Quote:
Originally Posted by Intothewind
I've wondered on this funny life thread for a while.
When I was little little my Gma scribbled or tore out all pictures of snakes from an animal book we had. Reason...snakes are evil
An early childhood memory is my father chopping a gophersnake to pieces in our front yard...in part at least because snakes are evil. My young brain wondered what this critter could have possibly done to deserve such a welcoming.
At a yp camp one of the elders captured a young rattlesnake in a bucket. Their was considerable debate and sone other elders wanted to kill it like all the others found because it was evil, a couple others protested this...here I learned that despite what lc folk may say opinions still exist. Said snake was released by the first elder and myself
A lc friend donated a box of audubon encyclopedias to little me who promptly read all of them. Among many other things it sowed seed to the idea that organisms cannot be classified as good or bad but simply are.
I remember a highschool convo with my dad...he tried to defend the young earth and also genesis gap ideas, and mentioned how liking snakes in a christian family is like wearing the wrong colors to a hs
football game. I retorted that hating someone for wearing the wrong colors is very irrational.
I oddly have snakes to thank for showing me irrational human behavior is common and even an integral part of our species.
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Nice to see you here IntoTheWind (great name).
Joh 3:14 And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up,
Some early Gnostics who couldn't add up the big difference between the God of Jesus and the God of the OT used this verse to claim that the serpent in the garden was Christ coming to Adam and Eve to save them from the awful creator law-giver demiurge god.
In mythology, that's rich with serpent myth's, serpents are not necessarily bad. For one, they can go into the ground and come back up, symbolizing going into Hades (death), and coming back up. And for another, they slough off their skin, representing new birth. Both symbolizing being born again, or anew.
When I got the boot from the LC I was branded a serpent, and saints were told to have nothing to do with my wife and I. They were told we were serpents that would poison them.
I now see that the lead elder was a serpent (of that sort)... and so was Nee and Lee.
And now I think that real serpents are much safer than human serpents.
And I do not kill snakes. The non-poisonous ones don't bother me. I had one in my shop for awhile. I use to catch mice for him. The poisonous ones I catch and release in the woods. They have as much of a right to exist as I do.