Main Content Negative Effects of Religion Church engages in misleading conduct with their 'God can heal' adverts Many religious people believe that their god can heal them. A speaker for the Healing on the Streets (HOTS) Bath in the UK for example says that "Christians believe in, pray for and experience God's healing". "We're Christians from churches in Bath and we pray in the name of Jesus. We believe that God loves you and can heal you from any sickness".
They began handing out flyers that read:
Need Healing? God can heal today! Do you suffer from Back Pain, Arthritis, MS, Addiction ... Ulcers, Depression, Allergies, Fibromyalgia, Asthma, Paralysis, Crippling Disease, Phobias, Sleeping disorders or any other sickness?..."We'd love to pray for your healing right now!"
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) in the UK concluded that the adverts being made by the (HOTS) - Bath were misleading.
I have read of an experiment conducted by a religious organisation to prove that prayer works in healing but caused them embarrassment when they found that prayer had a negative effect instead ( which some jokingly attributed to a performance anxiety effect caused by patients knowing that they were being prayed for).
So far, I am not aware of any experiment or study done on a large scale proving that prayers do heal. You can easily find articles dispute the methods of such experiments but none offered a way in which such experiments can be improved. Most simply finish off by saying: "Well the healing power is beyond science's ability to measure anyway". In other words, there is no scientific evidence for prayer's power to heal.
[If you know of any study or experiment that proves either way, please share.]
The Tyranny Of God
Paperback Edition
Is there a God? Where do the animals, plants and human beings come from? Are scriptures the words of gods? Does religion teach us to live moral lives? Why do so many people kill and are killed over it? How should we live our lives if God exists? How should we live it if God does NOT exist?
This book explores the truth behind our beliefs in God and the propensity of human beings to be religious. In an honest attempt to seek the answers to life's deepest questions, I probe into how life began. I then progress to investigate the true nature of religions and their impact on our lives and the rest of humanity.
The main purpose of this book is not to argue against religion. Rather, it tells our story and how we have come to oppress ourselves with the tyranny of our own beliefs. I wrote this book to include everything I discovered to be relevant in my search for the truth, not just the truth behind God and morality, but also behind us and our existence. Instead of reading this book with the expectation that it is trying to prove the tyranny of God, I would like to recommend you read it as a story book: as a book that tells the story of humanity from the Big Bang.
"While Comelab's writing is always moderate in tone, its message clearly undermines current distractions with accommodationist arguments towards presumed religious "moderates". It is written with the fresh confidence of a young man who has had early success in his adopted country and only recently come to realise the truth of atheism. For those like me whose only worry about Atheism has long been its faultering progress, Comelab reminds us that much of the energy must continue to come from those who have more recently learned the truth. He seems more than bright enough to soon progress to seeing atheism not as an end but as a starting point to the kind of understanding that should enable us to work towards a future incomparably better than any heaven the faithful can imagine."
- TONY SMITH (AUSTRALIA)