Have you ever "Spoken in Tongues" as experienced in the Pentecostal Movement?

I have seen it but I have not experienced this particular thing. Not sure what to make of it but many believe in it and practice it so who am I to say it is not real? If it is real I would like to have an experience. I love to experience just about everything in life.

I sometimes like to speak in riddles, just to get people thinking :-/

I faked it once at my friend’s Pentecostal church and they all went nuts because of how good I was at it, apparently.

I understand the feeling and the ability to “speak in tongues” because it’s happened to me. It’s the same thing as any other way of getting out of your head and into your body, and moving into that which is your direct experience of the spiritual.

They dance themselves into a frenzy where their linguistic minds are no longer managing things. The nonlinguistic mind expresses itself much differently. People can do all kinds of things they can’t do in ordinary states of minds: handle snakes, speak in tongues, or in my case, make moves and jumps I never could have made if I were in my linguistic mind.

Well, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it! ;-)

No, but I saw an example of it once when I decided to go to a Pentecostal Service.

No….and i’ve never seen it.

Yep. I was ten the first time, and 22 the last.

These days I prefer to remain in control of all of my mental faculties. In retrospect, psychosomatic insanity isn’t very becoming.

I used to attend an evangelical church and I never experienced it myself but I did see others speaking in tongues. It was one of the things that seriously disturbed me about the church and was one of the factors leading me to leave it.

I saw it once, and it was very obvious everyone was faking it.

First time I learned of it was watching “Borat.” My wife grew up in an evangelical cult of sorts and explained to me what it was. I was pretty shocked my the whole thing, and have seen it in documentaries since. It looks like just another BS aspect of the illusion that is religion.

I have never seen it. Would like to.

I’ve only seen it in movies like Jesus Camp. It seems kind of disturbing, especially when the parents pressure their kids into doing it.

Buncha freaks.

I heard Jim Bakker do it for ten seconds on tv and I flipped. I didn’t think he could do it. It was very convincing.
Some ministers fake it by going, “dea da da da de de” by simply touching the top of their mouth real fast w/their tongue. That’s cheating! It just isn’t right !! Fakers!

@Fiddle_Playing_Creole_Bastard “I faked it once at my friend’s Pentecostal church and they all went nuts because of how good I was at it, apparently.”

Just goes to show what you can accomplish with a little effort.

@fundevogel, haha… I basically just went “heka leka ha laihm! heka leka ha laihm!” and coughed up phlegm over an over again. They thought I was loaded up with some holy spirit. Good times, haha.

There’s a scene like that in Saved.

I have never done it, and I don’t believe it is a gift of God. The true gift of tongues as revealed in the bible is when you speak in your own language, and the audience all hears it in their own language. It is a tool that God occasionally uses in order to spread His message. Glossolalia has no function- God does not create confusion.

No, I’ve seen many, many people do it, though, as I was raised in a church where that was one of the requirements to be considered “saved”. My guardian prayed aloud daily for an hour, sometimes two, and she’d go off on these glossolalia trips that would last a good 3–4 minutes at a time. I don’t believe they’re saying anything; I think it’s nothing more than an extreme emotional outburst.

Never done it, but I witnessed it when I was around 10, at a friend’s church. It scared the shit out of me to see adults behaving like babies. One man in particular, in his mid 30s, crumpled into a ball, fell to the floor and start sucking his thumb. Everyone else around him was going nuts and I wanted out of there, badly.

Very insightful @Harold… ”God does not create confusion.”

True dat!

”The true gift of tongues as revealed in the bible is when you speak in your own language, and the audience all hears it in their own language.”

@Fiddle_Playing_Creole_Bastard how did you do it?

@anartist, did you see that post above? I just made lots of hacking, phlegm-y sounds and said something like “heka leka la chaim” over and over again.

Mecka lecka hi, Mecka hiney ho!

Oh, good, this is the social section.

For a long time, my “tongues” sounded a lot like Japanese. Apparently no one (including myself) made the connection that I was a huge fan of those evil, sinful, debasing, witchcraft-glorifying Anime cartoons.

