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One of the craziest thing I read was the book on Evangelicals over-reacting to Last Temptation of Christ. Over-reacting is putting it mildly. They blew up a theater in France.
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Jul 3, 2015 16:17
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Animal-Mother posted:So strange that we're a nuclear powered nation that routinely launches people and equipment into orbit but we've got this huge population of folks who practically believe something like Lord of the Rings is a history book. Darth Walrus posted:Well, technically, the Bible is a history book. It's just that it's also a religious manual, and the methods and objectives of recording history have changed dramatically since a couple of thousand years ago. Just have a look at the mythologising you see in Greek and Roman histories, even if they are closer to the modern standard. While you are definitely correct I don't think he meant it like "most of the American public thinks the Bible is a document that has about as much historical value as a Greek myth" I think he meant "Most of America thinks that the events in the Bible are as likely as the events described by historians in college classes" and that includes the parts where the completely impossible happens. Which is kind of the whole issue here.
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Jul 4, 2015 18:46
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It's very difficult to be a religious person without resorting to self-righteousness.
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Jul 5, 2015 01:11
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FilthIncarnate posted:It's very difficult to be a religious person without resorting to self-righteousness. Honestly I think thats patently false. Because it depends on what you define as religious.
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Jul 5, 2015 01:36
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reignofevil posted:While you are definitely correct I don't think he meant it like "most of the American public thinks the Bible is a document that has about as much historical value as a Greek myth" I think he meant "Most of America thinks that the events in the Bible are as likely as the events described by historians in college classes" and that includes the parts where the completely impossible happens. Which is kind of the whole issue here. Exactly. We split the atom, but millions of us believe the whole world was literally flooded, God literally burned Sodom and Gomorrah, a talking serpent literally and so on and so on.
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Jul 5, 2015 03:10
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Christian churches in the US are fascist fifth column elements and should be destroyed if at all possible. The entire religion is veneration of a tyrant.
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Jul 5, 2015 14:00
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Effectronica posted:A crash ate my megapost, so I'll do a smaller one and follow up. This is a good post, but I disagree on one point. The Seventh-Day Adventists and Churches of Christ are evangelical, in the sense that their primary purpose is spreading the gospel. This may seem like a nitpick, but it is part of a larger problem in understanding evangelicals. Evangelical does not equal Fundamentalist. Evangelicals are primarily concerned with the salvation of the souls of all mankind. There are Fundamentalist Evangelicals. However if you look at a group like the United Methodist Church, they are clearly Evangelical, and clearly not Fundamentalist. Fundamentalism is another thing entirely, which is based on biblical inerrancy, strict adherence to scripture, and a return to the "fundamental" tenets of Christianity. These tenets are viewed as being those of original Christians, but are in fact modern constructions based on the fears and insecurities that accompany religious zealotry. Conservative Evangelicals, as opposed to Fundamentalist Evangelicals., do not believe the bible is wholly inerrant. this allows the issue to be used as a wedge between Fundamentalist and Conservative groups. The reason this conflation has occurred is because the news loves covering how crazy the fundies are, and they have come to be the public face of the Evangelical movement. The main reason this distinction is important is because many Fundamentalists adopt a city on a hill mentality that they have to withdraw from the world, and if you don't have the sense to convert, well tough luck. These churches are not Evangelical. I have to go to work now, but more on this once I have a moment.
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Jul 5, 2015 16:33
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reignofevil posted:While you are definitely correct I don't think he meant it like "most of the American public thinks the Bible is a document that has about as much historical value as a Greek myth" I think he meant "Most of America thinks that the events in the Bible are as likely as the events described by historians in college classes" and that includes the parts where the completely impossible happens. Which is kind of the whole issue here. Yeah, I know there's a great deal of myth in the Bible (to understate things considerably), and literalism is a problem. It's just that my inner pedant gets antsy when someone describes one of the world's oldest historical narratives as the equivalent of Tolkein's supremely nerdy constructed-world project.
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Jul 5, 2015 17:12
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Darth Walrus posted:Yeah, I know there's a great deal of myth in the Bible (to understate things considerably), and literalism is a problem. It's just that my inner pedant gets antsy when someone describes one of the world's oldest historical narratives as the equivalent of Tolkein's supremely nerdy constructed-world project. Understandable 
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Jul 5, 2015 17:17
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I don't understand why these guys call themselves fundamentalist christian, when they clearly don't like things that Jesus said and are super hard for old testament. Shouldn't they call themselves old school jews or something?
