I've been thinking about a local Christian church (Bethel church in Redding CA) , that I've never been to but I know a lot about because they are really outspoken and cause a lot of controversy here. Their biggest push is healing. Hundreds of people go there each weekend, some travel from all over the world to go there. They have schools of ministry for healing people, etc. They even have a "raising the dead" team, although not successful yet.

My question is, they have all kinds of stories about baffled doctors that don't understand how people have cancer one day, then don't the next. But I also hear about the cancer (or whatever malady it is) coming back, and how you have to work hard to "keep yourself healed".

My question is psychologically, is it possible to relieve your symptoms after having an especially convincing religious experience? Then as soon as you let your guard down mentally it comes back? This is why I had such a hard time in Christianity. I knew that someone praying over me wasn't just going to magically heal my depression/anxiety issues. It had to come from me. Then I realized, why does our faith in something make it true? Shouldn't truth just be AS IS whether we believe in it or not? My amount of faith should have nothing to do with being healed or not, I'm either healed, or I'm not.

Sounds a lot like LDS fast & testimony meeting.

It is fairly well accepted that the placebo effect is real. That is part of the reason that the use of placebos are so important in scientific research.

Check these out if you haven't seen them before - they may help you think through this:

http://www.skepdic.com/placebo.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=752V173e31o&feature=share
http://www.michaelshermer.com/weird-things/excerpt/



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/03/2012 04:02PM by bc.

I had bone cancer in my knee as a teen, verified by X-ray and CT scan. I had a blessing that night from my home teacher and my Dad. The next day, a bone scan showed nothing but healthy bone. The doctors were amazed. This was my "angel appearing to me" moment. My hubby and I have talked about this. I believe it was just my faith that I would be healed, not the power of the priesthood. Maybe also the faith of my parents and others praying for me. It doesn't prove that the church is true.

Did it stay healed forever?

Yes, forever. I was 13 at the time, I'm 43 now.

I'm happy for you no matter how it happened that there was no cancer.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/03/2012 04:53PM by ducky333.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/03/2012 04:26PM by americangirl406.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/03/2012 04:26PM by americangirl406.

There are also reasonable atheist/agnostic based explanations for this kind of phenomena, but I won't diminish your personal experience by going into them.

I want to know what they are

I want to know too.

I'll just say "Highly Unlikely" on this. If a biopsy wasn't done, I seriously doubt you had 'bone cancer'.

They did an x-ray and CT on my teenage daughter, and told me she had torn ligaments and bone fragments and needed surgery. They went in, and everything was fine - no surgery was needed. No, she did not get a blessing - they screwed up when taking and reading the tests. I believe the same is in your case - there was no cancer, they screwed up on the diagnosis.

The kicker was that they tried to charge me for the faulty tests/scans and the unnecessary surgery. But that's another story...

You could be right. It was my ace in the hole for faith in the church until I realized that JS could have written the BOM and the condemning words came from his own Mother's mouth.

I think, unfortunately, a LOT of that stuff is just a smoke and mirrors show. A friend of mine went to a faith healing once on his mission with his companion, who knew how this shtick was played.

"See the dude in the wheelchair?" the companion asked mischievously. "He'll walk."

"How do you know?" my buddy asked.

"Look at the treads on those kicks," the companion replied. "Pretty nice and worn for a paralyzed dude, no?"

Lo and behold... 35 years confined to a wheelchair, and ZAP! "BY THE POWER OF THE LOOOOOOOOOORD, I COMPEL YOU TO WALK! IN JESUS' HOLY NAME, WALK!!!!!"

It's a phenomenon that makes me shudder, but I too was guilty of lying to promote faith so readily as a Mormon. Are there really legit doctors really baffled? Why is there no news story? News is entertainment; millions would eat this up. Every Jesus in a grilled cheese sandwich makes CNN today.

I think it's literally all a very well-staged and orchestrated lie.

Granted, this probably does happen once in a while, but think what the survivability rate of cancer is these days (of most forms). Highly doubt that the healing had anything to do with it, but a positive mental attitude is VITAL. Getting depressed and lethargic can have seriously negative implications for healing.

