Monday, April 12, 2004

Chuckie Watch 45: Chuckie vs. Eve's Snake

Ole Chuckie is still on the upswing as of Easter weekend.  He brings us a religious message: Easter.

Well, actually it could have been more-or-less copied out of any of thousands of fundamentalist pamphlets.  But Chuckie couldn't resist a little snake-bashing:

Jesus’ coming was foretold over and over again in the Old Testament from the very first book of the bible, Genesis, where the Scripture says that God would put enmity between the woman and the serpent, Satan, and between the woman’s offspring and Satan’s offspring; that the woman’s offspring would crush the head of the serpent and that the serpent would strike the heel of the offspring.

Now, Chuckie's into the fundamentalist thing with the so-called literalist view of Scripture.  He hasn't said anything that I've seen where he explicity embraces the Christian Reconstructionist or Dominion theology, though it wouldn't surprise me if he does.  And, since I'm one of the people who regularly analyzes Chuckie's rants, I'm pretty confident in saying that.  Actually, I'm most likely the only person alive who does analyze his rants.  So I can say that the universal consensus among Chuckie experts is that it wouldn't surprise us.

But since Chuckie reads the Bible literally, he should be a little more careful.  Nowhere in the Bible does it say that the snake in the Garden of Eden was Satan.  Not in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, not in the New Testament.  Now, there are extra-canonical works in the "pseudoepigrapha" that do identify the snake with Satan.  But not in the canonical Bible.  Maybe Chuckie's been studying up on the pseudoepigrapha.

I did a paper several years ago about that snake.  Maybe I'll post it here sometime.  I kind of have some sympathy for that snake.  I mean, Yahweh walks up and sees that Adam and Eve realize they're nekkid, so he knows they've eaten the forbidden fruit.  So he asks them about it, and Adam proves his humanity by saying, "It's Eve's fault."  She proves hers by saying, "It's the snake's fault."  The poor snake didn't have anybody to pass the buck to.  One way to read the story is that if Adam and Eve hadn't been so quick to try to fink somebody out, maybe God wouldn't have been so upset with them.

Chuckie, playing fast and loose with the Bible.  What is the world coming to?  It would probably be a surprise to Chuckie to find out that Jewish readers manage to get through the whole Hebrew Bible (aka, the Old Testament) without reading any of those prophecies to be about Jesus.  Although Christians manage to find them on nearly every page.  Yeah, Chuckie better stick to snake-baiting.

But, while I'm thinking of it, what part of the Gospels has Jesus bashing snakes' heads open or snakes putting bruises on his heel?  Chuckie says those are prophecies of Jesus.  I think somebody may have added extra pages to Chuckie's Bible.

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