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I think that's what Vern describes, Waysider, but he stops just short of making that conclusion.

What we don't see in the studies is any linguistic difference between Tspeech (I could be wrong, but I think this term is exclusive to Rev. Vern) and non-religious free vocalization (ditto, in this context).

Agreed. And, by the same logic, you can't rule out the possibility that someone making it up can produce something that has qualities of language even though it's all coming from their head and God has nothing to do with it.

Also, if God is not participating in the study, then all of Samarin's findings about the qualities of language that he DID detect in glossolalia become irrelevant. You would now be conceding that something utterly made up by the speaker (God is not participating in the experiment) can have some qualities of language. So... We... Agree?

As I said, in a lot of ways, the conversation ends there. Who am I, that I should withstand God? Except for those people who did agree to experiment, spoke in tongues, and faked it. You have to tell them that. Remember, God's not participating in the experiment. They're speaking in tongues. They must be faking it. You tell them. ;)

Couple of things to note: My last post was written before I had the opportunity to read the three or four (more?) that came before it. I didn't mean to ignore anyone. Second, in case it wasn't clear, I do not agree with the contention that neither theory can be proved or disproved. Mine can certainly be disproved, and the moment we document SIT resulting in xenoglossia, both sides will agree that one theory was proved beyond doubt at the expense of the other. And third, please not some small but substantive edits on my previous post, in case someone has quoted me from the "first edition," as it were.

I'm not really intent on people seeing it one way or another. I mean, I am, just as we all are. That's human. But count the number of people who've openly disagreed with me yet have not received any arguments or nasty responses from me. I have no interest in beating people over the head with my point of view. However, when told to prove my point, I put the burden where it belongs: since my point can't be proven without examining each speaker, but it CAN be disproved by ONE speaker producing a known language, clearly, the easier thing should be to disprove my thesis. It hasn't happened: in my view because it can't, in the view of others because God won't allow it. Well, I can't argue with God, so in a lot of ways the conversation should end there. But I'm not obliged to concede my point of view on that basis. You'll find, I think, that most of the disagreement expressed on the thread stems from here. I don't find that kind of "God won't let us test SIT" reasoning acceptable. The Rev. Vern is open to it, although he doesn't agree with it in principle (and cites scripture to back it up. Then again, so does Satan). Do you see how the explanation for how it works is supernatural, yet the explanation for why no one can prove it works is ALSO supernatural? Doesn't that strike you as a tad bit convenient? A theory is tested against available facts. The more facts fit the theory, the more reliable the theory is. If another theory is going to lay claim to the facts, that theory would have to do a better job of explaining the facts than the first theory. I submit that in this argument, all the facts are aligned on one theory. The competing theory considers it a success when its attempted application fails. My theory: people who think they are speaking in tongues are actually making it up in their heads. Their desire to do it is strong, and they truly love God and are "asking Him for a fish." Surrounded by other tongues speakers (either literally, in PFAL, or figuratively, in private) they do something completely unremarkable, spiritually speaking. They begin to engage in free vocalization. Going into the process with the preconceived notion that what comes out must sound like a language, they vary the sounds that come out of their mouths. They don't pre-think the sounds, but they know it's not going to be beep beep beep, boop boop boop. The creativity of the human mind is such that when we perform this exercise, we can develop quite a "vocabulary." (Note that I put that word in quotes and am not meaning it as literally true). We stop. We asked God for a fish. We gave ourselves chili. We surrounded each other and congratulated each other and bore witness to the day we saw you catch your first fish. Because so many of us did the same thing, the majority in the same way, we bound ourselves to each other in a way most fraternities could only dream. But there was nothing supernatural about it. Any child could do what we did. An atheist could do it. A pagan Buddhist Catholic could do it. ;). It wasn't God. If I'm right, you will never document someone speaking in tongues and producing a real language (not something that has language like qualities. I'm talking French. Russian. Yiddish. Chinese. Swahili. An honest to God language). When I search the facts, I need find only one exception, one, to prove me wrong. The competing theory searches for alternative reasons to explain why observable facts will never bear it out. Forgive me if I find that theory less satisfying.

