• teft@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      50
      ·
      7 months ago

      Sadly, only Miracle Whip has passed the scientific tests to legally be called miraculous.

    • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      7 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.

    • dantheclamman@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      7 months ago

      There are a lot of aspects of the world that are wonderful, can’t yet be explained, and maybe don’t even need explanation to be worshiped and enjoyed. Religion is just a means to make sense of these parts of our cosmos (I myself am a complete atheist, but have friends whose lives have been definitely enriched by finding religion). The problems arise when manipulative people codify these beliefs into regimented systems of control. That creates an incentive to coerce others to follow the same beliefs. That in turn leads to religions beginning to be shaped by a kind of memetic survival of the fittest. Some religions try to short-cut the hard work of having actually good ideas that improve people’s lives, by instead coercing people into beliefs that maximize birth rate and reduce individual thought.