the rix mix

The McCain/Palin campaign would collapse overnight if a video were discovered of Sarah Palin speaking in tongues. The vast majority of Americans have never personally witnessed the phenomena.

There are many anti-charismatic fundamentalists who consider speaking in tongues a dangerous & demonic form of worship & not at all an expression of the Holy Spirit. Here's a page titled Chaos with sound, from from ultra-fundamentalist website.

From a pentecostal website, an 8 minute RealAudio file, Mystery of Tongues, with some examples along with Holy Ghost preaching. Google turns up videos.

You might think, "Sounds like they're just having some fun." In a way you'd be right. They meet together by common consent. Some meetings are more intense than others. It would be downright disappointing at many churches if someone wasn't flopping in the aisle, & there are congregants who can be expected to stand up, get out there & fall down right on time every week if nobody else does. Other places it's a special event, they'll bring in guest preachers who specialize in moving the unmoved, even the children do some moaning & writhing.

As someone who has listened to & enjoyed religious trance music & sound from all around the world, I accept the practice as human. However, in pentecostal protestanism, speaking in tongues accompanies doctrines & theologies I find unsophisticated at the least. The Holy Spirit has plenty of creative means to exert itself, joyfully, poetically, & in community, without resorting to babble. Even the Klingon language that developed out of Star Trek has linguistic substance. Nobody knows what tongues mean unless the speaker provides a translation. I would imagine angel communication is either telepathic or as orderly & expressive as Classical Latin or Greek. Some tongues sound like poor imitations of Latin. Many orthodox Christians of literal minds explain the Pentecost as possibly xenoglossy, a paranormal event during which the Disciples miraculously learned the languages of the countries they would evangelize. Following the Resurrection, this would be a wondrous thing but an almost minor miracle by comparison. Speaking in nonsensical syllables or angelic language would have been no help to them. I prefer to believe it was the moment when they collectively comprehended what they had become in community, because they would have lost heart & faith had they not carried a strength & spirit of community with them as they went their separate ways.

Labels: Grandma Palin, religion, THE election