Ralph W. Hood

I did have like a really, really crazy quote.

So this quote is from Dr. Ralph Hood.

He was a professor, professor of religious psychology at the University of Tennessee.

Hood is not personally a snake handler, but he is one of the world's foremost experts on snake handlers.

And if not, it was their time to go to heaven.

Let's go play with some snakes at their funeral.

Ralph Hood, again, was quoted as saying, if you go to any serpent handling church, you'll see people with atrophied hands and missing fingers.

All the serpent handling families have suffered such things.

But like many other Pentecostal and Charismatic services, they also involve these charismatic gifts of the Spirit.

According to research conducted by scholars Ralph Hood and W. Paul Williamson, who spent 15 years conducting ethnographic research in snake-handling churches, sometimes a full sermon may last only a minute or two before members start demonstrating these charismatic practices, possibly speaking in tongues or shaking with a feeling of being filled with the Spirit.

The preacher might jump back in at any moment, still preaching while people are shouting, dancing, and speaking in tongues.

Sometimes snakes don't make an appearance at all, but often during the worship service, suddenly a group of men will retrieve a special wooden box that contains venomous snakes and bring it to the front of the church.

Later studies tried to settle the question with experimental data, measuring heart rates, breathing, and brainwaves, but they found no consistent physiological differences between speaking in tongues and ordinary speech.

In my video on speaking in tongues, I cite the scholar Nicholas Harkness, who argues that trance-like glossolalia is actually the rarer form of the practice.

Hood and Williamson argue for a middle ground position.

They argue we're seeing some sort of culturally learned, physiologically real state of focused dissociation, guided by social cues, ritual, and belief, and worshipers know how to enter, deepen, and exit these states.

And a bass player and guitar player walked in.

We started chatting and they went, hey, you want to sort of sing some real songs and be in a real band? And those two guys was Ralph Hood, who was the bass player from Grand Prix, and Mick O'Donoghue, the guitar player from Grand Prix.

And so I thought, yeah, what the hell? They had a bunch of songs written.

We got together.