I grew up watching pople do it. They each had their own set of syllabic vocalizations. I do not believe it is anything other than infantile babbling. It has been studied many times by linguists and they all came to the same conclusions. The only times that there was an actual lanuage sopken the prson was found to have been exposd to the language as a child. The rest were without cadence or syntax. Just babblings.
This does not mean that they were all faking it. The energy built up in these meetings is real and they feel something which has been studied as well. It is caused in part by an emotional build up coupled with shallow breathing among other things. The Christian groups are not the only ones to experience this. I won’t go into all of it again, I’ve posted about this before.

I went to an evangelical church where it was common practice for people to be called up by the pastor and go through some ritual of cleansing that would bring the spirit on them. Ever one that did this said, “Ah la babala babala babala!” over and over again.with an occasional modification of the starting cadance to something like, “Masheen ah babala babala babala!” Rather contrived, I thought, althought I am sure the emotional charge was real and the experience was genuine to them..

It certainly did not come close to the description of the phenomenon in the New Testament, where when it happened tongues of fire descended on the heads of the assembled and while they spoke gibberish, all the assembled observers heard God being praised in their own tongue.

Acts 2:
1 — And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place.
2 — And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.
3 — And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them.
4 — And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.
5 — And there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven.
6 — Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language.
7 — And they were all amazed and marvelled, saying one to another, Behold, are not all these which speak Galilaeans?
8 — And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born?

No, I haven’t personally experienced it, but I have observed it in respected relatives, along with a process called laying on of hands.

@aprilsimnel “Mecka lecka hi, Mecka hiney ho!”
Are you kidding me? That has nothing to do with God. I heard girls in Las Vegas say that to a group of businessmen in a bar!

@Aster That’s from Pee Wee’s Playhouse, a Saturday morning TV show with Pee Wee Herman. Before rubbing one out in a porn theater ruined his career.

Once, I saw a group of people screaming in tongues and it was so freaky and extremely disturbing. There was nothing holy about it. Gave me a sick feeling in my stomach.
@Fiddle_Playing_Creole_Bastard Lol

yep.

the first time i saw it done was in an assembly of God church, where a special speaker was praying for people to be filled with the holy spirit. the whole time i was thinking, “what a load of crap.” it just seemed so fake! how could everyone be suddenly speaking a new language.

later on in my life, i was attending a church meeting, and there was another guest speaker, who called all the youth up to the front to pray for them to receive the holy spirit. i was so doubtful, but i gave it a try, and i followed all the instructions of the speaker (which were basically to start praising God’s name and worshipping him.) i started to do so, and suddenly i felt a feeling like i never felt before. something that shook me to the depths of my soul, something i couldn’t explain. i broke out in tears out of nowhere, and i started babbling words. to me it just seemed like incoherent babbling at first, but then i realized i could control my speech, and i was actually speaking another language.

after that, i had so many questions, because i was one of the few that spoke. and i wasn’t even expecting it, there were people there that wanted it so much more that i did. why was i chosen to speak in tongues? why did it happen on that day? did God have a mightier plan for me? but after what happend to me on that day, there is no way i can deny that God is real. i looked it up later on gotquestions.org and found out that the act of speaking in tongues has a purpose as a sign for others. (1 Corinthians 14:22)

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20cor%2014:22&version=NLT

Anyone read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson? It’s a science fiction novel but there’s some interesting stuff in there about speaking in tongues, and about religion as a “virus”. Great book, I highly reccommend it.

I read it ages ago, but I don’t remember in any more.

@kwik3mart I respect your experience, and do not mean to detract from it. I would just say that there are people in any number of different religions including the occult who have experienced a phenomenon similar to the one you describe. Since many of these people are experiencing this in practices that claim to be the one and only route to such experience, it seems reasonable to guess it may be a natural function of the brain under certain conditions.

What is described in Acts is very different from being able to babble in a language nobody else understands. I would be swayed to believe we had hit something quite unique of the person speaking in tongues were understood by a wide range of people who all spoke different languages.