This is a follow-up to a previous post.

Ever wondered why people supposedly get out of their wheelchairs and run about on stage during a healing crusade; but no one has ever regrown an amputated limb?

There are a few possibilities:

1. God is not omnipotent. Regrowing an amputated limb is beyond what he can do. (Remember, this is the same ‘god’ who flooded the whole earth, parted the Red Sea, created humans from dust, etc). This obviously does not make sense even if you look at it from the theological side.

2. God refuses to regrow limbs due to reasons that we, being humans, are not supposed to comprehend. As the popular apologetic argument goes: We cannot understand god’s ways. Most Christians that I have spoken to love using this cop-out.

However, this runs contrary to the Bible:

(Matthew 7:7) Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For every one who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. Or what man of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!

(Matthew 21:21) I tell you the truth, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only can you do what was done to the fig tree, but also you can say to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and it will be done. If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.

Uh-oh. That argument doesn’t seem to work either.

3. God does not want to be too obvious. He prefers to remain silent and unseen so that people would have no reason to believe in him. In the end, he deliberately sends all the nonbelievers to hell.

4. God is imaginary, and the faith healers are simply deluded or are deliberate charlatans.

You may still wonder why so many people are supposedly ‘cured’? There must still be miracles to account for, right?

Wrong.

1. Some faith healers are plain frauds. Peter Popoff pretended to get messages from god while his wife was whispering through an earpiece backstage. She got her information from cards that the audience filled out when they attended  In the incredibly credulous atmosphere of his crusades, the audience fell for it hook, line, and sinker. This fraud was exposed in the 1980’s by James Randi.

2. Some alleged cures have involved mistaken diagnoses that required no cure at all in the first place.

3. Psychosomatic illnesses respond positively to psychological manipulation. This never works in the case of amputated limbs. This is the most logical explanation when we consider psychosomatic illnesses as opposed to amputated limbs.

4. In the excitement of an evangelical revival, the reduction of pain due to the release of endorphins often causes people to believe and act as if they have been miraculously healed (Nickell 1993).

5. The desire to be cured can relieve stress and bring about the effects of the power of suggestion; and testimonies are often exaggerated to please god, the healer, or simply to demonstrate that they are full of faith. Nevertheless, the desire to be cured can sometimes bring adverse effects. One cancer patient at a Kathryn Kuhlman faith-healing performance was asked by Kuhlman to remove her back brace and run across the stage. She claimed her cancer was cured, but then died two months later after X-rays showed that a “cancer-weakened vertebra had collapsed due to the strain placed on it during the demonstration” (Nickell 1998).

6. Some serious ailments (etc. cancer), are unpredictable and may undergo spontaneous remission.

7. Failures are sometimes blamed on the patient for not having enough faith, or too much doubt.

8. Many patients refuse to admit that they have not been cured as they are ashamed that they “lacked faith”.

9. Many cures have been attributed to the placebo effect, not divine intervention.

To fully comprehend the lunacy of faith healers, the following is an excerpt from the transcript of what Benny Hinn said on Paul and Jan Crouch’s TBN television program (Praise The Lord, Trinity Broadcasting Network, October 19, 1999).

[start of excerpt]

Benny Hinn: But here’s first what I see for TBN. You’re going to have people raised from the dead watching this network. You’re going to have people raised from the dead watching TBN. It’s not going to be a Benny Hinn saying “Stretch your hands.” It’s going to be your average teaching program, your normal Christian program that’s blessing the church. There’s going to be such power on these programs people will be raised from the dead worldwide. I’m telling you, I see this in the Spirit. It’s going to be so awesome. Jesus I give you praise for this — that people around the world — maybe not so much in America — people around the world who will lose loved ones, will say to undertakers, “Not yet. I want to take my dead loved one and place him in front of that TV set for 24 hours.”

[end of excerpt]

So far, nobody has been raised from the dead by Benny Hinn or any of the other faith healers. Wouldn’t raising someone from the dead show non-believers that there must be something to this god business after all?

The sad thing about this is that people who are desperate for a cure often put all their trust in the faith healers, and blame themselves for ‘not having enough faith’ when they are not cured. This is the main reason that faith healers are not being called out on their outrageous claims, and in the case of Popoff, for example, people are still falling for his scam even after he was exposed by James Randi. As skeptics, we need to speak out and make our voices heard, at least for the sake of the desperate people conveniently exploited by the faith healers. Humanism calls for it.

I recently attended a ‘healing crusade’ where people expected Jesus to somehow cure their illnesses while children die of starvation in Africa.

Did it convince me that something supernatural was going on? No.

Granted, nobody was literally smacked on the forehead like what happens during Benny Hinn’s crusades, but it was a painful experience to sit through. The room was packed with true believers, and I felt exasperation overwhelming me. It took every ounce of effort not to start screaming and yelling at everyone to simply open their eyes to the deception that they have willingly entered into.