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Jul 5, 2015 23:15
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Darth Walrus posted:Well, technically, the Bible is a history book. Its a very poor history book. Its more of a collection of folk tales inspired by someone actual events.
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Jul 6, 2015 04:34
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Animal-Mother posted:So strange that we're a nuclear powered nation that routinely launches people and equipment into orbit but we've got this huge population of folks who practically believe something like Lord of the Rings is a history book. That doesn't matter the rulers will be the ruling class and the peons the peons.
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Jul 6, 2015 04:43
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caleramaen posted:This is a good post, but I disagree on one point. The Seventh-Day Adventists and Churches of Christ are evangelical, in the sense that their primary purpose is spreading the gospel. This may seem like a nitpick, but it is part of a larger problem in understanding evangelicals. Evangelical does not equal Fundamentalist. Evangelicals are primarily concerned with the salvation of the souls of all mankind. There are Fundamentalist Evangelicals. However if you look at a group like the United Methodist Church, they are clearly Evangelical, and clearly not Fundamentalist. Fundamentalism is another thing entirely, which is based on biblical inerrancy, strict adherence to scripture, and a return to the "fundamental" tenets of Christianity. These tenets are viewed as being those of original Christians, but are in fact modern constructions based on the fears and insecurities that accompany religious zealotry. Conservative Evangelicals, as opposed to Fundamentalist Evangelicals., do not believe the bible is wholly inerrant. this allows the issue to be used as a wedge between Fundamentalist and Conservative groups. The reason this conflation has occurred is because the news loves covering how crazy the fundies are, and they have come to be the public face of the Evangelical movement. The main reason this distinction is important is because many Fundamentalists adopt a city on a hill mentality that they have to withdraw from the world, and if you don't have the sense to convert, well tough luck. These churches are not Evangelical. I have to go to work now, but more on this once I have a moment. Evangelical also refers to a set of theological positions, which overlap heavily with fundamentalism, but which predate it and which are used to define "evangelical Protestantism". SDAs and Churches of Christ are not evangelical in this sense, though externally they appear that way.
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Jul 6, 2015 04:46
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You seem to clearly ignore the point here. The evangelical church, just like many churches in america has been co-opted. It has been taken over from inside to serve a political purpose, corrupted beyond a spiritual and religious entity it is something else. A political one. That is the biggest legacy and impact that America has had on the Church, and it has served a very key role in ensuring these political concepts remain spread among the masses. Where the Russians stamped out the Church, the United States coopted it as a useful tool for propaganda.
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Jul 6, 2015 04:55
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PerpetualSelf posted:You seem to clearly ignore the point here. The evangelical church, just like many churches in america has been co-opted. It has been taken over from inside to serve a political purpose, corrupted beyond a spiritual and religious entity it is something else. A political one. That is the biggest legacy and impact that America has had on the Church, and it has served a very key role in ensuring these political concepts remain spread among the masses. This stuff actually predates America as it is now. Much of it goes back to the original colonies and the fact that some of them were outright theocratic. While some were more open some of the original cities set up here had the governor and the leader of the church be literally the same person. Some of the colonies actually explicitly forbade certain forms of religious practice and were outright hostile to the Catholic Church. Whiles some people were in fact fleeing persecution in Europe the dumb side of it was that they were actively persecuting people of other faiths after they got here. In some colonies it started with severe fines being levied against any Catholics that tried to hold office. Later it was "all Catholic priests must leave or die." Even so you had to be a prominent, respected member of a particular church or you would not get ahead in life. If you believed the wrong things there was no way for you to make anything of yourself. Full religious freedom was the exception not the rule. Some colonies would allow a certain set of religions but really a lot of them were very fundamentalist. This is part of what is used for justification of trying to implement theocracy in the U.S. The argument is that we grew out of those colonies and a lot of them were outright theocratic. The Puritanical colonies of the time were pointed it at as full of great people who understood God's word and totally had it right. It wasn't that the U.S. coopted the church it's that this particular sector of religion was there right when the country was founded. Granted this is also where the persecution complex also comes from. These religious movements are centuries old - older than the nation, even - and their attempts at forcing theocracy keep bubbling up and we have to keep slamming the lid on it. The lines are currently very clearly drawn but not where the fundies want them to be so they keep trying to press past them. When it inevitably starts to boil over again we put a lid on it and they start screeching loudly.