Remember, every person of faith will have a blessing of some sort. Some, of course, are going to heal. That's why it's so imperative for faith groups to continue this ordinance.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/03/2012 04:11PM by flyboy21.

This sort of thing infuriates me because it still perpetuates the myth that if someone is still ill after doing so much praying & having so much faith, that something must be wrong with them as people & that they must not have so much faith after all.

This church also has gold dust and/or feathers appear out of thin air sometimes during the service. They call it a "glory cloud", which you can youtube, just search for bethel glory cloud. It makes me sick to think that they are up in the rafters doing this themselves, but what else could it be?

Oh yeah. These are some cheap parlor tricks. Needs a good setup, but looks like they have it. Just like the Morg. If you have something and you really don't understand it, invite ALL the skeptics to come look it over and have their mouths shut.

I don't think our minds can heal a broken bone, but "our minds" which involves our entire nervous system can reduce pain and our bodies can heal themselves.

Here's an example:

When I get stressed out, I get a cold sore. If I keep my stress low, I don't get them. If I feel that itch, and start to get a blister on my lip; I take some time to do stress relief exercises and the growth of the blister stops.

Under stress our immune system starts to shut down. When we are in complete fight/flight mode our immune system almost completely shuts down, as well as our digestive system, sexual function, etc...This is because of the various physiological changes that occur in our bodies in times of stress and those released in times of peace.

There are a number of things that go wrong with our bodies that can be made better by just reducing stress in life. While certain things, like being chased by an ax-murderer, are valid causes for stress, many of us feel stress at various levels simply because we're obsessing about stressful things in the past or things that may never happen. When we're stressing ourselves out, our bodies don't know our thoughts aren't real, and our bodies respond as if the stressor were a real and present danger. Reducing unnecessary stressors such as these is completely in "the mind" and can help keep us healthy and heal us from some things.

So, yes, we can heal ourselves, and prevent some illnesses, just using our minds.

I'm not talking about deadly diseases, and I certainly 100% believe people should go to the doctor when they need to...but when you pop the medicine in your mouth, go sit down, relax, and think of something peaceful.

Oral Roberts and other "healers" came around where he lived in Phoenix and set up tents for preaching and healing demonstrations.

They hauled a trailer of braces, wheel chairs, walkers and other medical devices with them and dumped them on stage for the audience to view before they started calling up "volunteers" who needed healing.

DH's fanatical mother forced him as a pre-teen to go up and be healed of nearsightedness. Oral Roberts grabbed his head and started jerking and squeezing as he ranted to God. He yelled, and prayed and screamed, then threw DH's glasses on the pile. The boy dove in and grabbed them before they were damaged and went back to his seat where his berated him for lacking faith and not believing in the "healing."

Of course most of the people from their little congregation had to buy new braces and wheelchairs as soon as their adrenalin dipped back to normal.

The only ones who stayed healed were the ones who had ailments which generally run their course without medical intervention. I am sure there are also a few which were not properly diagnosed in the first place and perhaps a tiny percentage healed by coincidence or some other quirk of nature.

I went to an Oral Roberts gig when I was a kid. It was all fake. He's a charlatan.

Google Dr. John Sarno. He has tons of evidence that the mind plays a key role in back pain and similar type pains. He's worked with thousands of patients and is a real medical doctor. Really intresting stuff.

We most often hear about the successful healing stories, which I'm sure are a small minority of cases. I knew someone very well who had terminal cancer, it came on very quickly. He received a priesthood blessing which said that he would be healed and that he'd live in no ambiguous terms. He died a week or two later. The blessing didn't change a thing. Mormons will justify this with, Lord's will, the person giving the blessing misinterpreted spiritual promptings, whatever.

What's important to know is that there is this little thing called the placebo effect. During drug trials, scientists and doctors administer a fake "placebo" medication to half the patients and the actual drug to the other half. The patients have no way of know which they're getting. Usually they see an improvement in both groups. If they find there's a 25% improvement in the actual drug group, and then find a 25% percent improvement in the placebo group, then they know the drug is useless, even though there's an improvement.

From an atheist perspective:

You look at all the times something doesn't work. If you do something and you can't demonstrate that it repeatedly works, that probably wasn't the cause. That means there must be another cause.

