterested third party identify the language you produce and I'll change my mind. You are under no obligation to do so, but if you're going to start using expressions like "the evidence is there, it hasn't changed," then you shouldn't balk when asked to produce the evidence. Please note the use of the word "like" in the previous sentence. I know the quote is not exact. Anyway, you can look at my experiences and wonder what about my experiences led to a lack of faith. Or you can look at the Bible and test its claims, really asking yourself some pretty hard questions (like, seriously, you could have put that tree on the other side of the planet, dude! Or, working on Friday night cracked the top 10 commandments but rape and slavery didn't?) It's not about experiences. It's about reason.

Who said anything about it being sudden?

A long, rich, recorded, made up history, in large measure. "Out of Egypt I have called my son" is not a Messianic prophecy in its original setting, but Matthew makes it one... and to see its fulfillment, he concocts a tragedy that never happened (the Slaughter of the Innocents) to get Jesus to flee from his home in Bethlehem to Egypt (even though Luke has Jesus living in Nazareth at the time), just so God can call his son out of Egypt to fulfill the not-prophecy, then he comes back to Israel but instead of going to Judea (where, according to Luke, he did not live) he goes to Nazareth for the first time according to Matthew (where he already lived before according to Luke). Umm. That's not a fulfilled prophecy. And you'll find that most of them are not. And as you examine each prophecy, you will find TONS of similar inconsistencies. Some piddling, some utterly baffling. Seeing the prophecy of Jesus being fulfilled in the Bible is not that different from seeing the prophecy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone fulfilled in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Fiction has a way of working like that. Yes, I know, different authors. But the principle is the same: a story that never happened is malleable. You can shape it to meet whatever criteria you'd like, including the criteria of fulfilled prophecies. Look at the Left Behind series. It fulfills all those prophecies of the New Testament. The rapture. The antiChrist, the earthquakes, the plagues, the return of Christ. All of them, fulfilled. "Yeah," you'll say, "But Left Behind is a work of fiction!" Exactly. I'm not saying Jesus' existence is fiction. But the fulfilled prophecies? They were written to fulfill the prophecies (many of which are not prophecies at all), not to record history. Do you REALLY think, in the most amazingly astonishingly astounding coincidence of all time, that Pilate gave the people a choice between Jesus and Barabbas, and the people chose Barabbas? Never mind that this was NEVER a custom of Pilate. Put that aside for a second. Imagine the coincidence of Pilate giving the people a choice between Jesus, the Son of the Father, and a man whose NAME is "Jesus, Son of the Father." You CAN make that up! The "evidence" of fulfilled prophecy is not evidence at all.

Name it, though. Honestly, from my standpoint, gods and fairies have equal evidence. Not just the Christian God, ALL gods. There's not "more evidence" for the Christian God than there is for Allah. Or fairies. We have an honest disagreement there. Now, you may get away with the argument that there's more evidence for a "deist" type of God than any other, but that's self-defining. That is, the deist God is defined by his lack of involvement (and therefore his lack of testability). A deist God would have created the universe according to natural laws and then gone fishin. There is simply no way whatsoever to establish that any such God does or does not exist -- and no consequence whatseoever to believing either proposition. But once you start pinning down particular claims, your God becomes testable. And the more specific you make that test, the easier it is to determine whether your God passes it. SIT is a language. Ok, let's test it. Well, it's an unknown language. Ok, but unknown to the speaker doesn't mean unknown to linguists or anyone else on earth. Well, it IS unknown to anyone else on earth. Ok, so you're saying it's a dead language. Right! A dead language. Ok, but we actually know a lot about even dead languages. It's the tongues of angels. You know, people make testable claims about their gods and then go into retreat mode whenever people take em up on it. My God's got LOTS of evidence? Sure he does. Well then, I'm here and looking. Bring me back into the fold. Well, he doesn't like to be tested. WELL ISN'T THAT CONVENIENT!? I'll be right here.

Constantly being accused of mindlessly repeating jargon, coming from a Christian, strikes me as mildly ironic. Look, Pascal's Wager is ONE argument. There are only so many counterarguments, and to be expected to come up with something that no one has ever articulated before is not horribly realistic. If you want an original answer from me, then ask a f-ing original question. Not "what would you say if you came face to face with Jesus?" That's a dumb question to ask someone who thinks Jesus is dead, has been for about 2000 years now, give or take a dozen or two. And it WOULD be like me asking you what you would tell Thor at Valhalla. You want an answer from my heart? There it is: that's a stupid question, and one that Christians would never think in a billion years to ask of someone who doesn't believe in fairies, leprechauns or Bigfoot.

So did you find it?

Thanks Chock. Sorry for all the times I let my emotions get the best of me.