Touche on your first paragraph... And your last. Well said all around. Driving now, so will respond more when I can

And I will repeat, ask Mike if my previous posts lacked edge. Ask JohnIsBack whether our previous exchanges have been marked by politeness. You detect a new edginess because this time you disagree with my conclusion. There was apparently no edginess in calling my methodology Satanic or painting me as a crybaby politician. No, the "edginess" is when I call that out. Gee, he's so bitter. I don't mean to restart anything with chockfull, but it just seems to me that the "wow, look at the edginess here" is just a TAD one-sided.

Deluded liars. There's no such thing as coffee. Reposting (without checking links first) for Steve.

I think discussions of tone detract from the discussion as much as the tone itself does. This thread went on for a few pages before it got contentious, and even with the "lie" language in the first posts, it didn't start getting ugly until much later. I'm not proposing a solution. Despite the pop psychology that's gone on here, there is little difference between how I've posted here and how I've posted in other threads. True, it's been a while since I decided to venture into all these discussions, so some of you might not remember that. But I assure you JohnWhereDidHeGo does not see any difference in how I'm dealing with him, because we've rarely been on the same side of anything. Oldiesman and I have had truces, but more arguments than truces. Mike, fuhgeddaboutit. But now I'm not taking on Wierwille-worship or inordinate respect for Wierwillism. Now I'm looking at something that hits at the heart of many people's prayer lives. So it doesn't surprise me in the slightest that anyone would get deeply and personally upset. What surprises me is the expectation that I will NOT respond the way I have. I do apologize for striking so close to everyone's hearts. But the way I see it, that's only because a lie has been placed there that is very difficult and painful to root out. Yeah, yeah. You don't agree with me. Ok, I get that. But if you (or anyone reading) ever comes to the realization that, "shoot, you mean NO one has produced a verified, documented example of tongues of men? We ALL speak tongues of angels? ALL of us? Gee, I'm skeptical," know this: you're not alone. You're not the first. You won't be the last. Come on out. Faking a spiritual experience doesn't fool Him (and, you know, it doesn't fool you either). If that doesn't apply to you, then it's not addressed to you. I have my belief, you have yours, they're incompatible and there's more than enough room for both. If it does apply to you: I get it. And it's ok.

I'm talking WITH geisha here, not necessarily TO her: To which I'll add: If my tone and tenor have turned you off to my point of view, I feel bad. For you. Because it shouldn't be about people or personalities. It should be about the discussion, the points being made, your willingness to approach them with an open mind, and (put this first, last or middle) your faith. By allowing my tone to turn you off, you avoid the discussion, you don't deal with it. Then again... Exactly... you don't HAVE to deal with it. No one's forcing you or anyone else. Ok, now I'm talking TO geisha: I don't find this difficult to reconcile with my position OR TWI's. If it's free-vocalization, it's just as easy for a Christian to do it is for a non-Christian. If it's really what it's advertised to be, then it's proof that no matter what these folks believe now, they are still born again of God's spirit because it's seed and it never goes away. Sure you could, from either perspective.

Disagree. What he did was not present a thesis statement, but justify his refusal to draw the conclusion that his evidence clearly points to. It's his right, but it's not dispassionate research.

