what do you say about people who receive private sensory revelations? Is it a sign from GOD or is it a form of mental illness? Some types can be found in in the old testament book of Daniel while the book of Corinthians goes into great detail about having the so called gift of speaking in tongues. Also the book of Acts and ending in the last book of Revelation People I feel experienced hallucinations claiming they received visions and heard voices. This is signs of mental illness .i`m not branding only one segment of the church, Say protestants like the Pentecostals or the Roman Catholics But I believe this is wide spread. And it can become extremely dangerous. What has your experience been since the majority of Atheist were once confessing and practicing Christians. I have a lot to discuss since I came out of a Roman Catholic and Pentecostal background. thanks billy
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Delusion or not, as long as they keep their beliefs to themselves and not drag them into the voting booth, I don't care.
I wouldn't be too quick to throw out accusations of mental illness. Most religious people are quite sane. Even the ones that claim to have revelations. I think it much more likely that they just make stuff up either consciously or subconsciously than actual mental illness or neurological disorder.
Btw, people without any sort of medical or psychological problems can have hallucinations too. It happens all the time.
it's perfectly true that most humans are delusional, most people think they are above average intelligence, a better than average driver, and that their children are cleverer than the norm, for example. This as you say does not on it's own suggest a person is psychotic, though obviously a belief that a superhuman deity is instructing your actions quite specifically can divorce a person entirely from morality, if they view morality not as a reasoned assessment of the consequences of their actions, but as divine diktat. Such beliefs of course can be pernicious in perfectly decent sane people, for those who are psychotic they can have catastrophic results.
As for the OP..."what do you say about people who receive private sensory revelations?"
I'd say please demonstrate objective evidence that what you have imagined is in fact revelation, and not your own mind, possibly in a suggestible state, simply convincing itself this is the case in order to buttress a priori beliefs you hold about a deity.
@Agnostic Believer: "Is it a sign from GOD or is it a form of mental illness?"
Definitely the latter in my opinion. If someone tells you that god's commanded them to sacrifice their children or massacre innocent people with guns, call the police, not a priest. You can hear voices and see hallucinations because of mental illness, drugs, or dementia. In her final years, my mother saw ghosts, angels, plagues of insects. She lived in fear.
"Speaking in tongues" is trash. The people who do this are babbling meaningless nonsense, supposedly in foreign languages. If you listen closely, there are no linguistic patterns or intonation. The phonemes are always from their own native languages. As far as I know, nobody's ever identified the language being spoken as Latin or Chinese, etc. Perhap's its Martian.
Deus non est. Je n'aime pas les escargots. Zwei Kaffee bitte. 日本語分かりますか。
That's me speaking in tongues. I can really do it, but it's the result of years of study, not divine inspiration.
To be charitable, perhaps the individuals involved believe they are inspired by god. But I don't think it has any basis in reality.
What are your thoughts on "speaking in tongues" as its presented in Scripture? Because I agree that all Pentecostals are doing is just babbling. In Acts 2 however, its kind of a different and unique event. Its as if the disciples just spoke normally, and the listeners were able to understand, despite the language barrier. Obviously its miraculous, so I don't expect you to believe it. But it seems to play around with the notion of deep structure and universal grammar. At least that's what comes to mind when I read it.
The speaking in tongues (or the idea that the divine spoke a special/magical language) was common in Greek and Roman deities/cults/mysteries. It is one of the many common aspects of the pre-existing religions that was folded into Christianity to make it competitive. Some other examples are: virgin births and promises of magical rewards after death. One of the great innovations of Christianity was the willingness to just repurpose old beliefs with the thinnest of veneers, making conversion easier than it normally would have been. The glue lines are obvious to anyone who isn't a fanatic.
Christianity is a Dr. Frankenstein's monster of religions.
"the idea that the divine spoke a special/magical language"
Explain that point further before I comment.
What is to explain? Before Christianity other religions practiced a speaking of seemingly gibberish with the belief it was the language of the gods. Christianity comes around and what do you know, this new religious product has many of the same features as the previous successful religious products. I'm suggesting that is no accident.
Ok, now what verse talks about gibberish which is really the language of God?
Don't need a verse; since I don't care if what they are doing is biblical or not (I got no dog in that fight).
Well you do need a verse if you're going to claim Christianity repurposed ancient Greek and Roman ideas. It's not much of a repurposing if your prime example is a group that appeared over 2,000 years after Christianity was born. You said this makes conversions easier, I wonder how many ancient Greeks and Romans are being converted by the Pentecostal church with their babbling.
fine:
Yes Virginia; early Christians spoke in tongues also. Let the gymnastics begin!
No gymnastics needed. Acts 2 already established that speaking in tongues means speaking a language other than your native tongue. "Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us in his own native language" (v. 7).
