My favorite cult is the snake handlers. There is scriptual basis for this practice too. The snake handlers handle poison snakes like rattlesnakes and copperheads. If they get bit and die, well that's proof that their faith wasn't strong enough. Some snake handling cults drink poison, although I'm not sure of the scriptual basis of this practice. I am sure it's based on the same scriptural passages as exorcism and snake handling.
>From what I can tell snake handling is bigger now than it was 30 or 40 years
ago. You would think after the interstate highways, cable and satellite TV, and
the internet that things would be going shall we say in a more rational
direction.
Then too, the mass immigration of "pagans" and other "cultists" into this country should help raise the mumbo-jumbo decible level too.
Tom
Carl Remick wrote:
> >I don't see why science has to presuppose that the
> >world is intelligible to our finite understandings and imaginations, just
> >that there is order there that we can find by empirical investigation.
> >
> >--jks
> >
> >--jks
>
> Certainly religion's prime competitive strength vis-a-vis science is that it
> does claim to make the world wholly intelligible. That's obviously a key
> reason why modern secular society creates such enormous psychic stresses
> despite the abundant material comforts afforded by advanced technology. I
> recall that as being a central argument of a book I read many years ago,
> Cornell historian Carl Becker's classic The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth
> Century Philosophers.
>
> Carl
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