Raf

I'm not bringing up the anecdotes to bolster my point. I'm bringing it up merely to point out the inconsistency in yours. You can't cite a verse promising no one will understand it and then point to anecdotes is which men understood it. You're being inconsistent. The very clear verse has a very clear context in which it is talking about what's common, not what's possible. Unless understanding of the glossa is possible, your anecdotes are worthless. So you need to make a choice. You can keep accusing me falsely of being a hater, but it is a false accusation. Have at it.

I am challenging your interpretation of that verse and definitely describing the BEHAVIOR of coming up with one excuse after another, which is a behavior. If I were namecalling, I would accuse you of qualities that result in that behavior. But I'm not. I do not hate your position or your interpretation. I disagree with it. Why do you hate cessationists? You have ripped that verse from its context (a common description of a worship setting) and used it to prove something it does not assert (that understanding the language is not humanly possible). That is not what the verse says. That is not what the verse means. I am challenging your position, not calling you names, not accusing you of poor reading comprehension. That verse is not a promise that others can't understand. If it is, all your anecdotes are herefore negated. That's a criticism of your argument. I have not called you names. I am not a hater, and you need to knock off the namecalling. Try again.

Noted for all to see who was trying to be polite and who insists on namecalling. My skin is plenty thick, thankyouverymuch. If you don't want to stop the namecalling, I'm not going to force you. I will repeat what obviously needs repeating: there is one thing I hate, and that's when a lie is presented as God's truth. When people in all sincerity believe that lie, they are not liars. They are deceived and deluded. I have sought to awaken people from that. To a lesser extent than I would have wanted, I have been somewhat successful. I reject your accusation of hate, Chockfull, not because I do not hate, but because I do not hate what you CLAIM I hate. If you want to accuse me of hating a fraudulent practice, then I will embrace the term. If you want to accuse me of hating the Bible, then you are bearing falsewitness against me. What I am hating is a fraudulent practice pretending to be Biblical but failing to deliver the goods. And all you have come up with is one excuse after another as to why the fraudulent practice doesn't deliver. I understand your passion. I understand your frustration. But that doesn't make me a hater of anything more than an exposed fraud. Go ahead, report me. Hmm. You cite a post in which I say that a logical fallacy was invoked (it was) and mocked the fallacy (not the person making it). That's not hate, my friend. Sorry. Try again.

"Haters" does not describe behavior. It describes people and is namecalling. If I am hating anything, it is a fraud. I have restricted my criticisms to arguments, positions and practices. I have ceased directing them at people. Calling people haters is, at this point, deliberately crossing a line. I am more than happy to subject my reasoning here to the judgment of the other mods. Report my posts if you think they cross the line. I'm not reporting yours. I am politely asking you to stick to the subject.

No, I have tried very hard to confine my statements and criticisms to the practice. You are directing namecalling at people. There's a vast difference. You should be able to recognize it. I am asking politely. Haters crosses the line. You really ought to reconsider. I am not asking you to go back to every post throughout the thread, nor do I think you seriously expect me to do likewise. If something I've written in the last few days strikes you as personal in nature and not directed at an argument, position or practice, I will gladly remove it and apologize. Calling people "haters" should be out of bounds. I hate nothing more than a counterfeit masked as a Biblical promise. Your court.

I am going to respectfully request that you stop using the term haters. We are in disagreement. No one is hating, and it's offensive to suggest otherwise.

Where in the Bible does it say that someone understanding SIT is a miracle? ANYTHING to make a testable claim untestable, to make an empirical claim impervious to dispassionate observation. Excuses, excuses and more excuses, and still no dragon in the garage. Let me do it this way instead: Anyone who challenges the Biblical viewpoint of cessationism is challenging the Bible itself. If you don't believe in cessationism, you don't believe God.

By the way, didn't escape my notice that we had yet another venture into the slippery slope fallacy. Predictable. In fact, would have been disappointing if it had not been cited yet again. Watch out, people! If you admit you faked speaking in tongues, you're gonna end up being a Darwinist! Ok. I'm challenging the Bible now. Not because I am, but because Chockfull said so. I'm challenging a fraudulent practice. The Bible says a language will be produced. The fraud does not produce it. Bible 1, Fraud 0.

But even assuming the verse is talking about the inability of the people in the same worship meeting to understand (a perfectly reasonable interpretation, given the context), it's a far cry from "what is produced isn't really a language and therefore no linguist will be able to detect it." Taking a common occurrence (no one understands) and making it into a rock solid promise that no one investigating SIT will ever be able to understand the language produced is FALSE. It is untrue. Such a position, by definition, INVALIDATES EVERY ANECDOTE where someone present DID understand. I reject it as an internally inconsistent property of the so-called Biblical argument. The problem is not what the Bible really says. The problem is twisting what the Bible says to come up with one more excuse as to why the fraud doesn't deliver the goods.

