If a follower of another religion were going through this many logical contortions and definition expansions to justify the failure of his claim to produce it's promised results, we would all reject the claim without hesitation.
Ever hear a Mormon try to explain why his holy book has zero archaeological evidence to back it up? That's what this conversation sounds like.
Did or didn't the serpent use a language to speak to Eve?
I see two potential problems with this question. First, (and, this is a big one.) it presupposes the incident literally took place. Do you believe this or do you believe it to be figurative? Second, it veers too far from the topic at hand, in my opinion.
I see two potential problems with this question. First, (and, this is a big one.) it presupposes the incident literally took place. Do you believe this or do you believe it to be figurative?
Second, it veers too far from the topic at hand, in my opinion.
I don't see that your question matters to the issue at hand.
It's a biblical record illustrating some sort of communication between two parties, one being Eve. The question is whether it was done via a language, as it is written that something was "said."
Furthermore, it's relevant to the topic as it involves a prior biblical usage of terms relating to speech and/or language (and might therefore be involved in setting precedents.)
I don't see that your question matters to the issue at hand.
It's a biblical record illustrating some sort of communication between two parties, one being Eve. The question is whether it was done via a language, as it is written that something was "said."
Furthermore, it's relevant to the topic as it involves a prior biblical usage of terms relating to speech and/or language (and might therefore be involved in setting precedents.)
I would argue that it matters a GREAT deal. If the incident is to be interpreted as being figurative, it doesn't matter if it was "said", interpretively danced, conveyed by smoke signal or issued by flag semaphore. If the incident didn't literally, historically take place, it's a completely moot point. My contention is that it is figurative in nature and not a recording of an actual, historical event. As such, there is no precedent being set.
Many languages are used for communication. And yes, the story from Genesis with the serpent is figurative and not literal. It does show us that words can be used for deception and false information as used by the figurative serpent representing the God of this world Satan or for truth by God the Father. Serpents were likely looked down upon with dislike in the time period of the writings of the book of Genesis. And they can not literally talk. If this would have been literally true then the serpent would have been avoided and run away from or had large rocks thrown at it and smashed with a bat and destroyed. Who likes a serpent well enough to talk with one? And yes, this is the views of someone who likes dogs and cats and wants to always pet them.
And now with additional editing, I looked up snakes in my biblical software under Nelson's Bible Dictionary and it says: "Most snakes in Palestine were non-poisonous, but the Jewish people feared and hated all snakes". And serpents were the snakes most negatively seen.
Like it's everyone else's job to prove it's NOT. News flash: if you're the one claiming it IS genuine, then it's your task to prove it's a language. You should be calling in as many linguists as possible to get as wide a breadth of knowledge as you can to ID the language, not coming up with excuses for why they'll fail before they even start.
And for the last time, when you take one position for decades, reconsider and change your mind based on overwhelming evidence, the new position you take is NOT A PRESUPPOSITION. It is the OPPOSITE of a presupposition, and disingenuously calling it a presupposition to discredit it does not make it a presupposition.
...snip...
Au contraire, my good friends, at least from my point of view...
Objective reality is not what we have been taking it for granted to be. The only absolute is that there are no absolutes. Every generalization fails, including this one.
We are entangled. It's all very zen. Speaking in tongues is the sound of one hand clapping.
In the 17th century, Isaac Newton said some things which came to be interpreted to mean that the cosmos is governed by absolute laws, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, etc., etc., etc. It's interesting to note that the word absolute comes from Latin that means "free of imperfection." The laws of the cosmos are free of imperfection.
Isaac's principles gained a great deal of attention because you can use them to purposefully regulate the flow of cannonballs.
In 1810, when Schleiermacher wanted to include a theology department in the University of Berlin, he had to promise the royal Prussian government that his theology would be "scientific" theology... that is to say, his theology would have to conform to the Newtonian system of absolute laws... laws that are free of imperfection.
Therefore, one of the presuppositions of Schleiermacher, and all the liberal protestant theology that has flowed from his, is that miracles CANNOT happen. A miracle would be imperfection in the laws of the cosmos, therefore none of the miracles recorded in the Bible could have really happened. Therefore the task of liberal theology is to explain why the authors of the Bible are lying about so much, especially the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The liberal protestant theologians made an absolute statement that the Bible is NOT absolute truth.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, conservative protestant theologians reacted against the liberal protestant theologians by making an absolute counter-statement that the Bible IS absolute truth, free of imperfection. That is what's known as "inerrancy" or "plenary verbal inspiration." Denominations that believe the Bible is absolute truth are called "fundamentalist" because inerrancy was a plank in the platform of the Fundamentalist Conferences. After 1925, many fundamentalists switched to the word "evangelical" because of the publicity black-eye fundamentalism took in the Scopes trial.
Wierwille was a fundamentalist. PFAL was fundamentalist. He taught that if the Bible were not absolute truth, if it included EVEN ONE imperfection, then it was an absolute lie, error without imperfection.
Astonishingly enough, at the same time William Jennings Brian was notoriously tangling himself up in fundamentalist absolute counter-statements (the Scopes trial), Niels Bohr was articulating the fundamentals of quantum mechanics at THE UNIVERSITY OF BERLIN, the very home of liberal protestant absolutism.
One of the fundamentals of quantum mechanics is that the laws of the cosmos are NOT absolute, that is to say, the laws of the cosmos are NOT free of imperfection in the Newtonian sense of the word "perfection." The laws are mathematically calculable, but there has to be an element of uncertainty injected into the calculation to get it to reflect the behavior of observable, objective reality.
Cannonballs are sufficiently big that Newtonian mechanics can be used to purposefully regulate their flow. But electrons are not. The purposefully regulated flow of electrons, the flow that drives the life of our cells, the flow that constitutes our THOUGHTS, is NOT subject to the absolutes of the Newtonian worldview. A degree of uncertainty is inherent to the purposefully regulated flow of electrons. Likewise, language is not subject to the absolutes of Newtonian science, and the Bible is not subject to the absolutes of either Schleiermacher OR the fundamentalists.
SOOoooooooOOOOooo.............
What does all this have to do with he question under consideration?
Raf comes out with his "confession" that he no longer believes that he ever actually spoke in tongues, and he interprets his previous experience as fakery... not malicious fakery, mind you, but a fakery resulting from naive gullibility.
