• themeatbridge@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Well, no. Plenty of things have been, and still are, unexplained, but that doesn’t mean they violate the laws of nature. It just means our understanding of those laws is incomplete.

    Like 3,000 years ago, a total eclipse would have seemed miraculous, but people of the time just had not yet mapped orbits and the planets.

    In this case, glossolalia is a phenomenon that has been well-studied and found to be entirely mundane. They are not speaking foreign languages they had never heard before, they are not speaking new languages, they are not making phonemes that they have not heard before. Anyone can learn to speak in tongues, even if they do not believe in the spirituality of it. Neurologically, someone speaking in tongues is fully conscious and totally in control.

    There are no cases of spontaneous glossolalia in groups that are not familiar with the experience.

    It’s weird, for sure. The people doing it seem to sincerely believe they are doing something. And there’s no correlation to neurological conditions or mental illness. Functional MRI exams show that it isn’t always controlled by the same part of the brain responsible for speech.

    It just seems like people can learn to convince themselves that they have the magic power to talk weird and believe that they are channeling some supernatural power. They are not channeling any supernatural power, they are just making weird noises.