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Jul 6, 2015 09:17
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CommieGIR posted:Its a very poor history book. Its more of a collection of folk tales inspired by someone actual events. Sometimes no actual events even. There's no evidence in the archaeological or historical record for Jews ever having been in Egypt, for example. Exodus is largely the author writing an origin story for his people, rather than documentation of actual events. In fact, modern Egyptologists think the pyramids were not even built by slaves, but by farmers working between growing seasons. You have to take with a grain of salt a series of stories that boil down to "God says we're the best people, and he told us to kill all these other people and live in their lands because it's ours now." It reads like ancient propaganda for the campaigns to initially take the historical Israel from its original occupants. I want to discourage people from thinking of the collection of texts in the Bible as having any use whatsoever as a historical record. Instead, they should look at it as a record of the evolution of a society and its code of ethics and morals over the time it purports to document. Even if the stories aren't true, they truly reflect the morés and beliefs of the societies that wrote them. We should encourage people to see the Bible as a map. To study it end-to-end and see which ideas stuck around, and on which topics the biblical socieites evolved, and try to understand the trajectory of moral development shown therein. If you view it that way, you can see that as time moved on, the cultures that contributed to the bible started to see the benefit in welcoming outsiders, being kind to others, attempting to lift up your "lessers" and so on. We see the society move from the idea of a contract with God that says "you the best, as long as you follow these 10 simple rules" to a society where your duty is to be considerate of your fellow person in general, rather than just as far as God tells you to. If you take this approach, then you plot the bible on a course where at its trajectory in modern times things like acceptance of gays and the desire to lift up minorities are natural outgrowths of the lessons the bible has to teach. Treating it as a historical document is a grave error that leads to fundamentalism. Treating it as a series of documents charting a moral history is much better. disclosure: I used to be extremely fundamentalist. I grew up as a pastor's kid and was trained to be grossed out by gays, look down on schoolmates who had turned to drugs or alcohol, be disgusted by premarital sex, etc. The more I actually studied the bible, and the more I saw how miserable and mean the "Christians" around me were, the more I started to question that viewpoint. I got into many heated debates with my dad and his various pastor buddies. I started to keep track of the bible verses they read in church to support their sermons. I started to realize that these guys only ever selected a very narrow range of scripture. 90% of the book is left untouched in most churches, and things are never placed in context. They'll read two or three verses (that is, sentences) from the middle of a long story, say "the Word of God" and snap the book shut. The followers of these churches aren't even reading the bible, much less studying it. The style of pastoral leadership they get actively discourages understanding the bible on a level greater than sunday school vignettes. Eventually they all stopped debating me, and I was branded a "lost cause". I went off to college and eventually developed into an atheist. Ironically, I actually look to Jesus as a role model for how to behave as a person now and am way more invested in it than when I was busy worshiping a mutated image of him. -----topic switch----- Also, in terms of evangelical fundamentalism, I want to bring your attention to one of the most problematic groups ever: AWANA. The wiki page makes it seem benign, but the materials we studied there were anything but. Every day after school hundreds of us would be gathered into a gymnasium at the local Christian college. We had handbooks like what the Cub Scouts have, except ours were filled with bible facts to memorize. We'd have to memorize certain scripture versions (John 3:16 and then a whole lot of Old Testament genealogies and laws). We had to memorize the names of the books of the bible in order (but not read them). We had to recite "christian principles" (which included things like "If bad things happen to you, look for the sin in yourself that caused it.") You earned patches for completing these tasks. If you couldn't do it, you had to continue to work on it every day until you got it. You could not work on anything else until you'd earned a given patch. They carrotted you along through this by dangling the opportunity to do "service projects" every 10ish patches. These service projects were almost always actually just fundraisers for the church, whether that be volunteering at the concession stand for a local sporting event or "visiting" sick and bedridden church members (where we were told this was to keep them company and share fellowship in Christ, but we also weren't allowed to leave them alone until they promised to renew their tithes). This poo poo was some high-order indoctrination and a big part of why I continued to believe in fundamentalism as deep into my teenage years as I did. It wasn't until I finally realized that I'd never actually read the bible in all my years of Christianity that I started to question. It wasn't quite ACE schools, but it was definitely messed up.
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Jul 6, 2015 16:07
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How in the hell did some pentacostals decide that speaking in tongues and rolling around on the floor was a good and cool thing to do? is this even something that exists outside the US? e: of course there's an avalanche of youtube videos of the ridiculous meme online. Why would I think there wouldn't be? Bethamphetamine fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Jul 6, 2015 |
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Jul 6, 2015 16:27
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Do It Once Right posted:How in the hell did some pentacostals decide that speaking in tongues and rolling around on the floor was a good and cool thing to do? Hahaha, my grandma does this. She invented a hole new language on the spot to "Cast the demons out of me" when I told her I was an atheist. I've never seen it outside of apostolic megachurches, so I think it's a uniquely American phenomenon. The rest of the world has the whole "doing services in Latin" thing to add their exotic flavor to ceremonies.