I won't earn any new friends with this, but I'm not apologizing for my tone (except maybe for the use of the word "lie" and its variants). I don't think there's much difference in my tone between this and what I've previously posted. The difference is, this time, I'm in disagreement with many here. Ask Ol' Mike if he thought I was a genial fellow. So yes, some things have changed. But I'd rather let my arguments stand and fall on their merits. "Agree with me or I'll berate you" is not how I'm operating here, and it has never been how I operate. Steve and I are at polar ends of this discussion, and the tone has been nothing but respectful between us. That I am passionate about this is merely a reflection of the strength of my conviction. This all started, from my perspective, with the demand that I prove my point. Erase that, and we have no argument here. But the remainder of it followed quite logically, I think. Sorry if you disagree. +++ Let us take ourselves out of it and see if it helps with our discussion. I'm not going to cite sources here, but if you go through these articles and look through some more, they are not difficult to find. I suspect most of us would agree that SITWI doesn't work the way Pentecostals describe: You speak in tongues, this dude over there is gonna interpret. The researchers bear this out: Tongues are presented to one interpreter, who interprets. The exact same message is presented to another interpreter, and he interprets. And the interpretations don't match. Proof? No, not really. But if they matched, you can bet folks would be shouting from the rooftops that it's proof! That's not the only experiment, of course. In one church, a guy stood up and spoke in tongues, and another person got up and interpreted. Except the guy who spoke in tongues wasn't speaking in tongues. It was the Lord's Prayer in an African language that he knew. And the interpretation, well, wasn't. You can't find a single documented example to verify the gift of interpretation of tongues as described by Pentecostals. Not one. Now, a Pentecostal would say that interpretation is one gift and prophecy another, so the interpreter cannot just say, well, it was prophecy this time, the way a TWI follower could. Or he could say, as many of you have, that the experimenter's interference short circuited God, who had no desire to participate in the study. No amount of "proof" would satisfy them. But whatever it is they are doing, it is not what they claim it to be. So what do you say to them? Mind you, if any of these studies verified their claims, once again, you can bet folks would be shouting from the rooftops that it's proof! It is remarkably convenient to devise a proof system that can only validate your claim but cannot invalidate it. But here's the thing: These interpreters firmly believe, with utmost conviction, that they have the gift of interpretation. How do you call them liars? You can't. You've been had. You're deluding yourselves. There's no nice way to say it. So you shut up? Do you have to have a better Biblical answer (which I don't in our larger discussion) before you tell them that they're practicing a falsehood? +++ What I mean in this stuff is that what we were taught is rather obviously error. Whatever it is we did, it wasn't speaking the tongues of men, and speaking the tongues of angels seems like a copout. Ok, so you guys disagree with me. Cool deal. Godspeed.

That's not true. Linguists are supremely interested in the topic, as we have seen. The problem with Vern, I find, is that he makes comments and assertions that are not academic in nature. I dismiss those comments when he makes them for the same reason that I dismiss those comments when you make them: they are not academic comments. Here you have someone who says, rather plainly, that someone making it up and someone doing it in a religious context produce utterances that are linguistically indistinguishable from each other. Indistinguishable? And we KNOW one is made up. So what academic reason does he give us for failing to conclude that SIT, at LEAST in the cases he examined, were fake? God. That may be satisfying on the level of faith, but it slams the door on any further discussion. How do you argue with that? You can't. He doesn't prove it. He just says it, and BAM! door closed. And that's his prerogative, as it is my prerogative to label that approach non-academic/biased. Compare that to Samarin, who looks at the same kind of data and concludes that a speaker feels strongly motivated to utter sounds that replicate a language and does so. What he speaks is not a language, but it can tell us something about how we communicate. We attach meanings to words, we use inflection, volume and pitch to convey emotion. Words? No, not in the real sense of the word. But fascinating to observe and document. His approach is unsatisfying to the faithful, but it's honest and apparently not considered biased (as evidenced by the fact that every single person we've reviewed in this discussion cites Samarin as an authority. So you may not like what he says about SIT as a real language (it's not), but you'll like what he says about how SIT resembles a language (neglecting, unfortunately, all the devastating and relevant things he says about how it's not a language). So we're stuck just plain disagreeing. And I'm good with that. No. :)

I'm fine with that.