That's OKAY! We all have our own experience, and we all interpret our experience in ways that will make sense of it to ourselves.
Raf didn't get himself into any trouble until he tried to generalize his interpretation of his experience to everyone else.
When Raf says that he was faking it, I'm fine with that. When Raf says that I am faking it, I begin to take exception.
Why do you find it necessary, Raf, to PROVE that everyone else was faking it, too? Why do you find it necessary to PROVE to me that I was faking it?
I say, "In my experience, I was not, and am not faking it. I am speaking in tongues." You say, "Your interpretation of your experience is wrong..." and then you devise a system of absolute statements about language and tongues to PROVE that my interpretation HAS TO BE wrong.
You make the absolute statement that "modern" tongues are NOT genuine Biblical tongues. When we look at what the Bible actually says, we see that there are only two restrictions the Bible puts on genuine, Biblical "speaking in tongues", one explicit and one implicit. The explicit restriction is that the speaker not understand the words coming out of her mouth. I would include deliberately forming nonsense syllables, as per theatrical improvisation, under the umbrella of this restriction as well, because the speaker understands that the syllables are nonsense. The implicit restriction is that it is not done as a result of willfully altering the speaker's state of consciousness. Though I recognize the force of these restrictions, I have to state that these restrictions are not absolute. The are not free of imperfection, BECAUSE NOTHING EVER IS!
If a person who has received the gift of the Holy Spirit is speaking in tongues without understanding the syllables coming out of her mouth, and without being in a willfully altered state of consciousness, then that person has met the Biblical requirements for genuinely speaking in tongues, whether that person is "modern" or not. To say anything else is to read into the Bible an absolute statement about speaking in tongues that just isn't there.
You make an absolute statement that a person has to produce an identifiable human "language" or all speaking in tongues is fake.
What does it mean to produce an "identifiable" human language? Do you know that if we heard Hebrew spoken as it was actually spoken in antiquity, we would not be able to recognize it as an "identifiable" human language?
You wrote, "You should be calling in as many linguists as possible to get as wide a breadth of knowledge as you can to ID the language, not coming up with excuses for why they'll fail before they even start."
If you want to find out scientific information about linguistics, go read Course in General Linguistics by Ferdinand de Saussure. I haven't read the whole thing, but I've referred to it in my debilitated state of scholarship. One of the things you'll find out is that you can't make absolute statements about language and/or communication, EITHER. To try to make absolute statements about speaking in tongues from a linguistic/communication standpoint, either to prove OR disprove it, is to chase a will-of-the-wisp. A person cannot make language do what you are trying to make it do, because of the very nature of language.
-----
You wrote, "Like it's everyone else's job to prove it's NOT. News flash: if you're the one claiming it IS genuine, then it's your task to prove it's a language."
It is not anybody's job to "prove" anything...
You say that it is your interpretation of your experience that you were faking it when you spoke in tongues. As far as I am concerned, it is a wonderful thing that you have the self-awareness and the honesty to make sense of your experience and to carry on as the unique Raf that we have all come to know and love. I have no impulse whatsoever to try to "prove" to you that you were speaking in tongues.
Why do you find it necessary to "prove" to me that I was not speaking in tongues?
You tell me that I couldn't have really been speaking in tongues because (and these are absolute statements, free of imperfection) modern speaking in tongues is not genuine Biblical speaking in tongues, and if that's not enough, genuine Biblical speaking in tongues is not really speaking in tongues either... because it is and always has been a hoax.
Why do people make absolute statements, Raf, when they aren't realistic? Because absolute statements can be used as propositions in syllogisms. People think they can "prove" whatever they want to "prove" if they pick the right absolute statements and apply the rules of logic. A conclusion can be logically valid, that is, it obeys the rules of the game of logic, but if one or more of the propositions are not true, the conclusion is unsound... or false. The degree of truth of a proposition is the degree to which the proposition accords with objective reality.
What quantum mechanics demonstrates for us is that NO absolute statement (including this one) accords 100% with objective reality.
There is a difference between objective reality and our experience of it. Objective reality has integrity, that is, it is whole and it persists. Our experience of objective reality in NOT whole, and does NOT persist. Nobody else shares my experience of objective reality except for God the Father through the Lord Jesus Christ by means of the Holy Spirit. The world-views that we hold are conceptual models of objective reality (purposefully regulated flows of words). Those models consist of all the stories we've told ourselves since we first acquired the linguistic means to do so. When we have a new experience, we incorporate that new experience into our models of objective reality by telling ourselves a new story about what just happened. These are important considerations of the branch of linguistics called semiotics, which deals with finding and assigning meanings.
When you write "it's your task to prove it's a language," Raf, aren't you really saying that I have to "prove" my interpretation of my experience to you?
Not only could I NOT do that, I judge it would be futile and wrong for me to even try...
...as futile and wrong as it would be for me to try to make you "prove" that you were really faking it when you were speaking in tongues.
When you say it's my responsibility to "prove" my interpretation of my experience, aren't you really trying to absolve yourself of your perceived responsibility to "prove" your interpretation of your experience? If that's the case, then don't sweat the load! You don't have to "prove" your interpretation of your experience to anybody, especially not to ME! ... and besides that... you COULDN'T... even if you wanted to... because of the nature of language... and of objective reality.
-----
You wrote "And for the last time, when you take one position for decades, reconsider and change your mind based on overwhelming evidence, the new position you take is NOT A PRESUPPOSITION. It is the OPPOSITE of a presupposition, and disingenuously calling it a presupposition to discredit it does not make it a presupposition."
Whether a thing is a presupposition or not has nothing to do with chronology. The prefix "pre" in this case means that it is a supposition that comes at the beginning of an argument, and that some features of the following argument will depend upon it, not that it comes from a previous point in time.
And the word "presupposition" is not a pejorative. A supposition is an assumption, a guess we have to make when we have to take a decision with insufficient information. A pre-supposition is a guess we have to make at the beginning of an argument to prevent uncertainty from derailing the argument. A presupposition is a tacit assumption. Presuppositions may or may not accord with objective reality. Presuppositions depend on our interpretations of our experiences, because our experiences of objective reality are incomplete. That's why we have to make assumptions.
