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[Amerigo Vespucci]

6 Insane Cults (That Would Probably Be a Lot of Fun)

By Ian Fortey

#4. Church of God with Signs Following



Understanding why your average Sunday service bores the hell out of most churchgoers, the Church of God with Signs Following turns every service into an insane orgy of pious madness and potential fatalities that puts even the UFC to shame.

You may know these people better as "snake handlers" and there could be anywhere from 1,000 to 5,000 of them just waiting to accidentally kill themselves for the Lord on any given Sunday.

Snake handlers engage in all the normal stuff you'd expect at a religious service: speaking in tongues, screaming, spasming, spinning in circles, occasionally drinking poison and, why the heck not, handling snakes. The faithful defend their extreme and sometimes deadly beliefs by saying everything they do comes directly from the Bible, specifically Mark 16:17-18, which if you add some words to it, says to bring a bunch of snakes into church.



Sure, basing an entire belief system around a single passage from the Bible is pretty out there, given that there are quite a few things in the Bible that would have your ass sent straight to prison if you were to attempt them in public. But at Cracked, we don't believe in doing anything half-assed and you can't help but admire the way the church just up and ran with the snake thing. There's even the odd death at these services. Our only suggested change would be adding the word "X-TREME" in their name somewhere.

For those in the know, of course, those deaths were just the result of people who lacked faith, faith being the universal method to prevent snake bites, followed closely by not dancing around like a drunkard at a hootenanny with a poisonous snake in your hands. And just because some people will point out the passage these churches hold as sacred, it's generally footnoted in most versions of the Bible as having most likely been edited in at a later date, it doesn't mean God doesn't want us to taunt poisonous creatures. It may mean that, but if people weren't willing to take risks for what they believe in, Jackass would have never existed. And we can all agree that God wouldn't have wanted that.