Medicine and religion

There have been a number of stories lately about people putting their faith in prayer as an alternative therapy. As the line goes in the Tim Minhchin beat poem 'Storm' "You know what they call alternative medicine that's proven to work? - 'Medicine'".

The cult-like movement, "The Body of Christ" has been in trouble recently for a series of posters claiming that prayer alone can heal a whole variety of ailments, but there is a specific act, called "The Cancer Act" which specifically prohibits these kind of claims when it comes to cancer. Complaints are in with just about every authority so these posters will change, but there's nothing to stop them claiming anything about other illnesses.

The saddest case of all was a little girl of 11, Madeline Neumann, who died on the floor surrounded by members of her parents prayer group.

The disease she had needn't have been terminal. It's a disease millions of people all over the world cope with and live long and fairly normal lives despite of. Including me in fact. Diabetes has, thanks to science, been very effectively treatable for over 80 years. These parents though were very religious, and believed that getting her medical help would be against what they understood of the bible and believed. When their prayers didn't seem to be working, they decided that they just needed more people praying. Meanwhile she became steadily worse and suffered incredibly until she died.

Of course, those of us who think rationally don't believe for a minute that prayer will work. Even most people of a spiritual bent don't realy believe it will work. Sure, they might pray they or someone else will get better - but they'll almost certainly back that up, like a lightning rod on a church steeple, with proper actual proven-to-work medicine.

The reason they don't rely on faith entirely is that they ignore most of the bible as the outdated and muddled nonsense which it is. They certainly don't believe in an all powerful god who will, if you have enough faith, give you what you want as the bible states. Believing in such a god and relying on him to change what nature does is mostly unthinkable in this day and age. When medicine was in its infancy that was actually a reasonable way to deal with illnesses, because there were periods when being treated by a doctor gave you a far worse chance than doing nothing for many medical problems. If you got better, which of course many people do quite well on their own, then you would thank god for intervening and if you didn't - well you didn't pray hard enough.

Nowadays if we need water for our crops, we use irrigation, if we need help, we call the fire brigade, and if we are ill, we go to the doctors. Over the years, science has eroded away at religion: Darwin explained to a large degree how we got here, Astronomers made it clear we're an insignificant speck in a mind-boggling massive universe that is governed by rules and psychology has even given us several possible reasons why so many people are religious.

If you do come across someone who believes in healing through the power of prayer, or faith-healing or in some supernatural way in which a 'higher power' has healed someone, cured cancer or whatever, you might want to ask them about amputees. People have claimed all sorts of medical problems have been cured by the power of the lord over the years (sometimes the lord performed this miracle while doctors were treating the patient too, but clearly it was the lord's input that did the trick).

The lord is especially good at treating things in an invisible way, especially illnesses which are somewhat nebulous. However, not one single instance is ever offered up as proof of his power of someone regrowing a limb. Or even a digit, ear nose, eyelid or tooth.

He can, apparently make the dead come back to life even, as well as the more mundane stuff like curing cancers, making the lame walk, making spots disappear etc. But he's mysteriously ineffective, no matter how hard you pray when it comes to regenerating limbs. Except for starfish. There must be a special place in his heart for them, because they do it all the time, apparently without anyone even praying for them. Unless there are special echinoderm masses held in secret in the Vatican - (Dan Brown, there's surely a book in this, I want a mention in the foreword).

Of course, those true believers will have an explanation for this, either one of the incredibly complex made-up ones, like the Wandering Jew, or they can always fall back on the good old 'God moves in mysterious ways' blanket explanation.