Recently I was driving from Edmonton to Calgary and just outside of Edmonton I came across a sign on the highway that read, “Need a Healing?” and then touted the name of an evangelical preacher (Thurman Scrivner) who was appearing at a hotel in Leduc to ostensibly heal the infirm. Being a skeptic and a former hard-core Christian, I thought I might just go find out what this gentleman was offering those who felt they needed to be ‘healed’ by his words or deeds.
So, off I went with a good friend to one of the evenings that this gentleman was going to be ‘healing’ at the hotel. Upon our arrival we were greeted with friendship and warmth, and the environment was pleasant. There was a band that warmed up the crowd with a series of religious musical numbers and then a local preacher did some talking to the room of about 120 folks before the guest of honor arrived.
A couple of years back a book, movie, DVD, audio-book combination was released called The Secret. The basic premise of the The Secret was that everything in your life can be altered by you simply ‘wanting it’ bad enough. The dangers of this kind of thinking are fairly self evident, and it’s in this kind of thinking where my trip to the faith healer got me a little riled up.
As I said, the evening was much like a church service, but as it wore on the speaker began to hint that the reason people got cancer, got sick, had problems in their lives was because of their sins. Indeed, this gentleman actually suggested that a woman’s teenage son, who was shot and was clinging to life in ICU, had been shot specifically because his mother was pregnant and the baby was conceived out of wedlock.
Now, I don’t pretend to know that what this guy was saying wasn’t true. Maybe some god somewhere is cruel enough to punish a child for something his mother did that has nothing to do with him, but the thing about faith is that we can’t know for sure if that’s true or not, so one has to be careful about how one places blame on someone. Didn’t this preacher think that the mother of the shot boy would be suffering enough with her child clinging to life without him telling her that it’s all HER fault?
After several similar stories where the sins of parents make children suffer or die, the talk moved to the scourge of oral sex, and how many of our most common diseases such as cancers are caused because someone in a family is involved in oral sex.
I say again, my point here isn’t to deride any religion, but rather it’s to point out that silly superstition lies just beneath the surface of many belief systems, and we need to be on guard with critical thinking tools to avoid getting into situations where we’re blaming innocents for the perceived sins of others. After all, what I think is a sin might not be a sin to 99% of the rest of the population. We need cooler heads, not craziness.
A few months back Brandon at the JREF showed me a video taken last may in Africa where some so-called ‘witches’ were burned alive (right on camera) all because some folks in the village decided that they were witches. What a horrible thing, and before you say “well, that’s Africa, that’s crazy” remember that I just attended a ‘healing’ where everyone attending was told that if they engaged in oral sex it’s entirely possible that a child close to them would die. Yuck. Who thinks up this stuff? Let’s let cooler heads prevail and keep religion as faith, and reality as reality. It’ll be better for everyone concerned.
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