Whether you were faking or not when you were speaking in tongues is up to you to decide. When you make the absolute statement that everybody was faking it, that is a guess which is necessary in order for you to argue that I was faking it. When you make the absolute statement that all speaking in tongues is fake, then you cannot use that statement in a syllogism to prove that all speaking in tongues is fake, because that would result in a tautology, a circular form of reason that is logically invalid.
That may not be what other people mean when they call things that you say "presuppositions"... but it's what I mean.
Thanks, Raf. It has not been easy to articulate these things, but it has been necessary. I've got a big job ahead of me at the School of Theology, and this has been a warm-up pitching practice for what I'm going to have to do up there! I am thankful that I can count you as my friend and speak openly with you. I am thankful for your responses, whether they agree with me or not!
And Spectrum49, I will do some editing to my commentary and might include the Greek word "idios" and its definition. You have made a very good point about the misleading or vague use of severally from the king James Version.
And I understand from another post that you are from Noo Yawk. Did I pronounce that correctly in your part of the state? And as I am typing this I am wearing a historic black baseball jacket with GIANTS on the front and NY on the right upper sleeve. NY stands for Noo Yawk or at least this is how I pronounce it. And my hope today is that I get you to giggle.
Thank you for your input.
You're most welcome, Mark! (And I'm in Liverpool "Noo Yawk" , a northern suburb of Syracuse.)
It's good of you to want to incorporate "idios" into your commentary. And --- I will "fine tune this" just a tad-bit, so as not to go completely along with what TWI did with all of that. As they put it, we (humans) are completely in control of whether or not we want to use these wonderful evidences. And if we choose not to use any of these, (because we're either lazy, or just plain apathetic about "our responsibility" to learn and to DO "all 9 all the time",according to how they taughtit should be done), then I guess God's just out of business, huh? (How's that for being "snarky"? Ha! Ha!)
Seriously though: The way I see it, God (or perhaps even to include Jesus Christ as well, for all I know) is the one who energizes these. And when he does, it's always in accordance with our willingness to follow where he's leading us. (To me, that's the "as the man wills" part.) And get this! In my experience, much of that seems to transpire even while I'm unaware it was actually happening that way. Let me explain:
Many times I thought I had a good idea. But later on, I discovered that it truly wasn't "my damned good idea" anyway. (Ha!) It was God's doing, because it was really HIS IDEA in the first place! And (of course) I went right along with it, simply because it just seemed to make so much sense to me at the time. (Again, this is an example of "as the man wills".) In truth, God was leading me right where he knew I wanted to go. (No problem! --- LOL)
But my problem with this used to be that I failed to recognize his having "worked in me to will and to do of his good pleasure". Rather, I prided myself in having come up with those "great ideas". Using hindsight, I see this more and more in the poems and music I've written, and even in much of what I've said and done. (That is, when I was really trying to do something good!)
But these days, things are a bit different. I'm very careful not to try and "take credit" for everything wonderful in my life, as though I DID IT ALL. (As I was saying, it just might be God's doing anyway!) God deserves the credit for what he does...not me! (I only wonder just how much I should ever honestly try to take any of the credit for! --- Hmmm...)
I hope this makes at least "some sense" to you. (And "sorry" if I was being too wordy while explaining it.)
Oh, pardon me. I must have stumbled into the philosophy thread by mistake.
If we're going to have a serious discussion of languages and meanings, waysider, we have to talk about these things, unless a person simply wants to drive a float in a snark parade :-)
After purposefully regulating my last flow of words, I had to write an English haiku... whether as a steam trap or a relief valve, I cannot say,
Mama's clock birds chirp
aping nature's hymnody --
I will speak in tongues
Love,
Steve
Steve: I simply loved your "Japanese style" poetry!
This might be a "bit off topic", but you got me going, pal! (I only wish to make you laugh, as you did me.)
Nearby where I live is a very disgusting lake which people make fun of a lot. Because of industry, it has been horribly contaminated with "God knows what". (And perhaps its even a bit radioactive!)
Some time ago there was a haiku contest in our area. I submitted the following (not that I might win) but perhaps to make the judges laugh a bit among themselves:
Steve: I simply loved your "Japanese style" poetry!
This might be a "bit off topic", but you got me going, pal! (I only wish to make you laugh, as you did me.)
Nearby where I live is a very disgusting lake which people make fun of a lot. Because of industry, it has been horribly contaminated with "God knows what". (And perhaps its even a bit radioactive!)
Some time ago there was a haiku contest in our area. I submitted the following (not that I might win) but perhaps to make the judges laugh a bit among themselves:
This is the doctrinal forum, stay on topic folks. If you wanna talk about vpw or twi take it to the "way" site. I would like to see this doctrinal forum stay pure and unpolluted by crap statements relating to twi or vpw, they have no relativeness to this forum.
I would argue that it matters a GREAT deal. If the incident is to be interpreted as being figurative, it doesn't matter if it was "said", interpretively danced, conveyed by smoke signal or issued by flag semaphore. If the incident didn't literally, historically take place, it's a completely moot point. My contention is that it is figurative in nature and not a recording of an actual, historical event. As such, there is no precedent being set.
My understanding and perspective is that the incident actually took place.
You wrote too much for me to respond to without becoming overbearing, so I'm going to be a bit selective. Forgive me if I don't address everything, but I sincerely believe I've "been there and done that" with the majority of what you raised, and I don't see the point in going through it again.
But I'm going to say THIS for, hopefully, the last time.
I do not feel obliged to prove your experience was not/is not authentic. I don't feel the need. I believe you're faking it as surely as I was, and I have demonstrated, over and over and over again, how easy it is. I have outlined the mechanics and shown beyond any reasonable doubt that faking it is easy and that it fits the evidence. The only reason "prove it" became a mantra on the thread that inspired this one is that it was demanded of me, not that I voluntarily engaged in a concerted effort to debunk any individual's experience.
I am under no obligation to prove that anyone does not speak in tongues.
The way claims and proof work is, when someone makes an affirmative claim, it is that person's burden to prove that claim.
I have not made an affirmative claim. My claim denies your affirmative claim.
