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Permalink Reply by Nelson on March 12, 2009 at 8:28pm

you can find some of what you seek in Daniel Dennet's Breaking the Spell, in Scott Atran's In Gods We Trust, and in Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained. there doesn't yet exist universally accepted theories on how religions formed and exactly why we as humans seem to gravitate towards supernatural feelings but those books are a good start because they lay out some hypotheses for how it could have plausibly happened.

as for "speaking in tonuges", that's all crap. scripturally, glossolalia, as it's technically called, was when followers of Jesus would be amongst people who's language they did not speak or understand. a gift of the holy spirit was said to be with them then allowing them to evangelize to these people in their own language despite never having learned the language themselves. so if i was a christian in a group of Kalahari Bushmen who speak Swahili and i had never learned or even come into contact with Swahili before but all of the sudden started speaking it fluently so that i could minister to the bushmen, THAT would be scriptural glossolalia. what the christians of today do is nothing of the sort. it's just gibberish. it's not a language. no one understands it. and it's not done for the purposes of evangelizing to those who wouldn't normally be able to understand your native tongue.

interestingly, the verses most often cited by Pentecostals as backing up the practice scripturally (though there are other verses in the new testament that mention speaking in tongues) are those in the last 12 verses of Mark. the problem is those verses have been acknowledged by textual critics for decades to be apocryphal. they do not appear in our earliest best copies of Mark. they are a later addition to the text.

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Permalink Reply by Tom on March 12, 2009 at 8:42pm

I was thinking about it some more and decided that trying to explain a phenomena like speaking in tongues is unfair, because we don't know enough about the brain yet to decide even if it causes things that are in our face daily (like consciousness, intuition, love). I don't know if we'll ever have a clear definition of religion and supernatural experiences from a neuroscientific standpoint, maybe someday, maybe not even in my lifetime.

I will have a look at the books you mentioned, Nelson. (I have a book by Dennet that's been sitting on my shelf for a while). And thanks for the image doone, I'll have to spend more time reading about these connections some more to come up with some better ideas about my own experiences.

Thanks for the replies guys.

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Permalink Reply by Nelson on March 12, 2009 at 9:11pm

except we have a lot of information about the biochemical neurological processes in our brains. scans have been done on people while they're speaking in tongues. the only thing they show is that the people doing it actually believed that it was because of god and that they weren't doing it on purpose. great. super. a few problems:

1. the scans were only of 5 women- hardly a proper study. (the research paper itself calls the study "preliminary" as it should. something all the newspaper reports leave out of course.)

2. the study had a major flaw.
"Differences between the experimental and control tasks can appear in any of a large number of the brain's cortical structures, and they can look like either increases or decreases in blood flow. With so many possible outcomes, you might get some false positives through random chance, so researchers have to correct their statistics for multiple comparisons. Not everyone does this. The glossolalia researchers, for example, chose to skip this step."

3. what exactly does the study tell us? that the women actually believed that it was god communicating through them? okay. people who insist they've been abducted by aliens and probed anally also believe what they say. so do schizophrenics who say that their dog told them to go on a killing spree. do we say that these instances indicate that aliens have abducted and do abduct people? does this mean that "my dog told me to do it" is a valid trial defense (at least one that isn't an insanity plea)? of course not.

of course, none of this has kept a few newspapers and especially many Christians from saying that it backs up the claims of those who speak in tongues.

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Permalink Reply by Johnny on March 13, 2009 at 12:26pm

Although we don't have absolutes about the origin of religion or supernatural belief in general; its obvious to speculate that early man somehow stumbled upon the idea of supernatural beings to explain the unexplainable. Things like lightning, rain, the seasons changing, the sun rising, animals migrating, etc. Then once you have the tribe believing in the god(s), they designate someone to communicate with the god(s). Or the priest/shaman appoints themselves; either because they are a devout believer or they see the opportunity for manipulation (and personal advancement). Additionally, here is an interesting video that shows human's lack of understanding of probability causes them to associate things to the supernatural.

AtypicalAtheist posted a blog where we discussed how faith (and prayer) effects people's happiness and well being.

Morality comes from an individual seeking social balance and social norms. This is best illustrated by the observance of what is acceptable in different cultures, especially in cultures that have experienced isolation. The fact that an isolated culture/community shares some common moral values with other cultures and community illustrates it is part of human nature. The slight variances in what is morally acceptable also show that morality is based on what is socially acceptable. In my opinion also, the fact that morality has evolved greatly while religion (in theory) has not, this illustrates that morality is independent of religion.

I can't find the article right now (I'll look some more); it was about some skeptics trying to study the speaking in tongues. They found that many of their subjects had entered a state similar to hypnosis; and also that it is almost unheard of in groups that had never observed others doing it. So they speculated that it was a subconscious learned behavior that was essentially self-hypnosis. One of the damning moments in their study was when a preacher translated while they were filming; then a few days later while interviewing the same preacher they played back the audio of just the speaking in tongues, and he translated it with completely different meaning.

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