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Jul 6, 2015 16:30
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LeftistMuslimObama posted:Hahaha, my grandma does this. She invented a hole new language on the spot to "Cast the demons out of me" when I told her I was an atheist. I've never seen it outside of apostolic megachurches, so I think it's a uniquely American phenomenon. The rest of the world has the whole "doing services in Latin" thing to add their exotic flavor to ceremonies. There's tradition, and there's outright batshittery. Truly, that your grandmother invented her own language on the spot to "cast the demons out" of you upon learning you were an athiest, is pants on head crazy. That sort of person likely has an untreated illness that her religious sect encourages.
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Jul 6, 2015 16:48
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Talmonis posted:There's tradition, and there's outright batshittery. Truly, that your grandmother invented her own language on the spot to "cast the demons out" of you upon learning you were an athiest, is pants on head crazy. That sort of person likely has an untreated illness that her religious sect encourages. Nah. She's not mentally ill. If you've ever been to one of these churches, pauses for prayer are literally a room with 5000 people in it all babbling nonsense sounds for 5 minutes and genuinely believing they are praying. My theory is that making sounds is an emotional release anyway (think about how good it feels to just shut yourself in a room and scream when you're really stressed out), and these ministers are masters of building you up emotionally so you have A LOT to release when it's time to pray. Eventually you just get conditioned to "pray" like that whenever you're emotionally overwhelmed. If one person babble-talks, it might be a disorder. When 5000 people babble-talk, they're being psychologically manipulated.
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Jul 6, 2015 16:57
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Talmonis posted:There's tradition, and there's outright batshittery. Truly, that your grandmother invented her own language on the spot to "cast the demons out" of you upon learning you were an athiest, is pants on head crazy. That sort of person likely has an untreated illness that her religious sect encourages. Not really. Glossolalia is hardly something that the Pentecostals invented, though they'd adore you saying so. It dates back almost as long as human history. The Oracle at Delphi would speak in tongues when she gave her prophecies, fueled by a nice gas vent under her chair. It's more a form of religious mania than rare mental illness, IMO. Anyone can do it.
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Jul 6, 2015 16:57
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Do It Once Right posted:How in the hell did some pentacostals decide that speaking in tongues and rolling around on the floor was a good and cool thing to do? Try the entire third world. Pentecostal poo poo often syncretizes easily with traditional folk religions. Africa is now full of these people, along with SE Asia and even Latin America, basically anywhere you have ethnic or tribal groups without established nation-states. icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 21:26 on Jul 6, 2015 |
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Jul 6, 2015 21:23
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When Pentecostal missionaries first arrived in Africa they were discouraged to find that they couldn't freely communicate with the natives by speaking in tongues.
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Jul 7, 2015 00:21
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icantfindaname posted:Pentecostal poo poo often syncretizes easily with traditional folk religions [...] basically anywhere you have ethnic or tribal groups without established nation-states.  There's a lot more in the Pacific Northwest than I'd imagined.
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Jul 7, 2015 00:28
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Guavanaut posted:Figures... Probably just a bunch of hipsters trying to be ironic.
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Jul 7, 2015 12:12
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TheBalor posted:Not really. Glossolalia is hardly something that the Pentecostals invented, though they'd adore you saying so. It dates back almost as long as human history. The Oracle at Delphi would speak in tongues when she gave her prophecies, fueled by a nice gas vent under her chair. It's more a form of religious mania than rare mental illness, IMO. Anyone can do it. Yeah, growing up in a church that did this I wouldn't call it mental illness. It's just insanely easy to convince yourself that God is speaking through you in tongues or whatever. E: I remember during these prayer sessions that sometimes people felt like God was giving them a translation of someone else's prayer. Man, church was nuts. Glad my parents didn't press the issue too hard when I lost interest. Dubstep Jesus fucked around with this message at 14:13 on Jul 7, 2015 |
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Jul 7, 2015 14:10
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My favorite thing to do is ask charismatic evangelicals-turned-atheists if they were faking tongues and other "spiritual gifts" like being able to see demons perched on people's shoulders.
