“They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them.”
If the above quote from Mark 16:18 is LITERALLY true, then I guess it means that Pastor Coots was not one of “them” (meaning, apparently, he was not enough of a believer).
From the New York Daily News:
Pastor Jamie Coots, the star of “Snake Salvation,” was bitten on the right hand at his Kentucky church, Middlesborough police said.
The Pentecostal holy man refused to go to the hospital or accept any medical treatment, police said.
Coots, whose show appeared on National Geographic’s television channel, believed snake handling was a commandment from God and a viper’s bite was God’s will.
“When I first started church I said if I ever went to a hospital or a doctor over a snake bite I would quit church,” Coots said in one episode.
He had previously survived a bite that cost him most of the middle finger on his right hand. Instead seeking medical attention for the gruesome injury, he let it rot to black, exposing a quarter inch of bone before it broke off.
He kept the stub of the finger in a glass jar for his wife.
“To me it’s as much of a commandment from God when he said, ‘they shall take up serpents’ as it was when he ‘thou shall not commit adultery,” Coots said on the show of snake handling.
Coots was just as resolute on Saturday, according to police.
Unless I am misreading Pastor Coots, apparently if you are bitten and you die, it means you didn’t believe. This strikes me as deliberately impenetrable thinking. It also strikes me that people who handle snakes in these rituals are deliberately testing God. Assuming God’s existence, how is God to be expected to respond to such a deliberate challenge? And as was pointed out earlier, why aren’t they testing their faith (per the same Bible quote) by drinking strychnine or arsenic? If it won’t hurt them any more than handling snakes, why aren’t they willing to give it a try?
The answer, I think, is that handling snakes is less dangerous than drinking poison. The church’s snakes are kept in cages, and are fed and handled regularly. This tames them down and makes them far less likely to bite than, say, a wild, freshly caught rattlesnake. I’d call bullshit, but these days, disagreeing with any opinion said to be grounded in religion can evoke strong reactions. I’d rather let these folks just test their faith, as long as they don’t insist I do so.
And as if snake handlers weren’t bad enough, there’s deliberate workplace inflexibility which does not allow clocks to be adjusted in my local gym. After repeated complaints about the clocks being wrong (including an incident when I thought I had six minutes till closing because of the damned clock in the shower room), I was told that it is “not the job” of the regular gym staff to adjust the clocks. That, they claim, is the job of the maintenance staff (meaning the nighttime cleaning crew), but the latter don’t consider it their job either, so the clocks get more and more off.
In other words, it is no one’s job. And these days, employees are not allowed to do what their job does not tell them to do.
Initiative must be punished. (Hey, at least the snake handlers have that!)
Comments
15 responses to “What time is it?”
I drank poison this morning. Actually, I drink poison almost every morning.
Happily, in small quantities caffeine has a most salutary effect.
In Mark 16:17, it is Jesus himself who specifies that handling serpents and drinking poisons are two of the criteria for identifying true Christian believers. The others being preaching the Gospel, casting out demons and speaking in tongues.
So the real issue is why people claiming to follow Jesus don’t do these things, too. Of course, Coots (what an appropriate name) is an object lesson to us all.
The whole Mark 16:15-18 business is yet another example of just how bizarre the Bible is, just how full of contradictions it is. And it also shows how Christians and Jews find it necessary to pick and choose what parts they like.
In reality, Coots was bitten by the Reformation. Its leaders insisted that only the Bible could be relied on (and then purged it of books and verses they didn’t like), that the ancient Catholic/Orthodox Tradition was false, that the Bible was literally true, and that any man of normal intelligence could understand it. Hence, 30,000 Protestants sects and growing.
This doesn’t mean Coots would have been better off in a Catholic parish, although snakes and poisons aren’t part of the Mass.
There is a permanently stopped clock built as a mosaic into the floor of the original Mt. Carmel building in Waco. It’s called the 11th Hour Clock and was the work of one of the founders of the Shepperd’s Rod/Davadian Sect, Cecil Helman, who died recently.
http://www.shepherds-rod-speaks.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/B8-11thHr-clock-e1333247075756.jpg
Beware Eric, should the gym clock stop at 10 minutes to midnight!
Faith, as applied to religious beliefs, is not only believing things to be true without sufficient evidence to do so, it’s also believing things to be true despite evidence to the contrary. I would say that Pastor Coots’ snake handling beliefs definitely fall into the latter category.
If a person can believe things to be true without evidence, then anyone can believe anything to be true without evidence.