No, I don't. Would you like me to post the writings of a high school sophomore raised by atheists? No. Because I was looking for the competent work of linguists, not the exploratory work of a college kid who quotes the philosophical musings of a tongues speaker as a kicker for an academic research paper! Dare I ask? Could you please show me a post where I expressed wholehearted support of Vern? I mean, aside from my repeated references to his work as laughably biased, can you show me one? Justone? I'm cowering in my confessional.

Vern is a biased researcher who doesn't discount SIT for religious reasons. He doesn't point to research to bear this out. All the research he cites points in the opposite direction. But I agree, he doesn't rule it out. Samarin absolutely discounts tongues as a language. That he "supports the possibility of tongues being real in private prayer life" is a dodge and a distortion of his VERY firm finding that it's not a language in any real definition of the term (he actually calls it a pseudo-language, which I suppose you can quote and count as a victory). That it's real in private prayer life only means, to Samarin, that the people who do it attach a real meaning to it and they do it in what is, at times, a rather sophisticated manner. Really, at this point your misrepresentation of his work can only be uninformed (you haven't read him, have you) or deliberate (you don't care what he says. You'll pick out a quote that describes the linguistic qualities of glossolalia and ignore the fact that he's dismissed it as any kind of language, which is the only point of this discussion. Landry is (at the time he wrote that article, which incidentally I did not cite) a college kid who wrote a paper for class, a paper for which we don't even know what grade he received. His conclusion is a quote from a tongues speaker. He favorably cites research conducted by Guideposts writer. I've got nothing against Landry, as I'm sure he has nothing against me. But he would be alarmed, I think, to find people seriously debating his work. I think that accurately reflects Landry and Vern. It does not accurately reflect Samarin. If you read him, you'd know that by now. Samarin basically recognizes that this is something made up by the speaker and is fascinated by the quality of the creative stuff we come up with. Your interpolations into his work are purely imaginary. HA! You're right. I've yet to produce one. Except someone forgot where the burden lies here. Remember, it's not on ME to disprove tongues. It's on YOU to prove it (but you can't, because God). What the studies say, unanimously, is that Speaking in Tongues, when studied, has failed to come up with a single instance of someone actually speaking a known language. NOT ONE. In other words, I looked to these studies to see if anyone had already proved me wrong, and guess what? It hasn't happened! (And if I may make a leap of "faith" here, it won't. Because I'm right). Um, I said bring it because you accused me of misrepresenting what these people, specifically Samarin, wrote. You proceeded to butcher Samarin's findings to suit your own ends, utterly ignoring the relevant statements he makes about what glossolalia is but focusing like a laser beam on what he says about what glossolalia looks like. Buh bye.

Um, no. Other than that it looks like a term paper and that it WAS written by someone who at the time he wrote it was a college undergrad with a major in philosophy and religion, no, I have no evidence that this was a college paper. Goodness, is enough evidence enough for you in ANY area? You have descended into a fit of namecalling and hysteria that is far beneath you. I think. Excy, I wholeheartedly agree with that first sentence! Do not accept my abbreviations. Read them all for yourself (IF YOU WANT TO. If you don't, don't. I sleep exactly the same either way. Sure! I googled "speaking in tongues" and "linguists" and that was the first article that came up. I printed it out. I thought it was interesting, though I questioned the objectivity of the writer (not realizing until later why). I did not provide you with the Vern citation to "prove" my position. I provided it because you asked for it, and I'm not going to hide stuff I find interesting just because I disagree with some of the conclusions or methodology! We call that integrity. You should try it. You see, if I lacked integrity, I would have ONLY shared Samarin. And you would have found Vern and asked me why I ignored him. I didn't. He's just biased, and I showed exactly how and where and why. But it's okay for you to not accept that. What's not okay is to take a quote out of context, use it to prove that a researcher (Samarin) is saying the exact opposite of what he's saying (which is EXACTLY what you did) and then turning around and accusing ME of the same when all I've done is correct your misrepresentation of his findings!

