Monday, September 1, 2008

Hocus Pocus & Medicine Don’t Mix!


All this business with that fraudster Pastor Gugliemucci, got me pondering about the wider picture of faith-healing and sick, desperate people.
I concluded, that any form that involved 'selling Gods healing actions’ & 'unfounded religious hocus pocus’, is in it's rawest form - fraud of the most exploitive type (however genuine the practitioner, and recipient is of these so-called magical powers of their deity) and should be banned accordingly.

Governments around the globe know fully well, that in the entire history of modern science, no claim of any type of supernatural phenomena has ever been replicated under controlled conditions, yet allow this widespread ‘belief fraud’ to go ahead unimpeded (indeed give the perpetrators a tax cut instead!)

Fact: There has never been a single provable ‘miracle’ involving supposed actions of deities.

Conventional Medicine, tested and quantifiable, is a patients best, and often only proven hope.

Were a medicine proven to be ineffective or dangerous, it would be pulled immediately, but no such rigours are applied religious-healers.

There can no longer be a place for unsubstantiated, anecdotal superstition in modern medicine, in the same way there’s no place for leeching.

Giving false hope, and charging for the privilege, is not just a crime worthy of admonishment, but also a stretch in prison.

Ask yourself - ‘If intercessory prayer works - why do we even need a medical system in the first place’?!

Moving from this - ‘where is the evidence any of this speaking to invisible entities has any admissible benefit at all’?

Could The Archbishop of Canterbury explain to you and me, how his God actually cures patients in quantifiable, measured terms?

No way, all we would get is wishy-washy anecdotes, not scientific facts, little more than ‘hocus pocus’.

Could The Pope explain the logic of why his God would give someone a fatal disease, only to prove what a nice guy he really is, by curing it? Seems sadistic in the extreme.

Which passage of these ancient sacred scripts written by God explains to those that have lost a limb, digit, eye, ear etc, why they are now ‘the great unwashed’ & exempt his magical healing powers?

Asking this and any other burning question of your local ‘religious health provider’, and you’d have to endure an explanation that relies on blind faith, and if you especially unlucky you’ll to hear some erroneous passages from a book, which amongst other enlightenment, tells us the sun revolves around the earth, for good measure.

In 2008 should we should be relegating all forms of ‘faith based healing’ to the ranks of African Witch Doctoring, ridding our hospitals of these pariahs, closing meetings like the ones run by Pastor Michaels, and warn our kids about adults who pollute their minds of Gods over science + medicine.

Its high time Authorities stopped turning a blind eye to religious ‘snake-oiler’s.

If we see fit as a society to prosecute those guilty of commercial fraud, we can not continue to ignore the actions of religious providers, who offer the largest morsel possible to entice believers and their finances to their cause - life itself.

And why do we give any credence to these same religious ‘hocus pocus’ providers when it comes to medical advancements?

Who cares what people that that have tried to suppress science for centuries, have to say.

Here’s an idea to ponder.

Let’s introduces laws which would mean if you belong to a religious grouping that tries to suppress the advancement of medical science e.g. say The Catholic Churches stand on stem cell treatment, then it would be made abundantly clear to these followers, you and your children, will be automatically be relegated to the bottom of any, waiting-list for this treatment, were you to suffer an illness requiring it’s use.

The policy is entirely logical, fair to everyone and consistent with their beliefs (we wouldn’t want to tread on their precious beliefs after all) and a chosen belief system could be denoted on driver’s licences. Jehovah Witness’s prohibit blood transfusions in exactly the same way I'm prescribing.

For those that say such a policy is stupid and draconian, I suggest there’s a large plus side to duplicitous believers being relegated to the bottom of medical waiting lists.

They’ll have more time to pray!

How much time (?) may well depend greatly on the length of the waiting-list.





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