I'm Catholic and used to be Protestant, specifically Pentecostal. My early interest in linguistics made me realize that glossolalia doesn't function in any capacity of language, and that the random phonemes only come from your native language. Theologically it's suspect because the gift of tongues in Acts 2 is said to be human languages... "we have heard them speak in our own tongues." Even metaphysically it doesn't make sense: the telos of language is communication, and supposedly this is God talking... to Himself?
A lot of good that early interest in linguistics did for me anyway. I took a single NLP course and hated it. Historical linguistics is a fun topic though; I have a history of English gathering dust, half-read, sitting on my bookshelf.
Good note from the author on "Everyone knows a language and thus everyone thinks they know about language." I agree on the conflation of language with writing is wrong because most languages that exist do not have writing systems, but a language having a writing system created for it could be argued to be "better" in the same way an armadillo or an ant is "better" than a slug; it has "armor" against "death." But yeah, thinking a language is dying because speech is drifting from text is boomer.
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