I assume if a God does exist, after giving us the ability to think,
would expect some level of responsibility, Just as parents expect responsibility from their children.
Stupid is stupid no matter how much biblical support can be found for it.
bob sykes,
You’d ought to have more respect for the Reformation. The idea that the Bible was accessible to all, and could be interpreted by anyone for themselves, was the means by which the peasantry got out from under the thumb of the aristocracy, began educating themselves, became citizens, and made it socially acceptable to be individuals rather than just a sentient collection of allegiances.
Before you say that mankind would have been better off without religion, you’ve got to ask how people COULD have expressed themselves in the 16th century.
There’s a great and very old Ray Stevens song about the snake handlers. Enjoy –
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5bhG0LKsZ0
More respect for the Reformation? I give it it’s due. It broke the monopoly power of the Catholic church.
And really, socially acceptable to be individuals? Pray tell that to Michael Servetus.
An incredibly Panglossian reading of the time.
c andrew,
You have imposed your own morality anachronistically on another age.
Servetus broke the law in Geneva and was burned at the stake accordingly. In prior times or other places contemporaneously, he’d have been sent back to his sovereign for punishment, since he was legally the property of said sovereign.
Believe it or not, that was a step toward individuality.
[I’ve over-simplified just a bit; Servetus was wanted by the Inquisition, which theoretically had jurisdiction over all Christians. Servetus’ Catholic monarch would have had to wait in line to get at him.]
And you have a very different version of “individuality” than I have ever encountered before. By these lights, chattel slavery in America was an advance in individualism. The only difference was they were owned by a private individual instead of a sovereign individual.
I don’t think that individuality means what you think it means.
c andrew,
Your reply made no sense whatsoever, how does going from one form of slavery to another advance the individual?
The Reformation argued that the individual had a direct relationship with God, that the Church and the Sovereign had no business severing that relationship. It’s true that the law of Geneva prohibited certain heresies (including the non-trinitarianism of Servetus), but the mere fact that Calvin claimed the right to judge Servetus’ actions was an implicit recognition that the Church and the King of Spain did not have ownership of Servetus. That Servetus was free to leave Spain, leave the Church, and responsible for his own actions.
Ideas advance a step at a time. It serves no purpose to hold historical figures to anachronistic standards of morality.
Prostantism, like Catholicism, Orthodoxy and Judaism is a mixed bag. For many, it was the route to individual freedom, but in the American South it supplied the ideological justification for black slavery.
But my real point is that the Bible is a rich source of lunacy, and Coots is an example of its possibilities.
You might remember that Jones (of the Koolaid) was running a cult whose beliefs were a mixture of communism and Prostantism.
Oh, this is a fun game! Can I play too?
Atheism, like Stoicism, Epicurianism, or Sophistry, is a mixed bag. For many it was the route to critical thinking, but in much of the world it creates the spiritual longing which the unscrupulous can fill with communism, marxism, fascism, maoism, global warmism, etc.
People do nasty things to each other over the things they find important. I see no reason why religion should bear the stigma of that behavior any more than any other ideology.
The fact is that science, critical thought, and the Western recognition of us each as an individual owes much to the Reformation. Indeed, it owes much to the Rev. Coots’ right to decide that the bible states he’d ought to play with snakes.
If he got bitten he must have been a sinner. QED.
Like the drowning test for witches – if she drowns she wasn’t a witch. If she floats she’s a witch; BURN HER!!!
Ideas advance a step at a time. It serves no purpose to hold historical figures to anachronistic standards of morality.
You mean like ascribing enlightenment era concepts such as “individuality” to historical figures that didn’t represent any such thing? That kind of anachronism?
I could go on about how Luther denounced the poor as a class for their thieving murdering ways whilst praising the elite as a class for their thieving murdering ways.
Or his egregious denunciation of the Jews because they wouldn’t accept his theology. (He excused them for not accepting Catholic theology, because, you know, after all – Catholic.)
This egregious work was bad enough and its connection to the ongoing anti-Semitism obvious enough that the Missouri Synod – in 1993 and the ELCA – in 1983 – removed these works from the canon. Why it took 48 and 38 years respectively to come to that conclusion…
Or we could talk about Calvin’s doctrine of “Total Depravity.” And Predestination. Certainly these would be highlights of “individuality” in the Reformation.
I repeat; the historically important aspect of the Reformation was it broke the monopoly of the Catholic church. And in the ensuing religious wars that followed, it exhausted the moral authority of the religious establishment, leaving room for other sources of moral authority to arise.