TONGUES AND LANGUAGES (fwd)

Miracle (miracle@procyon.com)
Sat, 26 Apr 1997 00:55:07 -0500 (CDT)

Gene
When I was active in the Assemblies Of God they believed when believers
spoke in tongues they were speaking actual languages. In fact, one of the
AOG writers at headquarters wrote a book "THIS MEANETH THAT" on this. The
only one of the author's arguments I remember was the fact that there are
several thousand languages in the world & it would be presumptuous of
skeptics to claim that what tongue speakers were rattling off were *not*
real languages if the skeptics were not conversant with all these various
languages.
The argument appealed to me at the time, but I still heard too much
"Shanda Ah La Makooree" in message after message. Made me wonder, even
then.
BTW, after my initial tongue experience that made me decide to go into the
AOG & become a Pentecostal minister, I did very little tongue speaking. I
never suddenly spouted a message in church or anything of the sort. I felt
at the time that I just wasn't "anointed" to do this & my "ministry" lay in
other directions. Didn't do it in my private prayers, either. At this late
date it makes me wonder why I was in the AOG at all.
The AOG also felt they should have no more that 3 tongue "messages" in a
meeting & that all the messages should be "interpreted". Paul says
something like this in Corinthians somewhere (I think). Sometimes people
got overzealous & we got *four* messages. In such cases, we invariably
thought of the 4th message as "part of the 3rd message" & thus justified
breaking this biblical rule. It's amazing the way people find justification
for breaking even their own rules.
I know this isn't strictly on errancy; sorry...

RJV 4/25
MY first g/f was an AOG'er. She knew I was an agnostic (at the time) and
took me to church. Well, she musta known that I was about to start
laughing my head off, b/c it wasn't even 0.0002 seconds after the end of
the first babble session I heard that her Bible was opened to some verse
that supposedly supported this. I, of course, was curious as to why the
Bible was the justification to this. That was probably the first time I
ever heard "The Bible Says it, I believe it, that settles it..." Anyways,
I looked at those services as good entertainment. Even now, they sure
were funny. Of course, anyone who understands any rudimentary knowledge
about languages will know that they aren't really speaking another
language. In fact, at one service, I even heard the minister say
"Shilililili". He sounded a bit like a smurf... Anyways, I can't
remember exactly where I read this (Discover probably), but there is some
sort of rule that most (if not all) languages follow. It has to do with
the commonality of words and the power of 10. It went something like
this: A common word could be found every 10 words or so (ex: and, but,
or...) A less common word could be found every 100 words or so... This
went so on and so forth to 1000,10000,... If you ever listen to these
people speaking "tongues", you will never see this sort of pattern
(unless it is Yoel spouting Hebrew Disco lyrics...)

-- R Jason Valentine ..ooOO miracle@procyon.com

Hsaljien ielnbrqln ekgy ierlh iqhwriyh alksa lkfehn ene i qiuwr btei uya
aohsfu eownb oam lerpnw neoguuoak kahsbeioa neutt akslhfbneii e

Ooops - sorry - was typing in tounges...