You also look for counter examples. You have allegorical evidence that X made Y happen. Then you have allegorical evidence that Z made Y happen. They can't both be right.

So then you look at things like a misdiagnosis. Which is more likely that an error was made in diagnosis or that a supernatural occurrence randomly happened that can't be repeated?

You also look at what is more effective in the vast percentage of cases. Faith healing has been around for a long time. It doesn't seem to have been very effective at keeping people alive on the aggregate. However medical science is clearly much more effective at keeping people alive - you can see a significant, measurable increase in life expectancy due to medical science.

Cancer happens. Cancer goes into remission. Cancer comes out of remission. Certainly the immune system has some effect on this. Certainly our brain has some impact on how effectively our immune system works. However, those things stay within physical laws.

I think people who look for faith based healing use the argument that Dr's are baffeled as a straw man. Actually, Doctors are getting tantalizingly close to finding the causal factor in some cancers.

Yes cancer happens and cancer can, very rarely, go into spontanous remission. A cancer patient is always wishing his/her cancer would go away. If they are lucky and get a spontanous remission some may attribute this healing to wishful thinking. The reality of it is that they were lucky.

Believe me, good old chemo works a lot better than wishful thinking of any kind. If I relied on healing myself with good thoughts I'd be dead now.

possible. Mental state has a lot to do with healing and pain control, especially when it comes to chronic symptoms. Acute symptoms of virulent disease, not so much.

What keeps coming to my mind while reading this thread is "take two asprin and call me in the morning." Many problems resolve themselves with time. Other, more serious problems, may require lots of therapy and hard work on the part of the person who is sick or injured in order to get well. If you take two asprin and wait til morning and then feel better was it the asprin or the time that made you feel better? You may conclude it's the asprin but in reality it was the time. You assumed a connection where none existed. Also, was your doctor a genius for telling you to essentially wait til tomorrow and see how you feel or was he just using a common trick of the trade?

After posting my comments I realized I hadn't directly responded to your questions so here goes:

> Is it possible to relieve your symptoms after having an especially convincing religious experience? Then as soon as you let your guard down mentally it comes back?

Absolutely. The mind is very powerful. People can be seriously injured and not even notice because of the adrenaline in their system. It is only later, after the adrenaline has worn off, that they notice the pain.


> Then I realized, why does our faith in something make it true?

Faith in something doesn't make something true. It is a logical fallacy.
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/appeal-to-belief.html


> Shouldn't truth just be AS IS whether we believe in it or not?

I think so. Believing you're immortal will not make any difference if I chop off your head. You will still be dead.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/04/2012 09:30AM by Mnemonic.

+1000

I don't pray to be healed, I pray for the presence of mind, courage and humility to face whatever might be ahead.

I pray the same things for others.

The world will proceed as it will, and I don't believe that God intervenes or miraculously heals. It's easily attributed to placebo effect (which is incredibly powerful), random chance (absolutely with time, many conditions both chronic and otherwise clear up on their own), medical misdiagnosis and error, medical intervention, etc.

I'm so very tired of the "faith healing" branch of Christians negating thoroughly scientific explanations of why some people recover and others do not.

If I ever face a life-threatening disease, I won't be praying for my life. I'll be praying for the courage and strength to do what I can, and if nothing can be done beyond a certain reasonable point I'll pray for more courage and strength to accept what will be with dignity - and to enjoy the time I have left in as meaningful ways as possible.

I admit that as a practicing Episcopalian, it sets my teeth on edge that faith healing is held up as something all Christians believe. Many of us don't. We pray, not for a change in the outcome but to work a change we might need within ourselves.

WOW! I found this interesting just because my husbands aunt lives in Redding and belongs to some very conserative weird church there. She posts things on FB about being careful about where you buy your Thankgiving turkeys from because how it was prayed over before it was killed and stuff about Muslims etc.

Lots about Father-YAHweh- most of her posts sound like a differen language. Definately a different thought process. I read then and my first thought is always, "WTH?"

And I actually thinki she is in Millville.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/04/2012 09:36AM by ladybug.

Sounds like bethel, but there are other weird ones too here