Is Speaking In Tonges Pagen Or Biblical?

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I have heard that many pagen religions in Africa and Asia practice speaking in tongues to their god. Is this practice biblical and should I practice it? What is the Catholic teaching on it?
Thanks! God Bless!
 
Please READ 1st Cor. chapter 12

Its biblical BUT selectively granted and NOT the greatest gift of the HS

God Bless you,

Patrck
 
It’s Biblical if true tongues
But St Paul says there are conditions to it.

There are many that babble says my superior in my aspiring order.
 
Speaking in tongues is a very very very old concept belonging to many different religions and is in no way unique to christianity
 
I think it depends on what you mean by “speaking in tongues”
 
In the Catholic Charismatic Movement it is quite common for people to speak in tongues. I have attended Catholic Charismatic Masses where I’ve heard both Clergy & congregations speak in tongues.
 
It seems to me that speaking in tongues would have two purposes: to communicate to someone in their language when you don’t personally know it, or to communicate to many people in many languages at once.

People babbling and groaning complete nonsense noises with their eyes rolled up in their head and shaking like they have a bad case of Parkinson’s doesn’t seem to serve either of those purposes.

But it does draw a whole lot of attention to oneself, and gives one a nice warm feeling of being special. Definitely serves that purpose.
 
The apostolic kind of glossolalia – ie, either miraculously being able to speak a real language, or miraculously being understood in a listener’s language – is not a gift that is paralleled anywhere pagan that I know about. It’s not an unheard of gift, among missionaries, and saints like St. Francis Xavier occasionally received it when preaching out in Asia. (It didn’t keep him from having to learn the local people’s languages, and a hard time he had of it, too!)

The babbling kind of glossolalia as we usually hear of it, and in the form that annoyed St. Paul into setting down rules, is a form of reaction to crowds and excitement. It can be a deeply religious for some people, while for others it’s just like girls seeing the Beatles, shrieking with excitement, and finding themselves fainting.

Basically, if your brain gets a lot of exciting (name removed by moderator)ut all at once, and especially if you’re around a lot of other excited people, the brain seems to have the option to turn off some of its control and intellectual functions. If it turns off your bloodflow for a moment, you faint. If it turns off your ability to stand, you topple over. (Some groups associate this with being “slain in the Spirit.”) If it turns off parts of your language centers, you start producing various random sound patterns instead of words in your own language. I’m sure there is more to it, but there is evidence that if other people around you are having a certain form of excited crowd reaction, or if you expect to have one, your brain is more likely to choose the same one everybody else is having.

The dark side is that there are less pleasant crowd reactions, of the kind usually associated with “mass hysteria.” If somebody starts throwing up in the middle of an excited crowd, a whole lot of other people can start throwing up, too.

(breaklng up this post)
 
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This doesn’t mean that charismatic experiences like babbling glossolalia are definitely not religious in nature. God is certainly able to use natural phenomena and our bodies’ capabilities for His own purposes. So it is very common for certain kinds of people (extroverts, usually) to have religious experiences more easily in or around crowds. Grace builds on nature. So if large numbers of people think God is making them have such experiences, they could be right.

OTOH, if you look into the history of pagan religions, it would seem that these crowd reactions have often been exploited by “mystery religions” like the ancient Greek worship of Dionysus, or modern voudoun (“voodoo”). In many cases, this was used to make worship “fun” or impressive. But some of these pagan crowds were driven by excitement and evil leaders to do mass works of evil. Demagogue politicians through the ages have liked to turn their crowds into semi-religious worshippers of themselves. In other cases, crowd reactions seem to be influenced by actual demons. (If human politicians can figure this stuff out, it’s not surprising that fallen angels can, too.)

All this means that people need to discern carefully, just as with any kind of religious experience.
 
Saint Patrick greatly succeeded in his converting of Pagans which may not be expressed greatly enough in this thread. Although my remark about the non-95 theses may be somewhat true, the snake-biting in Protestant congregations defies both Lutherism and Saint Patricks miracle. Thumbs down there.
 
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There is a genuine Charismatic gift called ‘prayer in the spirit’.
That does not mean that one can acquire this gift merely by deciding to try doing it. It is a gift, not a skill.
 
Hmm. A serpent (and the rest) is/are cursed by God the Father in the Garden of Eden. Another attempts to upset Jesus and gets it’s head crushed, 2/3 of the Holy Trinity right there and let’s not forget the Holy Spirit is in the form of a Dove to many. Should I evaluate the relationship between Doves and Snakes for everyone so they can understand venom’s place in the universe?

Oh, let’s name it! That will make it better! “Spiritual Badge of Venom Revocation”

Whatever. You have to be illiterate to do that.
 
We have it bad enough in this country with Pet shops full of them and such, home alone older brother wannabees.
 
CatholicSpirit said:
Hmm. A serpent (and the rest) is/are cursed by God the Father in the Garden of Eden. Another attempts to upset Jesus and gets it’s head crushed, 2/3 of the Holy Trinity right there and let’s not forget the Holy Spirit is in the form of a Dove to many. Should I evaluate the relationship between Doves and Snakes for everyone so they can understand venom’s place in the universe?

Oh, let’s name it! That will make it better! “Spiritual Badge of Venom Revocation”

Whatever. You have to be illiterate to do that.
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Please clarify. What do you mean?
 
The bible is anti-snake front to back and if you can’t read the bible it makes senses that you should read it. People bringing snakes into Churches of Abrahamic religion for ritualistic purposes need to get it right.
 
Handling snakes (I don’t advise it) is basically folks leaning (what they’d say) or presuming (what others would say) on the promise in Mark 16:17-18 about Christians being able to “take up serpents.”

This was not a practice in early Christianity. But it was fairly common among the desert saints to have friendly relationships with snakes (St. Simon Stylites had a snake pet whom he had healed, and there was some desert monk who had two cobras as guard dogs), or to be snake trackers and slayers (mostly the young monks).

And of course, the brass serpent of the Israelites and the serpent staff of Moses were both foreshadowings of Jesus Christ, so it’s not true that the Bible is totally anti-snake in every respect.

(And in one of the long Greek versions of Esther, Mordecai dreams that he is a snake/dragon beating the tar out of a Haman-snake. From which we get the Welsh vs. Saxon snake/dragons fighting in the story of Merlin and Vortigern. But that’s kind of beside the point.)

Getting along with animals, even those which are normally dangerous, is a pretty common gift among saints. In some ways it is natural – someone who is calm and good is trusted by animals, and is able to stay calm enough to observe what animals like. But it is also a sign of Christ as the New Adam and how all Creation is groaning to be saved, remade into a better Eden. If we are the Body of Christ, it is natural to expect that we will sometimes be able to do what He can do.

Making friends with animals is a good plan. But insisting on signs to order, instead of trusting God to help in emergencies – well, that is a bit presumptuous. Also, a bit annoying for the snakes if they aren’t your pets.
 
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Speaking in the English tongue is not biblical. It might have pagan origins since it goes back to the Angles and the Saxons. Still, I continue to use it.

My brother once went with a former girlfriend to her hours long church service in which a lot of people spoke in tongues. Afterward I asked him, “So did you speak in tongues too?” “Sure,” he replied. “Everyone else was doing it, so I did too.”
 
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Moses was in total control of that snake because God gave him incredible powers to do so. The whole idea of bringing a snake into a Church for stuff like that to me is just blah. If I run into a relative of mine who talks to Rabbis, maybe he can tell me if anything Jewish has something of the like, but I doubt it.
 
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