Namely:
If I told you I have a fire-breathing dragon in my garage, it is not your burden to prove I don't. You can amass all the evidence you want about how non-credible my claim is, but you can never disprove it. But why should you? I'm the one making the claim. It should be my job to prove it.
That's what's happened here. We have all made the claim, "I can speak in tongues." Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that my claim was false and the suspicion that so was everyone else's. I no longer make the claim. But I did speak, and sounds did come out of my mouth. So what could account for that? Well, I faked it. That's still not an affirmative claim. It's merely an extension of my denial of the affirmative claim.
So, I faked it. And I think you did too. Now, I can't prove it, anymore than you can prove there's no fire-breathing dragon in my garage. But just as you can amass tons of evidence that I don't have such a creature in my garage, I amassed tons of evidence that SIT as practiced is faked. I showed the mechanism for fakery. I showed how our gullibility led us to believe it was real. And I established Biblical criteria for what real SIT would look like. It wasn't complicated. Real SIT will produce a language, every time. And I demonstrated that study after study after study failed to demonstrate that SIT produces an actual language, ever.
Note, I only did that in response to demands that I prove my position, not because I "felt the need" to do so.
So you feel you can easily prove I don't have a fire-breathing dragon in my garage if I give you access to my garage. Show me the dragon. But I'm more clever than that. You see, my dragon is invisible, so you won't be able to see it. Ah, you say, I'll throw a blanket over it. That way you'll be able to see where the dragon is, even if you can't see it. But I'm still too clever. My dragon is intangible also. So you can't see it, and if you throw paint or a blanket or anything on it, it will just pass right through him and land on the floor. You can't prove my dragon doesn't have those qualities!
Now you have to get smart. You have this tricorder, see, and it can detect all light forms. It can also detect variations in temperature readings, so the presence of a fire-breathing dragon will be detected in a number of ways. Unfortunately, you failed to account for the fact that an invisible, intangible dragon can certainly breathe fire that does not raise temperature. I mean, you believe in a fire that surrounded a bush without burning it. Surely if you had tried to take the temperature of that flame, it would not have been unusually high, because otherwise the burning bush would have been consumed, right?
So you cannot disprove that I have an invisible, intangible dragon in my garage that produces non-thermal heat, especially if you're using a tricorder that hasn't been calibrated to detect such a life form, no matter how many life forms that tricorder has been calibrated to detect.
So my claim that I have a fire-breathing dragon in my garage stands because you can't disprove it. Because it's invisible. And intangible. And non-thermal. And you don't have the tools to detect it. And the tools you think you have are inadequate to the task.
That is what has happened with this discussion. You say, "I can speak in tongues." Fine, I say. I go to the Bible and walk through every usage of tongues to show, in context, that tongues means languages. It doesn't mean codes. It doesn't mean the way dolphins "speak" to each other. Just walk through the Bible. So speaking in tongues means speaking in languages.
"No it doesn't. It can mean a lot of things." Um. No. It means languages.
"Well, just because you don't understand the language doesn't mean it's not a language."
Fair enough. Let's bring linguists in.
"Linguists can miss tons of languages that they haven't been exposed to."
Fine. Let's bring LOTS of linguists in. As many as we can muster.
"But they won't know dead languages. And they surely won't know tongues of angels. Or the language the serpent spoke to Eve."
It's invisible! It's intangible! It's non-thermal! You don't have the tools to detect it!
You know, after a while, I think you're justified in concluding, in the absence of real evidence, that I just don't have a dragon in my garage, no matter how sincere I am about it. The evidence isn't there. If I'm going to convince you that I have a dragon in my garage, the only thing I can do is show you the damn dragon.
If you're going to convince me that you're really speaking in tongues, then identify the language. Because after a while, I think I'm justified in concluding, in the absence of real evidence, that you just aren't speaking in tongues, no matter how sincere you are about it. And no matter how much you assert that I can't prove you're not.
I don't have to prove you're not. I'm not the one making a claim. You are. So back up your claim with evidence or acknowledge that I am justified in my skepticism, whether you share it or not.
All you guys are doing with your word play about languages and codes of communication, etc, is redefining the invisible dragon until I give up and concede I can't disprove it.
I'll save you the trouble. I can't disprove it. Nor should I have to.
Speaking in tongues was a perfectly testable claim until you defined away all aspects of it that make it testable.
And please note, nothing I have written in this post presumes the non-existence of God. There are dozens of explanations for the failure of SIT to produce a language that do not involve God being a myth. Does your inability to curse a fig tree and have it wither overnight disprove God's existence? No. Neither should your inability to produce a language.
I've been sitting back and watching this conversation's resurrection and thinking to myself, no one wants to go to the trouble of re-reading a 107-page thread that got awfully contentious (for which, again, I take full responsibility).
It's just, gosh, watching you guys twist yourselves into pretzels to avoid what I think is the clear scriptural conclusion here would be laughable if it were not so frustrating. It would be one thing if I hadn't addressed these points repeatedly. But I have. Rephrasing them doesn't make the dragon materialize in my garage. And it doesn't turn your utterances into a language.
And no, I don't have to prove it. You're the one claiming to produce a language. You prove it.
"Ok, I'll prove it. But first, let us define 'language.'"
Sheesh, if that's what was sold to us in PFAL (or wherever we bought this doctrine), we never would have believed it.
A claim that's proved cannot be denied. A claim that's NOT proved, can be denied.
You're making the claim. If you want me to believe it, prove it.
I feel no need whatsoever to disprove what you have never proved in the first place.
P.S. The invisible dragon in the garage is Carl Sagan's allegory/metaphor, not my own.
Off-topic, but the problem with the "serpent" just being a nickname as opposed to the actual animal appears to be Gen 3:15, which just doesn't make sense unless we're talking about a (very poorly understood) snake.
Off-topic, but the problem with the "serpent" just being a nickname as opposed to the actual animal appears to be Gen 3:15, which just doesn't make sense unless we're talking about a (very poorly understood) snake.
or a missing view of the exact relationship or correlation between snake and spirit.
(Perhaps that's synonymous with being a "very poorly understood" snake.)
I disagree, Mark, as I think the event did take place.
This presumes that Eve perceived reality in the same way that you perceive it (and/or have portrayed it.)
