Say it ain’t so! It has come to my attention that some individuals and groups make it a practice to manually handle poisonous snakes to demonstrate their faith and trust in the Great Spirit. Many people are probably already aware of this practice, as it has been ongoing for many years, but I don’t get out much. Some religious leaders point to passages in the Bible that state that the “truly” devout can handle poisonous snakes without being bitten. Their strong faith provides protection and only when their faith is weakened will they be at risk. Of course, demonstrating one’s faith publicly is a necessary part of all religious rituals and ceremonies and each person considers his or her own way of doing it is rational. Common sense would seem to dictate they demonstrate their faith in safer ways but what do I know. Intelligence exists in the population on a continuum between idiots and imbeciles, like poisonous snake handlers, and geniuses like Albert Einstein.

For anyone that wants to know, snakes, having no limbs, evolved from a type of burrowing lizard that had four limbs. These particular lizards became more and more restricted, due to predators, to places that required them to burrow smaller and deeper holes, and move through smaller cracks and crevicies in rocks. Lizards in the population that had smaller front limbs found it easier to operate under the new conditions, which allowed them to more easily elude predators, and, therefore, their numbers increased in the population. In time, all of these lizards’ limbs became increasingly shorter, eventually disappearing altogether. This is the process by which all snakes, poisonous and non-poisonous, evolved.

Read Settled Science to learn more about how snakes evolved, why giraffes have long necks, why birds fly, and how whales evolved from large land animals.

Keywords : Blogs, Science and Society, Faith, Idiots, and Common Sense

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