On the other hand, I felt pity and rage at the same time. I felt pity for the sick who attended desperately seeking a miracle. I felt pity for the children whose parents chose to drag to the healing crusade instead of receiving medical care. It was indeed a heart-wrenching sight to see the disabled, the deaf and the blind with looks of longing and hope on their faces as they ‘surrendered their fates’ to their particular version of a deity. I was filled with rage at the people who could even consider feeding tantalizing, false hopes to people who are desperately seeking a miracle just to propagate their own convictions. I felt rage looking at the entire system of self-deception and suspension of disbelief. With pity and rage alternating inside me, I took my seat among the true believers.

It started off with a few worship songs to supposedly ‘bring the presence of god into this place’. The songs were repeated over and over again, bringing about an almost hypnotic effect which some in the audience took as a sign that the ‘holy spirit’ was present. If the Christian god is the omnipotent, omnipresent, all-knowing deity he is portrayed as being, why would he need to be alerted to the fact that his followers needed healing? Couldn’t he have just healed them without having to be told to do so in a special ceremony? The ‘invocation’ also sounded a lot like pagan practices of invoking ‘spirits’. Another interesting question is that if god/his spirit/the holy ghost is omnipresent, why did he need to be specifically channeled into the hall? Why did they have to start the crusade with the act of ‘bringing god into this place’? Is it just me, or does something not quite add up?

The epitome of the phrase ‘fleecing the flock’ was displayed when the collection basket was handed out with calls to ‘give back to god what he has done’. In the first place, nobody had been healed yet, so what would be the rationale for that statement? However, the true believers gave, and they indeed gave! By the time the collection basket arrived at my row, it was full enough to line an evangelist’s pocket or two.

Next came the preaching. The preacher claimed that everyone wants to believe in a god. Many people do want to believe in a god, but saying that everyone wants to believe in a god was an overgeneralization. I guess he also missed the memo that wanting to believe in something doesn’t make it so.

He then claimed that he has ‘evidence’ to conclusively ‘prove’ the existence of one true god. First, he asked the crowd how many people have only one biological father. When the audience raised their hands, he continued with ‘Since nobody could have more than one biological father, it is only possible to have one god as well. It is impossible to have more than one god, as it is impossible to have more than one biological father.’

Yes, that was his great theological proof of monotheism. Voila!

I have to admit that I was more than a little disappointed.

After the great theological ‘proof’ of god, it was time for the ‘worship Jesus or burn’ threats. The usual evangelical stock-phrases were spouted: Now that you have proof that there is only one true god, it is your obligation not to worship false gods. You must choose Jesus, because if you don’t, you will end up in hell, and hell is not a place you want to go to. You want eternal life! You don’t want to end up in hell! You don’t! You don’t! You don’t! You don’t! You don’t! Hell is an absolutely terrifying place! You DON’T want to go there! ACCEPT JESUS!!

The same thing was repeated over and over again until I nearly fell asleep, but I was jolted awake in horror when I saw the true believers around me simply lapping it up. After attending evangelical crusades, trust me, horror movies pale in comparison. The horror of again realizing that around the world, millions of people are buying into this dogma would be more than enough to cause sleepless nights.

Next, we were promised that Jesus would work miracles and that through the miracles; we would see that he is the way to God. We were also told that God/Jesus/Holy Spirit would work the miracles not only to heal the sick, but to also ‘show the truth’ to the non-Christians.

You must be wondering what ‘miracles’ Jesus worked that night. And I have to say, Jesus was really disappointing, or more likely, a no-show. There were a few headaches, stress and depression cases ‘cured’, in addition to a kid’s cough, a slight pain in the foot, a mild ankle injury, ringing in the ears, and pain ‘disappearing’ from various parts of the body. Nobody got out of their wheelchairs and walked despite the repeated calls to ‘Get up and walk.’ No blind people suddenly saw, the deaf didn’t suddenly hear, the mute didn’t suddenly talk, and the disabled didn’t suddenly recover. Most importantly, no amputated limbs were re-grown by God.  Although that would be the most convincing ‘evidence’ that faith healing actually could have something to it after all.

One case was especially heartbreaking, as it was self-deception in the highest degree. A cancer patient who had undergone several rounds of chemotherapy claimed that she felt a decrease in the numbness in her right side. She also felt that the cancer had been ‘reduced by 90%’. How would this be possible to determine without a medical check-up? Despite the patient’s obvious credulity and willing acts of self-deception, I felt really sorry for her. Would she stop her chemotherapy treatments because she feels that her cancer is all but gone? I would never know, but somehow I hope that somewhere along the line, her skepticism kicks in. The anger and pity coursing through me when she gave her testimony at the front was indescribable.

Another sad part is how the crowd clapped and cheered at the end of each testimony, seeing the testimonies as a confirmation of what they so desperately want to be true. When it was time for the altar call, around forty people went up to the front to ‘accept Jesus’. Is skepticism dead among most members of the human species? Superstition claimed more members that night, and I am afraid that we may never be able to compete with the numbers superstition claims all over the world everyday if we are not willing to stand up, speak up, and be counted. Being an appeaser simply would not do.

I know this sounds pessimistic, but perhaps you had to be there on that fateful night.