King Rat

Yeah, that'll happen. I'm sure that would be ranked right up there with devil worship, Trotsky, and the Koran.

Xixax

I was United Pentecostal ( upci.org ) for the majority of my life. They are very much into the gifts of the Spirit. They also hold that one must speak in tongues when receiving the Holy Ghost.

It turns out it's kind of like filling a sponge with water. It eventually dries up on you and you have to soak again every once in a while.

There are two forms of this for them. One is the evidentiary type, when someone receives the Holy Ghost either initially or at any point in the future when "praying through". "Praying through" is a requirement for "backsliders", people who have started becoming less faithful to services or sinning out in the open.

There is the other type as well, the one that is interpreted by someone else in the service that night. That is the one they feel the scriptures quoted above is referring to when limiting it to two or three persons per service.

They also run the aisles while praying, fall to the floor, dance in near epileptic fits, and weep uncontrollably. This weeping, it's normally an outpouring of shame and guilt, something I see now as being extremely harmful and degrading.

I was into this full force, and have done all of the above except run the aisles or fall to the floor. I was entirely convinced at the time of its supernatural origins ( the mind in deep states of meditation or rhythmic chanting can be so completely altered that you can be convinced the emotions washing over you are of external origin ). There was a point where I began to feel that perhaps the speaking in tongues was just meaningless crap, especially when I noticed I could mold the sound, syllables, and inflection by force of will. I couldn't control it entirely, but I could direct it.

This honestly is embarrassing to mention, as it is so distant from how I am today as to make the old self nearly unrecognizable. Reason won out for me, I could not with good conscious pretend to believe in something for which I saw obvious evidence against. Once I let go of my desperate need for it to be true, the entire house of cards fell apart. The Bible's contradictions, which are glaring and straightforward, which I had dismissed before as confusion on my part or a poor translation were finally accepted as what they truly were, contradictions.

My problems with understanding why God would send people to hell whom had never had a chance to hear the gospel were solved: There is no God doing it.

I had even asked at one point, if children, before the age of accountability, are guaranteed a place in heaven, why would they ever allow a child to grow past that age?

I mean, if you really believe that they would spend eternal life in heaven for sure, no chance of going to hell, just by taking them out, what parent wouldn't do that to guarantee instant and eternal happiness for them? Sure, it would be murder, but what person hasn't lied on purpose and then asked forgiveness for it later? Isn't all sin of the same quality, considering sin supposedly separates you from God regardless of the severity?

Anyway, I just wanted to point out that these services in which this type of mass hysteria, and even praying alone for long periods of time with vast amounts of self inflicted guilt can produce what seem to be real and vivid experiences of an external spirit "ministering" to you. It's not purposeful self-deception unless they come to the same realization I did, and decide to continue doing it anyway. I know some are doing that, but surely the vast majority are not.

Oxidizing Material

My dad's really good at speaking in tongues. He's atheist, of course, but he likes to make fun of people different than he (all in good fun) and usually whenever on the TV there's people speaking a different language he'll start going off on his own little satire of the language- fairly well, too, and for a while without any stumbles or rough spots. It's neat to watch.