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Jul 7, 2015 14:59
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SedanChair posted:My favorite thing to do is ask charismatic evangelicals-turned-atheists if they were faking tongues and other "spiritual gifts" like being able to see demons perched on people's shoulders. Speaking as one, yes. The pressure to also exhibit the "gifts" is pretty severe. If you don't do it you're like the fat kid in school that gets mocked and ostracized until you lose weight and start playing the team sport. EDIT: "Discernment" is a neat little catch-all don't have to actually do anything "gift", though, for the people that have to fake it with family members. Just don't do anything stupid and you have it!
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Jul 7, 2015 15:31
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Wade Wilson posted:The pressure to also exhibit the "gifts" is pretty severe. If you don't do it you're like the fat kid in school that gets mocked and ostracized until you lose weight and start playing the team sport. This is pretty key with the whole tongues deal, especially with kids. I imagine you could get them to do all kinds of craziness if you can get everyone else around to do it, and convince them there is something fundamentally wrong with them if they can't do it. Of course they will speak a few lines of gibberish for social acceptance. I remember people speaking about discernment, but I never heard of people who claimed to see actual demons around. Is that a predominantly US thing?
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Jul 7, 2015 22:25
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LeftistMuslimObama posted:Some good thoughts regarding the status of the Bible Overall I agree with your point, the Bible shouldn't be treated as a literal, factual recounting of history. However I think you do it a disservice to say it shouldn't be treated as an historical document, somewhat like I think someone saying we shouldn't treat Tacitus as historical because he clearly makes poo poo up to tell a compelling story. I think it's better to say it shouldn't be uncritically treated as an historical document. Yale actually has an awesome Youtube lecture series up on biblical history and it makes it clear how much you can, potentially accurately, unpack from what you find in the Bible (for this series specifically the Pentateuch, first 5 books). For example you can see from the fact that there are 2 different creation myths or the similarities with Babylonian flood myths, etc. that the early books of the Bible weren't originally stories from a single, hermetic religion but a confluence of the mythology and religion of the region the very earliest Israelites were in. There are parts (such as God meeting with other divines in (iirc) the second creation myth) that show the religion previously accepted polytheistic belief or at least henotheistic (there are lots of gods but we worship one and he's bigger and better than yours). The current popular theory is that it was during the Babylonian exile, which was likely the elite of the Israelites rather than all of them, that you saw a turn towards monotheism and a reform of the religion that involved editing their mythology and history to fit this new vision. Followed by a return after their release and converting or driving out of those who had stayed behind. Hell the relationship between God and his people does neatly mirror relationships between over-kings and regular kings and Mesopotamian strongmen at the time. How people viewed their relationship to God really does change in the Bible as people change their understanding of their relationship to 'the state' and the relationships between 'states'. Of course all that value and interest is lost if you insist that it's all dry factual recounting of events. Also I can confirm the speaking in tongues thing is present in UK Evangelical and some Charismatic churches. My dad was involved with Alpha stuff in the UK back in the 90s quite a lot and I got dragged to camps where I'd be bored listening to guitar music while dreaming of incense and organ music and we'd often get that kind of stuff going on. At University I knew quite a few very conservative type Christians, one of whom claimed he'd witnessed someone's leg grow 3 inches to even out an imbalance after an injury. Surprisingly citing Hume's arguments against miracles didn't seem to convince him that he wasn't going to convert me to his church right then.
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Jul 8, 2015 03:48
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Zenithe posted:This is pretty key with the whole tongues deal, especially with kids. I imagine you could get them to do all kinds of craziness if you can get everyone else around to do it, and convince them there is something fundamentally wrong with them if they can't do it. Of course they will speak a few lines of gibberish for social acceptance. Yeah, no, literally seeing demons walking around is still lunatic territory. Discernment is more about God basically helping you avoid making stupid mistakes because people are stupid and can't be intelligent on their own. Or some poo poo.
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Jul 8, 2015 12:11
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Abner Cadaver II posted:Baptists run the gamut from ultra-right fundamentalists to strict secularist liberals, some are evangelical and some aren't (and not all the evangelicals are right-wing fundamentalists). Most American Christian sects have a similar sort of political spectrum within them. It's important to note that even within (say) the Southern Baptist Convention, there's a fair amount of diversity of opinion because the central organization has no power to compel congregations to do anything, and Baptists have a strong tradition of making decisions at the local level. There are congregations that would literally burn the gays alive right now if they wouldn't all get arrested, and there are congregations with female ministers (  ) and acceptance of teh gheys also. From what I understand, the Convention isn't very happy with the latter churches, but as many of them are urban and wealthy, they can't do very much about it.
