Faith, Belief and Healing

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Recommended: Discuss the importance of faith in healing

Faith, Belief and Healing

I became interested in researching faith healing as a means of understanding belief and the idea of the brain healing the body. I knew a little about Christian based faith healing: the evangelical preachers on T.V. who smack the heads of the skeptical, and then they fall backwards, unconscious, and are healed, but I wanted to learn more specific information about the general practice of faith healing. What are the different forms faith healing takes? What are the underlying beliefs of the proponents of this form of belief and healing? How are these people portrayed and delivered over the Internet? Is there anything substantive to the notion of faith healing? What I found was a mix of strange ideas, which I simultaneously believed and scoffed at, depending upon their contexts and the information used to back their claims up.

To begin with, I learned about a type of faith healing performed in the Philippines called psychic surgery. It is an ancient practice that was used to relieve pain and promote healing. However, the context it finds itself in today is much more complex than that. To begin with, let me describe what might occur in a session, because it does not embody exactly what the name implies, although many believe it to. There is a lot of "laying of the hands, balancing of magnetic forces, and massaging with divinely sanctioned oils;" these are the pre-"surgery" activities that are performed while "awaiting spiritual guidance." (1) At the meeting of actor Andy Kaufman and a psychic surgeon, the actor was hoping to have his lung cancer removed. After the surgeon received "divine intervention," he appeared to have pulled out "the offending material" in the midst of a lot of blood. (1) Howeve...

... middle of paper ...

...ershadow the truth: which is that belief cannot cure organic diseases existing independently from mind-control, however closely tied the mind and body are to each other.

References

1)The Facts About Faith Healing, ever heard of psychic surgery? read this!!! some pretty weird stuff

http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/neuro/neuro02/web3/www.quackwatch.com01QuackeryRelatedTopics/faith.html

2)Natural Hygiene: Nobody Knows, Understands, or Practices it. Why?, kind of fanatical support of Natural Hygiene

http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/neuro/neuro02/web3/www.healself.org/alternative.html

3)Deborah Elizabeth Shepherd, interesting piece on a fundamentalist Christian family who lost their daughter due to their faith in God and desire to forego medical intervention until it was too late

http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/bb/neuro/neuro02/web3/www.geocities.com/robbi01/

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