Reproof got a bad rap because of how TWI did it. It should not. It's a good thing. It makes us all better people when done right. Pick a word that's less insulting to you. I don't think anyone "lied" per se. I think we kidded ourselves out of a sincere hunger for the things of God and a considerable amount of peer pressure to manifest. I think Samarin described that well. I would say that you described my experience as well. First, I'll repeat: lying is an ugly, ugly word. As I used it, it had the effect of starting this whole conversation, immediately, in rather stark, absolute terms. I don't think of myself as a liar, and certainly didn't think of it then. But there was always little niggling thoughts in the back of my head: You KNOW this is just you. You know that interpretation bore no relationship to what you just spoke. You know you made up that prophecy. I keep using the words communal self delusion (since someone asked) because it's so vividly descriptive of what happened. It wasn't just that I fooled myself. It's that I fooled myself within the loving embrace of a community of people who had done exactly the same thing. And we embraced each other and it bound us. It helped cement us into a family. It wasn't just "God" or "Church." It was "Wow. We have done something pretty amazing. God's AWESOME." I intend no assigning of malice to anyone who did this. I did it out of a sincere hunger and desire to spread the message of God. I WANTED it to be real. But when I look in the mirror, I realize it wasn't. The rest is kind of a leap. I know I'm not alone in what I did. And I want others who did it to realize it's ok. Because it is.

You can say that, but that doesn't make it true. Why? You're just going to discount it anyway. Any study that doesn't agree with what you've already concluded is ineffective for our discussion. Clearly, when you asked me for those studies, you were uninterested in their scientific accuracy or reasonableness of their unbiased arguments. You were looking to embarrass me and insult me. You succeeded. Congratulations. But clearly your argument has been reduced to insulting me, as you have ceased misrepresenting the papers you soooo carefully read. By the way, the report has the look and feel of a college paper. I've taught college, recently. I know what these things look like. Landry also has a resume or something posted that shows where he went to school and when he graduated. This paper was written while he was studying for a degree in philosophy/religion. That doesn't discredit it, per se, but seeing as he quoted an evangelical tongues speaker without disclosing the rather obvious bias of the source... Do I really need to go on? Kid wrote a decent college paper, but that's all it was. "Drop the ridiculous namecalling, you tool." Riiiiight. Chockfull, take it elsewhere. I don't want this thread moved to Soap Opera. I noted earlier that an honest intellectual discussion is impossible once one side of that discussion has been denounced as Satanic in its methodology. Over the past two days, you have illustrated my point brilliantly, for which I thank you.

Not ignoring this. Actually quite interested in what folks conclude. One thing I believe with conviction: it is not as it was presented to us.

I am going to state rather emphatically that waysider and I appear to be headed in different directions here. ;) http://www.ctsfw.net/media/pdfs/muellerlinguisticanalysis.pdf It is communal self-delusion.

Can't speak for that researcher. I haven't gone into his work. I can tell you that Samarin recognizes such a field of study as impossible, for obvious reasons. A linguist could tell you whether different people are speaking the same language, even without recognizing the language itself, to a reasonable degree of certainty. But understand what we're dealing with in your question, excy: once we embark on it, we are accepting the findings of the linguists and concluding that if SIT is truly what we have claimed it to be (it's not. We all know it. Some of us just choose to finally admit it), then everyone who's ever participated in a study of it has either been faking or, how dare I suggest such a thing, speaking in the tongues of angels. ALL OF THEM. Come on.

Ok, so now I'm just piling on: Read more: http://meta-religion.com/Linguistics/Glossolalia/contemporary_linguistic_study.htm#ixzz272JyAyIW The bold and italics, and of course, the "well shucks" bracket, are mine. Folks, if ANYONE reading this is able to speak in tongues and produce the tongues of men, I am certain that there are linguists who would LOVE to talk to you. And preachers/pastors. And, yes, psychologists. James Randi, who has offered $1 million for conclusive proof of the paranormal, would probably be obliged to cough up a check to you. Yeah, I know. God won't let you. It can't be because, deep down, you KNOW that you don't know that you know.