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Jul 8, 2015 14:38
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Quorum posted:It's important to note that even within (say) the Southern Baptist Convention, there's a fair amount of diversity of opinion because the central organization has no power to compel congregations to do anything, and Baptists have a strong tradition of making decisions at the local level. There are congregations that would literally burn the gays alive right now if they wouldn't all get arrested, and there are congregations with female ministers ( Really? There was a recent (past year or so) story in Kentucky where a Baptist church allowed gay marriage ceremonies to be performed, and because of that decision, the Baptist convention cut them off. Declared they were no longer a Baptist church. I guess it depends on what you mean by "power to compel" but there's definitely a central body that makes decisions about individual churches. found the story: http://www.kybaptist.org/2014/11/11/louisville-church-voted-kbc/
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Jul 8, 2015 15:04
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GAINING WEIGHT... posted:Really? There was a recent (past year or so) story in Kentucky where a Baptist church allowed gay marriage ceremonies to be performed, and because of that decision, the Baptist convention cut them off. Declared they were no longer a Baptist church. I guess it depends on what you mean by "power to compel" but there's definitely a central body that makes decisions about individual churches. They can be kicked out of the main line but that doesn't really stop them from doing their own spinoff either. "Baptist" is kind of a loose conglomeration more than anything.
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Jul 8, 2015 15:23
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ToxicSlurpee posted:They can be kicked out of the main line but that doesn't really stop them from doing their own spinoff either. "Baptist" is kind of a loose conglomeration more than anything. Hmm. I guess the moment you decide to perform functions not approved by the convention, you also decide you don't care about still being part of it.
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Jul 8, 2015 17:12
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MrNemo posted:Overall I agree with your point, the Bible shouldn't be treated as a literal, factual recounting of history. However I think you do it a disservice to say it shouldn't be treated as an historical document, somewhat like I think someone saying we shouldn't treat Tacitus as historical because he clearly makes poo poo up to tell a compelling story. I think it's better to say it shouldn't be uncritically treated as an historical document. Yale actually has an awesome Youtube lecture series up on biblical history and it makes it clear how much you can, potentially accurately, unpack from what you find in the Bible (for this series specifically the Pentateuch, first 5 books). Do you have any reading recommendations on this? This is one of the things I find most fascinating about religion.
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Jul 8, 2015 17:17
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Great Metal Jesus posted:Do you have any reading recommendations on this? This is one of the things I find most fascinating about religion. PBS's Nova did a pretty good 2-hour show along the lines of what MrNemo is talking about (in regards to what we think happened in the times of the OT and why). It's watchable here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/bibles-buried-secrets.html Hello Sailor fucked around with this message at 17:59 on Jul 8, 2015 |
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Jul 8, 2015 17:56
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LeftistMuslimObama posted:Hahaha, my grandma does this. She invented a hole new language on the spot to "Cast the demons out of me" when I told her I was an atheist. I've never seen it outside of apostolic megachurches, so I think it's a uniquely American phenomenon. The rest of the world has the whole "doing services in Latin" thing to add their exotic flavor to ceremonies. Paul actually spends a lot of time writing about "spiritual gifts," which include speaking in tongues and prophecy. Beyond the early Church (as evidenced only by what Paul has to say) and modern Pentecostals, I don't know anything about the history of these practices. But they definitely weren't invented recently, and charismatics are all over Latin America. He also talks about how people shouldn't speak in tongues in front of the congregation unless someone with the gift of interpretation is present, but no one ever remembers that. EDIT: Hey, thanks! V gnomewife fucked around with this message at 19:19 on Jul 8, 2015 |
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Jul 8, 2015 18:50
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AGirlWonder posted:Paul actually spends a lot of time writing about "spiritual gifts," which include speaking in tongues and prophecy. Beyond the early Church (as evidenced only by what Paul has to say) and modern Pentecostals, I don't know anything about the history of these practices. But they definitely weren't invented recently, and charismatics are all over Latin America. The Catholic Encyclopedia article on glossolalia goes into the early church history on this pretty nicely.
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Jul 8, 2015 19:00
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GAINING WEIGHT... posted:Hmm. I guess the moment you decide to perform functions not approved by the convention, you also decide you don't care about still being part of it. Pretty much. How likely you are to get kicked out of the convention is also inversely proportional to things like how much money you contribute to missions, how well-liked you are by other congregations, and how likely you are to drag a bunch of other churches with you when you go.
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Jul 9, 2015 00:27
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