And to be clear: it is certainly common in Corinthians for no one at a worship meeting to understand the glossa. I'm not denying that. But to go from that clear statement to "no linguist will be able to detect a language if given the opportunity because it's not really a language in the traditional sense" is to inject a meaning into the scripture that is foreign to what is explicitly stated and promised. It's backtracking nonsense to assert that the normal expectation should be that no one will be capable of understanding the glossa. One more excuse to take an empirical claim and make it untestable. There is no dragon in your garage. You're not doing what they did in Acts or Corinthians. It's a fraud. The previous paragraph is an expression of my opinion, not of the Bible, but of the fraud we've committed in its name.

I don't need proof to believe the Bible. I need proof to believe that the counterfeit we were taught to produce is Biblical. If you think this is a challenge to the Bible, you are making a false assumption. This is not a challenge to the Bible. This is a challenge to a FRAUD, one I refuse to be a party to any longer. It is not "faith" to take the promise of God and expect it NOT to be fulfilled at every turn. So far, you have accused me of hate and questioned my reading comprehension. What else do you have in store for me today?

mmh hmm. We're critics and haters now. The verse in I Corinthians indicates that the speaker will not understand himself. It still asserts that what is spoken is a glossa, a language. Only one side in this argument is expecting the practice to hold up to the Biblical promise, and it's not the side that's still embracing the phony, counterfeit practice. I guess we're now going to point to the inability of linguists to detect a language as proof that the Biblical promise IS being kept. A dramatic turnabout from the clear promise of scripture to excuses for the failure of the counterfeit to deliver on that promise.

"Why did you break up the encounter with my pet python?" "I discovered it had a crush on me." *** "You know him?" "Not socially. His name is Jaws. He kills people."

Isolation is a powerful weapon for a cult. Blaming the people we isolated ourselves from misses the point.

Two Jedi discover a promising lad on a remote planet and decide he should be trained in the art of hustling and escaping from the urban ghetto of Watts, California.

Always an excuse as to why a language won't be found or hasn't been found. Never an expectation that it will be. That's not faith. That's wishful thinking.

Just going to say a couple of things about accents. The term, as used by Samarin, is not the same as it is used by Chockfull in extrapolating yet another excuse as to why the people on earth best suited to detect human languages in glossolalia have failed to do so. It's not because of accents botching the sounds. Samarin defines "accent" (he puts the term in quotes, which should be a signal to us that he's using a definition that's not the common one) specifically in terms of the failure of the glossolalist to produce foreign phonemes. He cited this as the giveaway that the English speaking glossolalist produces phonemes that are "entirely typical" of the English language. It should be noted that in the anecdotes that I am supposed to accept uncritically, with no corroborating evidence and no objective determination that the participants did what was claimed and the observers really heard what they claimed to, those anecdotes typically (though not always) feature a level of amazement at the perfection of the glossa. The speaker always sounds like a native, like someone with a college-level grasp of the language. This high quality of glossa appears to vanish whenever a linguist is looking at it. Suddenly, we're supposed to believe the quality is so lousy that even though a language is there, it's undetectable. Nonsense. Either the spirit gives the utterance or he/it doesn't. A SITter producing an obscure Chinese dialect isn't going to do it without producing foreign phonemes, no matter how bad his "accent" is. It's a red herring and an excuse, and it doesn't wash. It just amazes me that the shoddiness of his research is so heavily criticized, yet the incredible level of detail he goes into is cut up, yanked from its context, picked apart to the point that amateurs who have no idea what we're talking about think we can make better observations and analyses than those who've studied this field for more than a couple of hours reading an Internet thread. Phonemic inventory reveals glossolalia to be highly dependent on the native language of the speaker. There are exceptions, and those exceptions are easily traceable to the speaker's limited exposure to other languages. Everything I have to add has already been said.

And that was my first twig meeting. I was the friend he invited along.

For the sake of argument, I am compelled to concede that anything not excluded by scripture is permissible as a possibility. Poythress accepts the possibility of a kind of code that might be undetectable by linguistics but could still count as language. I reject that, and Chockfull has been kind enough not to argue the point. The very least I can do is not argue the point that extinct languages are a possibility, especially considering the Bible does not exclude the possibility.

As far as doctored verses go, the easiest place to start is the conclusion of Mark. The evidence for its authenticity is flimsy as all get out, and the "snake handling" verse is a lot easier to explain when you realize it's got as much right to be in the Bible as the story of Agamemnon's revenge against Perseus.

Really, I don't care. Give the answer!

Yeah, but I don't care. Go for it.

