I can't help but laugh at these dumb asses. I guess he wasn't right with god? pssshhhh idiots.
The Stache wrote:
I guess he wasn't right with god?
West Virginia state park rules prohibit animals other than dogs and cats on the property.
God done smote him down for violatin' the state park rules.
The Stache wrote:
http://news.yahoo.com/serpent-handling-west-virginia-pastor-dies-snake-bite-173406645--abc-news-topstories.htmlI can't help but laugh at these dumb asses. I guess he wasn't right with god? pssshhhh idiots.
This is crazy. Extremism and taking all text of your holy book literally (whichever religion it is from) is just crazy insane.
How does one know which parts to take literally and which not? How do we know which parts are really God talking, really history, or myth? Is there some methodology by which the good religious moderates know?
The whole snakehandling thing just comes from an aside in Acts (and which as a book is patently obviously not reporting history - it is trying to resolve contradictions between Christian sects that existed at the time).
Snakehandling makes sense if you see religion as a set of costly rituals that signal cultural/group commitment with sunk costs rather than a set of empirical claims.
Brian wrote:
How does one know which parts to take literally and which not? How do we know which parts are really God talking, really history, or myth? Is there some methodology by which the good religious moderates know?
Take none of it literally.
No part is god talking because there is no god.
Very little of it is actual history, the vast majority is myth transferred by oral tradition for a few thousand years before some dudes wrote it down.
The only methodology needed is to use common fvcking sense.
Brian wrote:
The whole snakehandling thing just comes from an aside in Acts (and which as a book is patently obviously not reporting history - it is trying to resolve contradictions between Christian sects that existed at the time).
Snakehandling makes sense if you see religion as a set of costly rituals that signal cultural/group commitment with sunk costs rather than a set of empirical claims.
To be fair, I believe most Snake handlers quote Mark 16:17-18 as the main justification for their practice. Drinking strichnine is also fairly common. They also quote Luke 10:19 and sometimnes practice walking on snakes, although this is not as common as handling them. I am not aware of which Acts passages you are referring to, although Pentecostals do make heavy use of Acts in general.
Just as an aside, it appears that the passage in Mark is a later scribal addition, so I am not sure why it is considered authoritative.
Pretty crazy. The fact that he chose to wait for his savior to heal him rather than getting standard medical treatment, which would almost certainly have saved his life, is both frightening and sort of impressive. Frightening in that a life gets cut short because of this blind faith in an old book, impressive in that he apparently truly believed what he said (or, maybe he was suicidal, who knows).
I'm used to seeing people make various terrible decisions in the hospital-- drink themselves to oblivion, keep smoking as their leg rots off from vascular disease, refuse treatments that have a high probability of working, etc. I've always explained to the med students and residents that grown ups get to make as many bad decisions as they want, all we can do is give them facts and advice. Lots of strange people in the world...
god has spoken.
his message: the bible is stupid. take it literally, and you too could be a dead fool.
I HANDLE SNAKES
it's my life
it's my decision
it's my idea of a good time
it's my religion
i don't make no sudden movements
can't afford to make mistakes
i'm a fearless man
i handle snakes (y'all)
the lord of hosts
has got to like me
else this thing here
(this one right here)
would surely strike me
the one man lays down 10 percent
another man trembles and quakes
i save my money
i handle snakes (y'all)
i handle snakes
well i hug 'em and i kiss 'em
i handle snakes
and if they kill me
i'll sure miss 'em
(i handle snakes
i love it when they listen
listen)
i handle snakes
and if they kill me
i'm sure gonna miss 'em
'cause it's my life
it's my decision
it's my idea of a good time (yes it is yes it is)
it's my religion
However
i don't say hallelujah
i don't even say grace
but i make my statement
i say it with snakes
I was referring to the episode on Malta in Acts 28 1 - 10. The late Punkin Brown used this verse.
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts+28%3A1-10&version=NIV
What is really theologically novel about snakehandlers is that they reject the trinity (rightly, I might add) as a late syncretic theological innovation. They call themselves Jesus Onlys (I guess that makes the patripassionists?). Now if only they could get rid of the other pagan accretions like, oh, I don't know, dying and rising salvic gods and most of the NT stories easily traced to pagan and jewish parallels.
Brian wrote:
What is really theologically novel about snakehandlers is that they reject the trinity (rightly, I might add) as a late syncretic theological innovation. They call themselves Jesus Onlys (I guess that makes the patripassionists?). Now if only they could get rid of the other pagan accretions like, oh, I don't know, dying and rising salvic gods and most of the NT stories easily traced to pagan and jewish parallels.
ummmmm.....what?
The craziest thing about this story, to me, is that his dad died the same way, yet he thought it was a good idea to return to snake handling. Hopefully he didn't have any offspring - we don't need more of this family in the gene pool.
george oscar bluth wrote:
we don't need more of this family in the gene pool.
dont worry. their genes dont enter the rest of the gene pool.
see what i did there?
He likely would not have died, had he promptly sought medical attention. Most venomous snake bites in North America are rarely fatal unless they go untreated. What a strange man.
Some snake handlers reject the Trinity, others do not. The Church of Jesus Christ with Signs Following, which may be the closest thing to a denomination (although a very loose affiliation) contains churches that are trinitarian and churches that are non-trinitarian. In this the snake handlers mirror a wider divide within the Pentecostal community of which they are a subpart.
I think you are mistaken if you believe their rejection of the trinity has anything to do with it being late or syncretistic. As I understand it the whole non-trinitarian pentecostals are an inadvertent result of the adoption of the Jesus-only formula for Baptism from a literal reading from Acts. The rejection of the trinty was a later attempt to maintain that practice in a consistent theology.
Mr. Obvious wrote:
The rejection of the trinty was a later attempt to maintain that practice in a consistent theology.
Then happily reroactively justified as being a more original Christology.
Brian wrote:
Mr. Obvious wrote:The rejection of the trinty was a later attempt to maintain that practice in a consistent theology.
Then happily reroactively justified as being a more original Christology.
Yes, I agree. I doubt whether many of the early practitioners of Jesus only baptism were well versed in the controversies of Nicea, however.
Poor guy. Just some crazy dude who got killed because he is crazy.
It is a strange religous practice for most to accept but at least they are only killing themselves.