LOL! Yeah,seems dumb to me.

If people choose to risk their lives or even kill themselves, that's their business, but coercion of other church members to endanger themselves, and their children, should have legal consequences.

But nobody from those churches is likely to sue their leaders, or press charges.

The concept of consent includes the idea that the person in question understands the consequences of their course of action. Did Pastor Wolford's beliefs, and his family's beliefs, interfere with that understanding? Can you truly give consent if you believe a non-existent entity will save your life?

Whatever floats your boat!!

Would anyone consider this a suicide?

Such a shame. It's a complete waste of human life. Awful for the man's family and friends that he should die at all, worse that he should die of his own volition when it could have been avoided, prevented, or cured through (perhaps not simple but readily-available) scientific medicine.

The people who ought to understand the real message -- GOD WON'T SAVE YOU FROM POISONOUS SNAKES -- will instead do intellectual backflips to reconcile the painful evidence of their own direct experience with the obviously false braggadocio of an ancient book whose reference to poisonous snakes was no doubt selected in part because it rhymed in the vernacular. They'll console themselves that his fictitious soul is in a fictitious heaven in proximity to a fictitious God.

It's testament to the astonishing power of religious delusion and a demonstration of how otherwise good and/or intelligent people (let's give him the benefit of the doubt) can be made to do evil or foolish things.

Not to mention, snake handling is probably cruel to the snake, which ought to be set free to live its life as a predator hunting wild animals and thinning out the population of wild mice and rats and such.

If only more of these people would handle poisonous snakes.

I prayed to god to take my pain away and he told me he was a total bunch of BS . So now I have no pain since he is not real.

Eccentric ways to clean the evil out of you. Religion allows self beating in repentance , it allows genital mutilation, it allows denying science and all other sorts of stupidity, But to win the most stupid prize playing with vipers is truly award winning.

Another one bites the dust... but there will be others to take his place.

i agree with her action. he would have refused treatment even if paramedics came and was competent to do so

this is stupid, just plain stupid.

If there really was a Gawd, he/she/it would cause those snakes to go into a biting frenzy every single time they were being abused like this!

Four days later, Pond followed him deep into the Appalachian hills. She shot several frames at an outdoor service as Wolford held, and then walked on, a timber rattlesnake called Old Yeller he had owned for several years. “Gone was the benevolent energy I had felt the previous year,” Pond later wrote, “and in its place an odd sense of urgency.”

As she shot, “suddenly an eerie stillness fell over the picnic site”. The cause quickly became clear: Wolford had been bitten. Eight hours later, he died, his family and followers having respected his steadfast refusal to send for medical treatment until it was too late — so strong was their belief that his fate was solely in God’s hands.