Now it looks like you may be assuming that everything written in the bible is literally true and actually took place. No, not everything that was written in the bible needs to be literally true to teach and communicate spiritual truth. People get truthful thoughts and false thoughts all the time today also. Does that mean that one needs to literally see a serpent in order for the devil to deceive people today and in past times? Again for that culture at the time, which was perhaps written by Moses, painting this sender of this deception as a serpent would expand the negative thoughts pertaining to the message, the deception used and the sender of the message.
Again, think about this TLC. Do all things written in the bible need to have literally taken place in order to teach spiritual truth? Or can some scriptures be written in figurative language and teach spiritual truth, perhaps even with emphasis?
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Raf
If a follower of another religion were going through this many logical contortions and definition expansions to justify the failure of his claim to produce it's promised results, we would all reject the claim without hesitation.
Ever hear a Mormon try to explain why his holy book has zero archaeological evidence to back it up? That's what this conversation sounds like.
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TLC
Thank you.
Did or didn't the serpent use a language to speak to Eve?
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waysider
I see two potential problems with this question. First, (and, this is a big one.) it presupposes the incident literally took place. Do you believe this or do you believe it to be figurative? Second, it veers too far from the topic at hand, in my opinion.
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TLC
I don't see that your question matters to the issue at hand.
It's a biblical record illustrating some sort of communication between two parties, one being Eve. The question is whether it was done via a language, as it is written that something was "said."
Furthermore, it's relevant to the topic as it involves a prior biblical usage of terms relating to speech and/or language (and might therefore be involved in setting precedents.)
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waysider
I would argue that it matters a GREAT deal. If the incident is to be interpreted as being figurative, it doesn't matter if it was "said", interpretively danced, conveyed by smoke signal or issued by flag semaphore. If the incident didn't literally, historically take place, it's a completely moot point. My contention is that it is figurative in nature and not a recording of an actual, historical event. As such, there is no precedent being set.
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Mark Sanguinetti
Many languages are used for communication. And yes, the story from Genesis with the serpent is figurative and not literal. It does show us that words can be used for deception and false information as used by the figurative serpent representing the God of this world Satan or for truth by God the Father. Serpents were likely looked down upon with dislike in the time period of the writings of the book of Genesis. And they can not literally talk. If this would have been literally true then the serpent would have been avoided and run away from or had large rocks thrown at it and smashed with a bat and destroyed. Who likes a serpent well enough to talk with one? And yes, this is the views of someone who likes dogs and cats and wants to always pet them.
And now with additional editing, I looked up snakes in my biblical software under Nelson's Bible Dictionary and it says: "Most snakes in Palestine were non-poisonous, but the Jewish people feared and hated all snakes". And serpents were the snakes most negatively seen.
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Oakspear
You made my day with that remark
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waysider
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Steve Lortz
Au contraire, my good friends, at least from my point of view...
Objective reality is not what we have been taking it for granted to be. The only absolute is that there are no absolutes. Every generalization fails, including this one.
We are entangled. It's all very zen. Speaking in tongues is the sound of one hand clapping.
In the 17th century, Isaac Newton said some things which came to be interpreted to mean that the cosmos is governed by absolute laws, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, etc., etc., etc. It's interesting to note that the word absolute comes from Latin that means "free of imperfection." The laws of the cosmos are free of imperfection.
Isaac's principles gained a great deal of attention because you can use them to purposefully regulate the flow of cannonballs.
In 1810, when Schleiermacher wanted to include a theology department in the University of Berlin, he had to promise the royal Prussian government that his theology would be "scientific" theology... that is to say, his theology would have to conform to the Newtonian system of absolute laws... laws that are free of imperfection.
Therefore, one of the presuppositions of Schleiermacher, and all the liberal protestant theology that has flowed from his, is that miracles CANNOT happen. A miracle would be imperfection in the laws of the cosmos, therefore none of the miracles recorded in the Bible could have really happened. Therefore the task of liberal theology is to explain why the authors of the Bible are lying about so much, especially the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The liberal protestant theologians made an absolute statement that the Bible is NOT absolute truth.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, conservative protestant theologians reacted against the liberal protestant theologians by making an absolute counter-statement that the Bible IS absolute truth, free of imperfection. That is what's known as "inerrancy" or "plenary verbal inspiration." Denominations that believe the Bible is absolute truth are called "fundamentalist" because inerrancy was a plank in the platform of the Fundamentalist Conferences. After 1925, many fundamentalists switched to the word "evangelical" because of the publicity black-eye fundamentalism took in the Scopes trial.
Wierwille was a fundamentalist. PFAL was fundamentalist. He taught that if the Bible were not absolute truth, if it included EVEN ONE imperfection, then it was an absolute lie, error without imperfection.
Astonishingly enough, at the same time William Jennings Brian was notoriously tangling himself up in fundamentalist absolute counter-statements (the Scopes trial), Niels Bohr was articulating the fundamentals of quantum mechanics at THE UNIVERSITY OF BERLIN, the very home of liberal protestant absolutism.
One of the fundamentals of quantum mechanics is that the laws of the cosmos are NOT absolute, that is to say, the laws of the cosmos are NOT free of imperfection in the Newtonian sense of the word "perfection." The laws are mathematically calculable, but there has to be an element of uncertainty injected into the calculation to get it to reflect the behavior of observable, objective reality.
Cannonballs are sufficiently big that Newtonian mechanics can be used to purposefully regulate their flow. But electrons are not. The purposefully regulated flow of electrons, the flow that drives the life of our cells, the flow that constitutes our THOUGHTS, is NOT subject to the absolutes of the Newtonian worldview. A degree of uncertainty is inherent to the purposefully regulated flow of electrons. Likewise, language is not subject to the absolutes of Newtonian science, and the Bible is not subject to the absolutes of either Schleiermacher OR the fundamentalists.
SOOoooooooOOOOooo.............
What does all this have to do with he question under consideration?
Raf comes out with his "confession" that he no longer believes that he ever actually spoke in tongues, and he interprets his previous experience as fakery... not malicious fakery, mind you, but a fakery resulting from naive gullibility.
That's OKAY! We all have our own experience, and we all interpret our experience in ways that will make sense of it to ourselves.
Raf didn't get himself into any trouble until he tried to generalize his interpretation of his experience to everyone else.