Gonna have to side with Chockfull here. He said includes, not includes ONLY. It could be extinct languages. It could be current languages. A convenient stretch would be that it includes future languages. Woohoo! No one can prove or disprove THAT. Am I the only one who's noticed that the general expectation of those who practice SIT is that a language will NOT be found, followed by a list of excuses as to why? I mean, right away, it's just assumed the linguists will be unable, or God will not participate, or the language will be obscure, or extinct, or heavenly. Or the dragon's fire is non thermal, so measuring the temperature won't reveal its presence. And throwing water or paint on it won't work because it's not corporeal. It won't leave footprints. Always an excuse as to why the promised result won't be found. Never a hint of expectation that it will be.

Let me just add a couple of things before going over Chockfull's last substantive post and deciding which pieces require a response (ie, which pieces haven't already been discussed to death). First off, when I say it's not an unreasonable request for Chockfull to reach out to a linguist to get answers to his questions, I'm not just blowing smoke. The results of one researcher's work seems to be in conflict with those of every other researcher reviewing the same phenomenon, and linguists who've gone over that researcher's work disagree with his analysis. But he stands by it. But he does agree with the other researchers on the conclusion that it's not an actual, human language. I've tracked this researcher down and e-mailed him for clarification. So what if he never answers me? I tried. Best I could do. I say, give it a shot. For wall we know, Chockfull may find a linguist who agrees that everyone we've been discussing is a hack, disrespected in the linguistic community at large, and we'd never know it because we're a bunch of amateurs dissecting 40-year-old studies. Or maybe Chockfull will get the same answers Larry Holton got. I don't know. Second, after I posted Holton's article on the SIT Reading Room thread (it's in doctrinal, if anyone's interested), I wrote the following: "Although the article I posted agrees with my conclusion, I would not have cited it in the original thread. I probably would have gone to his sources and posted them. If Vern is somewhat biased, he at least provided useful info. This guy seems to have been on a mission. My bet is we would have spent too much time discussing why he shouldn't be ignored just because of his conclusion." Today's response from Chockfull proves my prediction 100 percent correct. Holton hears an agenda. Chockfull's right: the chief value he brings to this discussion is a broadening of available sources. But even I noted above that Holton lists answers that don't always seem to follow the questions that he asked (the "dead languages" question stands out in this regard: the answer he posts does not seem to adequately address the question, in my opinion). And this criticism is coming from someone (me) who agrees with Holton! His article, as a primary source, is useless. But it does point us to better primary sources. I also want to make something clear about Landry: I knew this was a college paper the first time I read it. It practically screamed it. If you ever spent any time grading college papers, you know what they look like. Landry was poorly argued, poorly organized and poorly cited, at least when it comes to Samarin. Based on what I've been reading, I'm inclined to believe he wrote everything off Malony and Lovekin and did not review a single research work outside it. There was nothing in Landry's paper that wasn't in the first 10 pages of Malony and Lovekin, and what he did quote from it was misleading. The exception was Landry's conclusion, a quote from a tongues speaking friend lamenting the controversy over the issue. That should have been a sign to anyone that we were not dealing with a work of unbiased research. I do not recall seeing a bibliography in Landry's paper, but if he did include one, I'd bet good money he just copied it from Malony and Lovekin's bibliography. Third point: I need to go back over Chockfull's earlier post, but I thought I saw at a casual first glance an allegation that Nida had not conducted his own research into glossolalia. This assertion, if it was indeed made, is certainly inaccurate. Nida published in 1964 "A Case of Pseudo-Linguistic Structure," in which he concluded there was no scientific evidence that glossolalia produces known languages (cited in Malony & Lovekin, p. 8). When the director of translations of the American Bible Society, who is also a respected linguist, comes to such a conclusion, at the very least it warrants a close look. But it would be so very wrong to dismiss him as someone who has not examined glossolalia on his own. The opposite appears to be the case. I'd love to see his work. In a casual Google search, I see evidence that every single linguist cited by Holton has actually studied glossolalia to some degree. Most were done ages ago and are not available online. Nida's supposedly is, but damned if I can find it. Finally, in his farewell address, Chockfull states that he is going to believe God rather than linguists (I'm paraphrasing. I'm sure he'll come back to correct me if I've misrepresented him). I submit this is a false choice. This is not an either-or proposition. If the linguists are right, it doesn't mean the Bible is wrong. It means our understanding of it is wrong. Getting to a right understanding would take an enormous amount of humility, starting with the admission to yourself that in your hunger to manifest the power of God, you took a step without him. Or you could just disagree with me and we're all happy. I have a belief. You don't share it. This bothers you? Doesn't bother me one whit. Christians disagree with each other about far more substantial things than this.

Seeya