Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/04/10/creepy-video-senator-and-extremists-pray-in-tongues-to-resurrect-anti-abortion-law.html
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Summoning the devil is black magic.
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Having Arizona resurrect a 160 year old pre-state law points out that eventually (they hope after trump is re-installed) these knuckle-draggers will refresh the 150 year old Comstock laws. These are nightmarish laws to any marginally sensible person living in the last 100 years or so. If they’re allowed to blow the legalistic dust off these atavistic horrors it would mean a puritanical nation of censorship, (Comstock himself once confiscated an art reproduction of the Birth of Venus), no birth control or reproductive freedoms, and general misogyny. Comstock was a super nasty troubled dude who probably was living some self projection from his Norman Bates mother issues; perfect for the ‘modern’ republican -sigh-
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Someone should write a history of the phenomena of tongues. You can find some interesting info online - but it seems to have a bit of a bias.
My own experience is limited to seeing it very rarely in Catholic church growing up - then migrating to fundamentalist/evangelical settings.
It seems to have evolved from speaking in other established languages to the Prisencolinensinainciusol it is today.
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Speaking old white creepy dudes:
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Sometimes, the state I live in does good things.
This is not one of those times, and it makes me angry.
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So it was performative then. Visual evidence that all that babbling works and by voting for the orange jeebus it will keep the miracles flowing.
Got it.
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Is there a common agreement among those folks of what to say and how to say it… or do you just join in the circle (who decided circle?) and babble like a nutcake?
Who leads? Such a disturbing thing to see happen in a legislature. A quick mention that “God we pray thee that we make good decisions here today” is as far as that should go.
To anyone who cares about proper governance - that Arizona stuff was fucked up.
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The thing which gets me about ‘tongues’ is that it’s attributed to possession. Not ‘demonic’ possession, but rather having your body invaded and controlled by a ‘good’ if bizarre, spirit, specifically the holy spirit. (“See? I’m dancing about foaming at the mouth and uttering babble because my body is worthy enough to be taken over by the nebulous third bit of the father, son, holy ghost!”) Whhhy it’s a direct property theft from pre-germ-theory grift healers. (“Don’t exorcise me dude! This is the good kinda possession”)
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White scat singing is definitely an acquired taste.
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They have, but it’s written in Lorem Ipsum.
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Someone should collect all the recordings of speaking in tongues and put them into an LLM and see if it can make any sense out of it all.
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That video is straight out of a horror movie - a secret meeting of a cabal of influential people, kneeling around a magic circle, chanting in a language no human speaks… only it’s so much worse than a horror movie, as instead of looking to sacrifice a few teenagers, they’re looking to potentially sacrifice every child-bearing person in Arizona.
It’s interesting that there’s no consistency in Christianity about what it’s supposed to be, even within a particular church. I remember my evangelical grandmother being really excited about one particular instance of some glossolalia by a member of her church, where another person was certain was a particular language (that they clearly didn’t speak either), and how this was proof of miracles, etc. It suggested that, the rest of the time, they were accepting of the idea that it was just nonsense.
Pretty unnecessary, because you can look at individual utterances and see that it’s pretty simple gibberish. A lot of repeated sounds, nothing like grammar, etc. It hasn’t been studied a lot, but it’s so simple that it doesn’t really require it to come to some pretty firm conclusions:
There’s no possible meaning and it doesn’t even tell you anything about linguistics that you couldn’t get by just asking people to improvise a new language on the spot (which has identical results).
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Maybe the devil’s already here in the form of the Tangerine Shitgibbon.
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That’s why there is always supposed to be an interpreter there also, to translate the “angelic tongue” into human so it can be understood. But that tradition went away because it’s so much more fun to just sputter gibberish and not have someone trying to invent something meaningful out of it.
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Sounds just like Trump and the audiences at his rallies.
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