When Raf says that he was faking it, I'm fine with that. When Raf says that I am faking it, I begin to take exception.
Why do you find it necessary, Raf, to PROVE that everyone else was faking it, too? Why do you find it necessary to PROVE to me that I was faking it?
I say, "In my experience, I was not, and am not faking it. I am speaking in tongues." You say, "Your interpretation of your experience is wrong..." and then you devise a system of absolute statements about language and tongues to PROVE that my interpretation HAS TO BE wrong.
You make the absolute statement that "modern" tongues are NOT genuine Biblical tongues. When we look at what the Bible actually says, we see that there are only two restrictions the Bible puts on genuine, Biblical "speaking in tongues", one explicit and one implicit. The explicit restriction is that the speaker not understand the words coming out of her mouth. I would include deliberately forming nonsense syllables, as per theatrical improvisation, under the umbrella of this restriction as well, because the speaker understands that the syllables are nonsense. The implicit restriction is that it is not done as a result of willfully altering the speaker's state of consciousness. Though I recognize the force of these restrictions, I have to state that these restrictions are not absolute. The are not free of imperfection, BECAUSE NOTHING EVER IS!
If a person who has received the gift of the Holy Spirit is speaking in tongues without understanding the syllables coming out of her mouth, and without being in a willfully altered state of consciousness, then that person has met the Biblical requirements for genuinely speaking in tongues, whether that person is "modern" or not. To say anything else is to read into the Bible an absolute statement about speaking in tongues that just isn't there.
You make an absolute statement that a person has to produce an identifiable human "language" or all speaking in tongues is fake.
What does it mean to produce an "identifiable" human language? Do you know that if we heard Hebrew spoken as it was actually spoken in antiquity, we would not be able to recognize it as an "identifiable" human language?
You wrote, "You should be calling in as many linguists as possible to get as wide a breadth of knowledge as you can to ID the language, not coming up with excuses for why they'll fail before they even start."
If you want to find out scientific information about linguistics, go read Course in General Linguistics by Ferdinand de Saussure. I haven't read the whole thing, but I've referred to it in my debilitated state of scholarship. One of the things you'll find out is that you can't make absolute statements about language and/or communication, EITHER. To try to make absolute statements about speaking in tongues from a linguistic/communication standpoint, either to prove OR disprove it, is to chase a will-of-the-wisp. A person cannot make language do what you are trying to make it do, because of the very nature of language.
-----
You wrote, "Like it's everyone else's job to prove it's NOT. News flash: if you're the one claiming it IS genuine, then it's your task to prove it's a language."
It is not anybody's job to "prove" anything...
You say that it is your interpretation of your experience that you were faking it when you spoke in tongues. As far as I am concerned, it is a wonderful thing that you have the self-awareness and the honesty to make sense of your experience and to carry on as the unique Raf that we have all come to know and love. I have no impulse whatsoever to try to "prove" to you that you were speaking in tongues.
Why do you find it necessary to "prove" to me that I was not speaking in tongues?
You tell me that I couldn't have really been speaking in tongues because (and these are absolute statements, free of imperfection) modern speaking in tongues is not genuine Biblical speaking in tongues, and if that's not enough, genuine Biblical speaking in tongues is not really speaking in tongues either... because it is and always has been a hoax.
Why do people make absolute statements, Raf, when they aren't realistic? Because absolute statements can be used as propositions in syllogisms. People think they can "prove" whatever they want to "prove" if they pick the right absolute statements and apply the rules of logic. A conclusion can be logically valid, that is, it obeys the rules of the game of logic, but if one or more of the propositions are not true, the conclusion is unsound... or false. The degree of truth of a proposition is the degree to which the proposition accords with objective reality.
What quantum mechanics demonstrates for us is that NO absolute statement (including this one) accords 100% with objective reality.
There is a difference between objective reality and our experience of it. Objective reality has integrity, that is, it is whole and it persists. Our experience of objective reality in NOT whole, and does NOT persist. Nobody else shares my experience of objective reality except for God the Father through the Lord Jesus Christ by means of the Holy Spirit. The world-views that we hold are conceptual models of objective reality (purposefully regulated flows of words). Those models consist of all the stories we've told ourselves since we first acquired the linguistic means to do so. When we have a new experience, we incorporate that new experience into our models of objective reality by telling ourselves a new story about what just happened. These are important considerations of the branch of linguistics called semiotics, which deals with finding and assigning meanings.
When you write "it's your task to prove it's a language," Raf, aren't you really saying that I have to "prove" my interpretation of my experience to you?
Not only could I NOT do that, I judge it would be futile and wrong for me to even try...
...as futile and wrong as it would be for me to try to make you "prove" that you were really faking it when you were speaking in tongues.
When you say it's my responsibility to "prove" my interpretation of my experience, aren't you really trying to absolve yourself of your perceived responsibility to "prove" your interpretation of your experience? If that's the case, then don't sweat the load! You don't have to "prove" your interpretation of your experience to anybody, especially not to ME! ... and besides that... you COULDN'T... even if you wanted to... because of the nature of language... and of objective reality.
-----
You wrote "And for the last time, when you take one position for decades, reconsider and change your mind based on overwhelming evidence, the new position you take is NOT A PRESUPPOSITION. It is the OPPOSITE of a presupposition, and disingenuously calling it a presupposition to discredit it does not make it a presupposition."
Whether a thing is a presupposition or not has nothing to do with chronology. The prefix "pre" in this case means that it is a supposition that comes at the beginning of an argument, and that some features of the following argument will depend upon it, not that it comes from a previous point in time.
And the word "presupposition" is not a pejorative. A supposition is an assumption, a guess we have to make when we have to take a decision with insufficient information. A pre-supposition is a guess we have to make at the beginning of an argument to prevent uncertainty from derailing the argument. A presupposition is a tacit assumption. Presuppositions may or may not accord with objective reality. Presuppositions depend on our interpretations of our experiences, because our experiences of objective reality are incomplete. That's why we have to make assumptions.
Whether you were faking or not when you were speaking in tongues is up to you to decide. When you make the absolute statement that everybody was faking it, that is a guess which is necessary in order for you to argue that I was faking it. When you make the absolute statement that all speaking in tongues is fake, then you cannot use that statement in a syllogism to prove that all speaking in tongues is fake, because that would result in a tautology, a circular form of reason that is logically invalid.
