Tête-à-Tête-Tête

I started with a very dim view of the practice of “Speaking in Tounges”. It still freaks me out a little bit. But after having a loved one join a charismatic church where the practice was common, and after my initial freaking out, I talked to a psychiatrist friend at my church who said the practice was harmless, and that many charismatics were at least as well adjusted as their non-charismatic neighbors.

I’ve puzzled over what the practice is, and is not, and debated it hotly with my loved one. Well, it turns out that it may not just be harmless, but also therapeutic:

A recent study of nearly 1,000 evangelical Christians in England found that those who engaged in the practice were more emotionally stable than those who did not.

But the bigger news is that it may be unique, and better understood by its practitioners than others:

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania took brain images of five women while they spoke in tongues and found that their frontal lobes — the thinking, willful part of the brain through which people control what they do — were relatively quiet, as were the language centers. The regions involved in maintaining self-consciousness were active. The women were not in blind trances, and it was unclear which region was driving the behavior.
[...]
“The amazing thing was how the images supported people’s interpretation of what was happening,” said Dr. Andrew B. Newberg, leader of the study team, which included Donna Morgan, Nancy Wintering and Mark Waldman. “The way they describe it, and what they believe, is that God is talking through them,” he said.

This is all from The NYT (and a HT to onegoodmove, again). It’s important to bear in mind that one of the researchers of the project is herself a charismatic Christian, and you may see some theological bias in the interpretation of these results. I, of course, continue to maintain that there is nothing supernatural about the practice, and am by no means contradicted in that view by this study. However, it is interesting to know the respects in which it is unlike similar practices in other religions: how one maintains activity in the brain regions that bring self-consciousness, for instance, making it unlike the trances of some mystical or aborigonal religions; how one loses executive control in the frontal lobes, making it unlike meditation and prayer. And, it’s worth reiterating, there is a correllation between speaking in tounges and emotional stability - and in this world, that’s worth something.

I’d like to see something done about the harm religion does - whether it is in terms of societal health, in terms of fundamentalist urges for domination of others’ minds and bodies, or whatever. But it doesn’t hurt, when disposing of the bathwater, to watch out for babies that might be lurking in the tub. And that’s another reason I think UUism is a better choice for freethinkers than complete divorce from all things religious.