“Language-like activity in the absence of meaning” — a good definition of glossolalia, the act of speaking in tongues. The Bible promotes it, and I’d always understood it to be the miraculous act of speaking a language one doesn’t have any foreknowledge of. For example, breaking into Farsi having never studied it.

“Surely,” I thought, “No one really believes that happens?! It’s so easy to debunk: record it and have a computer try to recognize and translate the language.” But it turns out, real speaking in tongues is not the miraculous speaking of an otherwise-unknown language: it’s speaking in the language of angels. It is, in simple terms, gibberish.

If you listen to these segments of people speaking in tongues, you’ll notice a few things:

  • A lot of them repeat the same vowel sound over and over.
  • They like to trill their r’s.
  • At times it seems as if they’re mimicking — consciously or otherwise — actual languages.
  • Some consonant sounds seem more common than others: b, k, r, and s seem very popular.
  • They seem to be so clearly putting on a show that it’s almost hard to watch.

I’m on the fence about the video, though, because they’re clearly mocking these people, and while it does seem silly, I find myself thinking that they must get something out of it. It likely gives a natural high of endorphins.

I once attended a church where there was a lot of calling down of the Holy Spirit, a lot of prayers for God to send the Holy Spirit to enter the building and enter them, with repetitive music playing, the congregants with their hands raised and their eyes closed, swaying to the music. It struck me how similar they appeared to people I’d see just a week or so earlier at a party who’d passed around a gigantic bong and gotten stoned out of their gourd. They all had the lost-in-the-moment look about them, and even in some churches that speak in tongues, one way they see the manifestation of the Holy Spirit is through uncontrolled laugher, the tell-tale sign that someone has smoked marijuana.

There’s also the element of crowd pressure — some of those people are clearly forcing their laughter. And perhaps some of them are closeted non-believers and they’re finally able to let out the laughter that they keep pent up every Sunday.

The king of all this nonsense is huckster Benny Hinn.

I just can’t understand how people can fall for this stuff. I’d love to get up on stage with someone like this and let him wave his arms at me, fling his coat at me, and just stand there looking at him. Wonder what would happen — I’d likely be hustled off the stage in a hurry…