That may not be what other people mean when they call things that you say "presuppositions"... but it's what I mean.
Thanks, Raf. It has not been easy to articulate these things, but it has been necessary. I've got a big job ahead of me at the School of Theology, and this has been a warm-up pitching practice for what I'm going to have to do up there! I am thankful that I can count you as my friend and speak openly with you. I am thankful for your responses, whether they agree with me or not!
Love,
Steve
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waysider
Oh, pardon me. I must have stumbled into the philosophy thread by mistake.
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spectrum49
You're most welcome, Mark! (And I'm in Liverpool "Noo Yawk"
, a northern suburb of Syracuse.)
It's good of you to want to incorporate "idios" into your commentary. And --- I will "fine tune this" just a tad-bit, so as not to go completely along with what TWI did with all of that. As they put it, we (humans) are completely in control of whether or not we want to use these wonderful evidences. And if we choose not to use any of these, (because we're either lazy, or just plain apathetic about "our responsibility" to learn and to DO "all 9 all the time", according to how they taught it should be done), then I guess God's just out of business, huh? (How's that for being "snarky"? Ha! Ha!)
Seriously though: The way I see it, God (or perhaps even to include Jesus Christ as well, for all I know) is the one who energizes these. And when he does, it's always in accordance with our willingness to follow where he's leading us. (To me, that's the "as the man wills" part.) And get this! In my experience, much of that seems to transpire even while I'm unaware it was actually happening that way. Let me explain:
Many times I thought I had a good idea. But later on, I discovered that it truly wasn't "my damned good idea" anyway. (Ha!) It was God's doing, because it was really HIS IDEA in the first place! And (of course) I went right along with it, simply because it just seemed to make so much sense to me at the time. (Again, this is an example of "as the man wills".) In truth, God was leading me right where he knew I wanted to go. (No problem! --- LOL)
But my problem with this used to be that I failed to recognize his having "worked in me to will and to do of his good pleasure". Rather, I prided myself in having come up with those "great ideas". Using hindsight, I see this more and more in the poems and music I've written, and even in much of what I've said and done. (That is, when I was really trying to do something good!)
But these days, things are a bit different. I'm very careful not to try and "take credit" for everything wonderful in my life, as though I DID IT ALL. (As I was saying, it just might be God's doing anyway!) God deserves the credit for what he does...not me! (I only wonder just how much I should ever honestly try to take any of the credit for! --- Hmmm...)
I hope this makes at least "some sense" to you. (And "sorry" if I was being too wordy while explaining it.)
SPEC
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Steve Lortz
After purposefully regulating my last flow of words, I had to write an English haiku... whether as a steam trap or a relief valve, I cannot say,
Mama's clock birds chirp
aping nature's hymnody --
I will speak in tongues
Love,
Steve
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Steve Lortz
If we're going to have a serious discussion of languages and meanings, waysider, we have to talk about these things, unless a person simply wants to drive a float in a snark parade :-)
Love,
Steve
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spectrum49
Steve: I simply loved your "Japanese style" poetry!
This might be a "bit off topic", but you got me going, pal! (I only wish to make you laugh, as you did me.)
Nearby where I live is a very disgusting lake which people make fun of a lot. Because of industry, it has been horribly contaminated with "God knows what". (And perhaps its even a bit radioactive!)
Some time ago there was a haiku contest in our area. I submitted the following (not that I might win) but perhaps to make the judges laugh a bit among themselves:
Onondaga Lake
shines in the night like the sun...
Poor fish all aglow!
SPEC
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Steve Lortz
Love,
Steve
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MRAP
This is the doctrinal forum, stay on topic folks. If you wanna talk about vpw or twi take it to the "way" site. I would like to see this doctrinal forum stay pure and unpolluted by crap statements relating to twi or vpw, they have no relativeness to this forum.
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TLC
My understanding and perspective is that the incident actually took place.
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TLC
I disagree, Mark, as I think the event did take place.
This presumes that Eve perceived reality in the same way that you perceive it (and/or have portrayed it.)
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Raf
Steve,
You wrote too much for me to respond to without becoming overbearing, so I'm going to be a bit selective. Forgive me if I don't address everything, but I sincerely believe I've "been there and done that" with the majority of what you raised, and I don't see the point in going through it again.
But I'm going to say THIS for, hopefully, the last time.
I do not feel obliged to prove your experience was not/is not authentic. I don't feel the need. I believe you're faking it as surely as I was, and I have demonstrated, over and over and over again, how easy it is. I have outlined the mechanics and shown beyond any reasonable doubt that faking it is easy and that it fits the evidence. The only reason "prove it" became a mantra on the thread that inspired this one is that it was demanded of me, not that I voluntarily engaged in a concerted effort to debunk any individual's experience.
I am under no obligation to prove that anyone does not speak in tongues.
The way claims and proof work is, when someone makes an affirmative claim, it is that person's burden to prove that claim.
I have not made an affirmative claim. My claim denies your affirmative claim.
Namely:
If I told you I have a fire-breathing dragon in my garage, it is not your burden to prove I don't. You can amass all the evidence you want about how non-credible my claim is, but you can never disprove it. But why should you? I'm the one making the claim. It should be my job to prove it.
That's what's happened here. We have all made the claim, "I can speak in tongues." Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that my claim was false and the suspicion that so was everyone else's. I no longer make the claim. But I did speak, and sounds did come out of my mouth. So what could account for that? Well, I faked it. That's still not an affirmative claim. It's merely an extension of my denial of the affirmative claim.
So, I faked it. And I think you did too. Now, I can't prove it, anymore than you can prove there's no fire-breathing dragon in my garage. But just as you can amass tons of evidence that I don't have such a creature in my garage, I amassed tons of evidence that SIT as practiced is faked. I showed the mechanism for fakery. I showed how our gullibility led us to believe it was real. And I established Biblical criteria for what real SIT would look like. It wasn't complicated. Real SIT will produce a language, every time. And I demonstrated that study after study after study failed to demonstrate that SIT produces an actual language, ever.
