Faith healing

Public Broadcasting’s “Religion & Ethics” recently featured a story about parents facing criminal action because the parents trusted prayer rather than medical science to heal their children. Faith groups, and sadly they tend to be Christian groups, that teach reliance on prayer rather than medicine teach a lie.

If we believe that God created, then God created minds. God gave humans the ability to help themselves, other living things, and potentially even the planet. Parents and religions leaders who fail to rely upon all God-given means to promote life insult God and injure the children entrusted to their care. Seeking proper medical assistance does not express a lack of faith in God.

The irresponsibility and destructive teachings and behaviors of religious leaders and parents who construct a sharp dichotomy between religion and science provide one example of the danger of believing in an omnipotent God. God, in creating, birthed a cosmos over which God lacks total control. That assessment, often thought heretical in previous generations, is the only possible explanation for God failing to intervene in the face of massive, egregious evil such as the Holocaust. That assessment of God's ability to act also explains, on a more personal level, why so many prayers for healing often seem to receive a negative answer, an answer incongruous with a loving and life-giving God.

We rightly consider people who fail to care for the children entrusted to them, or for other living things, criminal behavior. For example, the Wisconsin mother now on trial the death of her eleven year old daughter, a death the mother caused by preventing the girl from receiving treatment for diabetes, is at a minimum guilty of criminal negligence. The daughter’s diabetes was not the result of sin, as the mother claimed. (Robert Imrie, “Witness says Wis. mother thought illness was sin,” Washington Post, May 20, 2009)