That's why I asked you earlier to explain your comment further. Because if you think speaking in tongues means "the idea that the divine spoke a special/magical language." Then you're wrong.
It means what Algebe said it means: "Deus non est. Je n'aime pas les escargots. Zwei Kaffee bitte. 日本語分かりますか。That's me speaking in tongues."
At long last John; speaking in tongues meaning speaking (a supposed) unknown language with greatly diminished syllabic patterns; and was common enough practice in the early church to be mentioned repeatedly in the New Testament.
But I'm sure you'll be able to just dismiss it; get up on those parallel bars!
I don't understand the purpose of quoting all these verses. The meaning doesn't change. It's also kind of ironic, given that this entire chapter is about Paul telling people to stop "speaking in tongues," which goes against your claim that Christianity is recycling ancient ideas.
Now, clearly what Paul is against is not even nonsensical gibberish, but speaking real languages that no one else understands. Read the verses you are quoting slowly:
"The one who prophesies is greater than the one who speaks in tongues, unless someone interprets, so that the church may be edified
"Unless you speak intelligible words with your tongue, how will anyone know what you are saying? You will just be speaking into the air. Undoubtedly there are all sorts of languages in the world, yet none of them is without meaning. If then I do not grasp the meaning of what someone is saying, I am a foreigner to the speaker, and the speaker is a foreigner to me" (v. 10).
"For this reason the one who speaks in a tongue should pray that they may interpret what they say"
A prime example is the Catholic Church, which used to have mass and prayer exclusively in Latin, despite most people not speaking Latin.
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Keep back flipping John.
It's difficult to reply when you don't even give commentary to the things you're quoting. I see these quotes as backing up my position, not yours.
After all, haven't I been the one saying you're confusing what Pentecostals do, with what Scripture and Christianity teaches? What do you gain by quoting things which further demonstrate you don't comprehend the difference?
You seem to paste anything with the phrase "speaking in tongues" seemingly giving no thought to what it's saying.
Even with deep structure and universal grammar, and even accepting that all the languages in the region concerned were Indo-European, there's still the problem of lexis. It reminds me of the exaggerated expectations that people had about language translation when computers started to become a thing back in the 60s and 70s.
The speaking in tongues in Acts is a magic trick, a deus ex machina, like the universal translator in Star Trek. I don't believe in miracles or magic.
Possibly it was a metaphor for the ability of the disciples to communicate their passion across cultural rather than linguistic barriers. But any real speaking in tongues would have been the result of hard study.
What's the problem of lexis?
Star Trek was a bit before my time, and I certainly wasn't around to hear to debates during the 60's and 70's.
But I am around now when people use Google Translate, and Skype supposedly translates in real time. So the idea of a universal translator doesn't seem like fiction to me.
I don't believe in miracles or magic either. But I do believe that if God exists then these things shouldn't be a problem. If I can pretty much do this with my cell phone, why wouldn't God be able to without one?
The vocabulary of a given language. Even if two languages have similar grammatical structures, and even if their vocabularies come from common roots, people aren't going to be able to understand each other. Mother, moeder, Mutter, madre are all obviously from common roots but not mutually intelligible.
Google Translate is very unreliable. Try translating a sentence from English to German to Spanish and back into English. Anything more complex than "Today is Sunday" will get garbled. Imagine trying to negotiate a treaty or explain a gospel with that tool.
Star Trek had a universal translator that would instantly analyze the speech patterns of aliens and translate them into idiomatic American English. It was essential for the stories, but probably more unrealistic than warp drive or transporter beams.
But is Google unreliable because it is fundamentally and in principle unreliable, or because it's still developing and improving?
I tried learning a little bit of German before I went. I never finished, but it didn't seem impossible. So if I can learn, surely a computer can too.
Perhaps a universal translator doesn't work because in theory aliens would be biologically different from us. But a German and an English speaker share the same brain structure. A computer will eventually be able to simulate that structure.
@John 61X Breezy: "A computer will eventually be able to simulate that structure."
You hit the nail on the head there. Language is one of the most complex functions of the human brain. For a computer to have a proper understanding of language, it would need to model the entire brain structure. How close do you think we are to that level of technology? When we reach that stage, I think the implications will go far beyond language translation.
Google translate works by statistically sampling vast volumes of data. No understanding is involved. Human translators work by directly understanding meanings in source texts and recreating them in the target language.
I don't think it's as complicated as you suggest. At least no more complicated than other faculties. A computer doesn't need to simulate the entire brain, just those concerned with speech. I think mathematics is more complicated than language. Besides being a language of it's own it requires far more effort to execute. Hence why babies learn language naturally and we need years of education to master math. Yet a simple calculator already does what the brain does much better.
But even if it is as difficult as you say, the question isn't how close we are to it, but is it possible at all. If it's possible, then like I said I would expect God to be able to easily do it, though the means are not currently known to us.
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