Your words to the Tea Party have some wisdom, but when the damage being done seems rather extensive, and the country is dying the death of a thousand papercuts, it’s hard to feel all that glad that you’ve been able to apply only a couple of bandaids.

In 2011 world population will reach 7 billion (vs. 3 billion in 1960). There are now approximately 2.2 billion Christians. Chan and Sprinkle seem to be saying that 4.8 billion people may be facing eternal hell.

Concepts of an afterlife vary between religions and among divisions of each faith. Here are three quotes from “the greatest achievement in life,” my ebook on comparative mysticism:

(46) Few people have been so good that they have earned eternal paradise; fewer want to go to a place where they must receive punishments for their sins. Those who do believe in resurrection of their body hope that it will be not be in its final form. Few people really want to continue to be born again and live more human lives; fewer want to be reborn in a non-human form. If you are not quite certain you want to seek divine union, consider the alternatives.

(59) True mystics transcend apparent manifestations of the theatrical production called “this life.” Theirs is not simply a search for meaning, but discovery of what is, i.e. the Real underlying the seeming realities. Their objective is not heaven, gardens, paradise, or other celestial places. It is not being where the divine lives, but to be what the divine essence is here and now.

(80) [referring to many non-mystics] Depending on their religious convictions, or personal beliefs, they may be born again to seek elusive perfection, go to a purgatory to work out their sins or, perhaps, pass on into oblivion. Lives are different; why not afterlives? Beliefs might become true.

I spent over thirty years in Pentecostal/AoG circles, went to Bible college/seminary in that denomination, held ministerial credentials, etc. I’m now a recovering Pentecostal . It’s a very long and still excruciatingly painful story, so I won’t “go there.”

I am convinced that speaking/praying in tongues is for real–except when it isn’t, of course, and that happens often enough. People feel pressured into making something up, or participants in a service use the tongues/interpretation gig as a way to….well, to do any number of things that are not Christlike. I could tell many stories about how “spiritual gifts” are used in manipulative and downright abusive ways.

But back to the real stuff. For me the question became how to define “real.” My current thoughts on tongues and other ecstatic expressions of worship center around the idea of the trance experience. There are many trance-inducing elements in the Pentecostal worship style, and IMO speaking in tongues fits nicely into that type of experience.

Lots of people would take umbrage at that assertion. On one side we might have the Pentecostal worshipper who protests that trance is a fleshly thing and speaking in tongues is a spiritual thing. On another side people who do not believe in that worship style (or in God at all, or anywhere along a continuum of “not believing”) might use this concept to further denigrate the whole experience as nothing but gobbledygook, the product of a weak or disturbed mind.

I see it differently. Trance is a natural, normal state of human consciousness. Some people “trance out” easier than others, and some people really enjoy a state of trance. They are unlikely to name it as such, but no matter. I’ve come to believe that what I see in a Pentecostal worship service is a bunch of people who find something spiritually valid and fulfilling in a communal trance experience.

http://swordofthelordbook.com

http://andrewhimes.net

Thanks Dan! Always insightful.