Note, I only did that in response to demands that I prove my position, not because I "felt the need" to do so.
So you feel you can easily prove I don't have a fire-breathing dragon in my garage if I give you access to my garage. Show me the dragon. But I'm more clever than that. You see, my dragon is invisible, so you won't be able to see it. Ah, you say, I'll throw a blanket over it. That way you'll be able to see where the dragon is, even if you can't see it. But I'm still too clever. My dragon is intangible also. So you can't see it, and if you throw paint or a blanket or anything on it, it will just pass right through him and land on the floor. You can't prove my dragon doesn't have those qualities!
Now you have to get smart. You have this tricorder, see, and it can detect all light forms. It can also detect variations in temperature readings, so the presence of a fire-breathing dragon will be detected in a number of ways. Unfortunately, you failed to account for the fact that an invisible, intangible dragon can certainly breathe fire that does not raise temperature. I mean, you believe in a fire that surrounded a bush without burning it. Surely if you had tried to take the temperature of that flame, it would not have been unusually high, because otherwise the burning bush would have been consumed, right?
So you cannot disprove that I have an invisible, intangible dragon in my garage that produces non-thermal heat, especially if you're using a tricorder that hasn't been calibrated to detect such a life form, no matter how many life forms that tricorder has been calibrated to detect.
So my claim that I have a fire-breathing dragon in my garage stands because you can't disprove it. Because it's invisible. And intangible. And non-thermal. And you don't have the tools to detect it. And the tools you think you have are inadequate to the task.
That is what has happened with this discussion. You say, "I can speak in tongues." Fine, I say. I go to the Bible and walk through every usage of tongues to show, in context, that tongues means languages. It doesn't mean codes. It doesn't mean the way dolphins "speak" to each other. Just walk through the Bible. So speaking in tongues means speaking in languages.
"No it doesn't. It can mean a lot of things." Um. No. It means languages.
"Well, just because you don't understand the language doesn't mean it's not a language."
Fair enough. Let's bring linguists in.
"Linguists can miss tons of languages that they haven't been exposed to."
Fine. Let's bring LOTS of linguists in. As many as we can muster.
"But they won't know dead languages. And they surely won't know tongues of angels. Or the language the serpent spoke to Eve."
It's invisible! It's intangible! It's non-thermal! You don't have the tools to detect it!
You know, after a while, I think you're justified in concluding, in the absence of real evidence, that I just don't have a dragon in my garage, no matter how sincere I am about it. The evidence isn't there. If I'm going to convince you that I have a dragon in my garage, the only thing I can do is show you the damn dragon.
If you're going to convince me that you're really speaking in tongues, then identify the language. Because after a while, I think I'm justified in concluding, in the absence of real evidence, that you just aren't speaking in tongues, no matter how sincere you are about it. And no matter how much you assert that I can't prove you're not.
I don't have to prove you're not. I'm not the one making a claim. You are. So back up your claim with evidence or acknowledge that I am justified in my skepticism, whether you share it or not.
All you guys are doing with your word play about languages and codes of communication, etc, is redefining the invisible dragon until I give up and concede I can't disprove it.
I'll save you the trouble. I can't disprove it. Nor should I have to.
Speaking in tongues was a perfectly testable claim until you defined away all aspects of it that make it testable.
And please note, nothing I have written in this post presumes the non-existence of God. There are dozens of explanations for the failure of SIT to produce a language that do not involve God being a myth. Does your inability to curse a fig tree and have it wither overnight disprove God's existence? No. Neither should your inability to produce a language.
I've been sitting back and watching this conversation's resurrection and thinking to myself, no one wants to go to the trouble of re-reading a 107-page thread that got awfully contentious (for which, again, I take full responsibility).
It's just, gosh, watching you guys twist yourselves into pretzels to avoid what I think is the clear scriptural conclusion here would be laughable if it were not so frustrating. It would be one thing if I hadn't addressed these points repeatedly. But I have. Rephrasing them doesn't make the dragon materialize in my garage. And it doesn't turn your utterances into a language.
And no, I don't have to prove it. You're the one claiming to produce a language. You prove it.
"Ok, I'll prove it. But first, let us define 'language.'"
Sheesh, if that's what was sold to us in PFAL (or wherever we bought this doctrine), we never would have believed it.
A claim that's proved cannot be denied. A claim that's NOT proved, can be denied.
You're making the claim. If you want me to believe it, prove it.
I feel no need whatsoever to disprove what you have never proved in the first place.
P.S. The invisible dragon in the garage is Carl Sagan's allegory/metaphor, not my own.
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WordWolf
If one presumes that this was part of a larger dialogue,
and one rather sensibly concludes that "the serpent" was not a description
of a literal animal, but rather a descriptive nickname
(like "the Dragon" for Bruce Lee or calling someone a fox, a sidewinder,
a jackal, a vulture, a pig and so on),
then it took place in some kind of language-and one of reasonable sophistication
(not some crude code like "hand signals" but something like English, Spanish,
French, German, Italian or the like,) where there's sufficient vocabulary to
discuss in detail.
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Raf
Off-topic, but the problem with the "serpent" just being a nickname as opposed to the actual animal appears to be Gen 3:15, which just doesn't make sense unless we're talking about a (very poorly understood) snake.
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TLC
or a missing view of the exact relationship or correlation between snake and spirit.
(Perhaps that's synonymous with being a "very poorly understood" snake.)
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Mark Sanguinetti
Now it looks like you may be assuming that everything written in the bible is literally true and actually took place. No, not everything that was written in the bible needs to be literally true to teach and communicate spiritual truth. People get truthful thoughts and false thoughts all the time today also. Does that mean that one needs to literally see a serpent in order for the devil to deceive people today and in past times? Again for that culture at the time, which was perhaps written by Moses, painting this sender of this deception as a serpent would expand the negative thoughts pertaining to the message, the deception used and the sender of the message.
Again, think about this TLC. Do all things written in the bible need to have literally taken place in order to teach spiritual truth? Or can some scriptures be written in figurative language and teach spiritual truth, perhaps even with emphasis?
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TLC
There's a presumption being made, that this was the only means by which Eve could know or perceive what was being communicated.
Yet, as indicated in a previous post, I do not believe her perception of reality was the same as ours at that point in time.
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