I did not see this thread until this afternoon and have not been diving into each.... and EEEEVery post, so here's the deal. If you want to argue about whether modern SIT is or is not supernatural, keep it here. If you want to discuss what Biblical SIT should be and whether what you're practicing conforms to it. start a new thread in doctrinal or resurrect an old thread that brought it up already. Either way is fine with me. Just know, whatever stays HERE in Questioning Faith... "unbelief" is an expected part of the conversation. Translation, if you want to talk about this biblically, take it to doctrinal and I promise not to stick my atheist nose in it (at least not without plenty of scripture to support what I'm saying).

Why did you doubt at first? Why did you stop for a year? Think about it. Wouldn't you, of all people, have known if you were faking it? That doubt was not misplaced. That was your brain telling you that you were faking it. And it took time and repetition (what those psychology types like to refer to as conditioning) to convince yourself that it was genuine, and the doubts went away. Your doubts were right the first time, in my opinion. If you no longer doubt you're speaking in tongues, that's between you and your God. I don't believe you. I think you faked it then and are faking it now. Nothing personal. I just don't believe anyone who claims they can do real magic, and speaking a language you've never learned is really magic. Now, it may be that you don't care whether I believe you or not. Fair enough. I'm not asking you to care what I think. I feel the same way about any expression of "if you had done this, you would still be a Christian today" or however you phrased it. It's a polite way of saying you do not believe my turn away from "faith" was based on reason, but on experience. You're entitled to believe that wrong thing. I'm not gonna stop you. I do suppose you're right, though. If I had magically begun speaking Aztec or Zimbabwean (or whatever languages are spoken by the people represented by the words I just threw out there for effect), I probably WOULD still be a Christian. Because that there would be evidence. I rejected faith because I found the evidence lacking. (Well, absent, to be frank, but I'll go with lacking). You can agree. You can disagree. I can have a beer with you either way. But if you want me to believe you really genuinely speak in tongues (and I'm not saying you do or you should), then show me the language. Otherwise, you can have no doubt at all that you speak in tongues, and I have no obligation whatsoever to believe you. It's like Schroedinger's utterance. It's spoken, But is it a language or is it not? As long as no one tests it, either of us can claim it is/isn't. But come one. You know as well as I do. That's why you doubted. And that's why you're still trying to talk yourself into it. (P.S. You can still be a Christian, and a good one, while acknowledging that out of a hunger and thirst for righteousness, you allowed someone to trick you into thinking something unremarkable was quite remarkable).

I'm trying SO hard to keep up after last November's crossover.

When is the cheat threshold again? Three days? It's only been 1.5, for those keeping track.

My guess was Gene Wilder, and I was evidently mistaken.

I'm thinking my wildest guess would be going too far.

Wild guess? Or maybe not so wild. Or maybe I should go MORE than wild?

Indiana Jones Han Solo

Linus Larabee

I don't recall the others, but yes, Gladiator was one. Crash was another.

I think the writers of the Bible came up with the idea of a wise God who ultimately becomes an all-wise God, a smart God who ultimately becomes an all-knowing God, a powerful God who ultimately becomes an Almighty God. The implications of a God THAT wise, powerful, mighty, etc. were not considered. God knows everything. The utter impracticality of such a thing is never addressed because these men were mythmakers and storytellers, not philosophers. Nothing wrong with not being a philosopher. It's just, when you tread on a theme in which you are not an expert, the experts in that field get to weigh in. And it doesn't take an expert to realize that a God who knows everything everything everything also knows what WOULD have happened if contingencies had worked out differently. And every day, 6 billion people make 100 decisions a day, and God knows what would have happened if we had decided differently. That's 600 billion decisions and, bare minimum, 600 billion alternative decisions, a DAY. Next day, 600 billion more decisions. And each of those measured against the actuality of the 600 billion decisions made the day before AND the 600 billion decisions that could have been made but were not. Plus the 600 billion decisions that could have been made today. I'm not even going to dare do that math, but quite clearly, the number of contingencies that God would need to know to keep track of "this happened and that happened and this is going to happen and this is what would have happened if you had decided to do that instead..." It gets unwieldy. Granted, I don't have infinite knowledge, but for real. WHY? You don't have to give this infinite thought. Just think a little bit. A little.

My comment on this would be inappropriate in this forum. So I posted on Picking Up Threads in Questioning Faith.

Picking up from "What Does God Know?" I'll keep this brief: As someone who looked at this intently and came to the conclusion that the Bible depicts a God who absolutely knows the future as well as the past, a lot of this ends up making a LOT more sense when you consider that it was all made up, gradually, by people who had not really thought it all through.

Yes, sir. I was teasing.

I finished the book a couple of weeks ago, and I have to say, it really is very good. One of the questions I get asked most is, how did you get suckered into joining a cult? And I think Charlene answers that question by showing how incremental the process is. I found the story to be a deeply personal one (unlike The Cult That Snapped, which was "about the Way," Undertow is about the author). Beautifully done, Charlene. Congrats!

Shucks, you left out Friends and Party of Five.

Crispin Glover Charlie's Angels Drew Barrymore