Faith healing

Godless Gross asks some questions about faith healing in the context of various stories of children dying as a result of their parents choosing to pray for healing rather than obtaining professional medical help. These stories are tragic and, indeed, criminal. However, as Gross himself notes, they are "examples of destructive fundamentalism" rather than the norm of Christian belief.

Nonetheless, it is important we act to prevent similar future tragedies. Society must continue to "enforce the law with rigour". The church must do a better job at educating its members that belief in magical (or miraculous) intervention is not a pre-requisite for faith.

Interestingly, this misunderstanding appears to extend deeply into the atheist community. Gross says "Jesus was a faith healer and this was one of the bases of his claims to divinity."

No. The people who wrote this part of the bible said Jesus performed miraculous healings. Which doesn't mean Jesus actually did perform miraculous healings. Jesus probably did heal people, but in the normal, "medical" sense, and sometimes in the psychosomatic sense. To your average person of the day, with no knowledge of science, this would be a miracle. And the amount, nature, and extent of those miracles would be amplified by rumour.

If only Christians and atheists alike could move past the literal interpretation to the metaphorical one. Jesus is a faith healer to the extent that the way and philosophy of life ("faith") taught by Jesus (i.e., love, compassion, tolerance, social justice, peace, etc.) leads to wholeness of body, mind, and spirit ("healing").