My family has been involved in the Charismatic Movement since the 1970s. As a teen, I got caught up in it for a while and, as it was said, "received the gift of tongues."

I felt a pleasant tingling in my mouth and hands, and my mind shifted into a sweetly altered nonverbal state. My vision clouded over, and the church seemed filled with a blinding light. I saw movement within that light and assumed it was God and the Angels. But I wasn't doing it "right," so I was chastened, ignored, and shunned. I was 15 and undiagnosed autistic.

I "lost my religion" a few years later when Nixon was in town and I wanted to go to a protest over our participation in the war in Vietnam. My father ordered me to remain home and quoted the Bible: "Honor your father and mother." (He often mentioned that because his anger issues made him very hard to honor on his own merits.) So I sat down on my bed and resolved to be an atheist so that he couldn't hurt me anymore. I had just made 18.

Shortly afterward I tried marijuana for the first time. The euphoric brain fog felt very similar to how I'd felt speaking in tongues. I realized glossolalia was just a brain glitch that could be hacked to induce a cozy, non-rational state. Sports events, music concerts, alcohol, and recreational drugs induce similar altered states. Even travel can do this, as evidenced by Jerusalem, Louver, and Jamaica Syndromes.

The final nail went into the coffin of my youthful religious delusions when I held space for a friend who was experiencing an epileptic seizure. She vocalized in a manner that sounded indistinguishable from glossolalia. QED.

Somehow or other, a significant portion of this country has decided to follow people who hack a brain glitch to induce an irrational state of consciousness -- and they think it's from God.

Scary stuff, folks.