Faith, Healing, and Morality

There has recently been a lot of talk in the media about the power of faith to heal people. While much of it talks about the placibo effect of faith, there is also a lot of talk about God interfering in human life for the purpose of healing sick people. The idea seems to be that God, an omnipotent being who exists in some separate realm called heaven, is willing to help human beings in distress in response to prayers offered on someone’s behalf. While millions of people the world over are suffering and dying from myriad illnesses and other causes, this being called “God” is paying attention to whether people pray for somebody, and acts in response to the prayers.

I know and understand that belief in the willingness and power of God to heal the sick is comforting to people. Why does it bother me? It bothers me not only because it is absurd but because it is a refutation of rational thought and logic. Why would God heal one person and not heal everybody in the world? Does he need prayers in order to step in and perform a healing miracle? Must the prayers be said only by Christians? I can’t understand how thinking people believe it.

All religions tell of miracles performed by their gods, or by their holy men, not only in the past but also in the present day. Within Buddhism, for example, miraculous healings occurred among the general population at the moment of Buddha's birth. Later in life he raised the dead, healed incurable diseases, and walked across the mile-wide Ganges. Are we supposed to believe that Buddhist miracles are bogus but the miracles of Christianity are authentic?

Islam abounds in stories of miracles both by the prophet Mohammed and by wonder-working saints. Moslem Shiites travel from all over the world to the shrine of Reza in the Iranian city of Mashad to be cured of illnesses. Crowds strain to kiss or touch the silver cage housing Reza’s tomb. The sick and lame attach themselves by lengths of thread to a lattice window looking on the shrine, camping and praying there for days and weeks in hope of being healed.

Sudanese refugees prepare the mihaya, a traditional healing drink. Verses from the Koran are written on a wooden plate, the plate is washed with water, and the water is drunk by the sick. In some sects of Islam the verses of the Koran are thought to have healing properties. In Kashmir people travel from all over to see Peer Munshi Syed Hussain Kazmi heal people with prayers and restorative Koranic verses.

The Hindu religion reports many miracles. The Hindu residents of Bali practice Melasti, a purifying ceremony that heals and prepares the community for the New Year. Millions of people believe that the South Indian guru, Sathya Sai Baba, performs miracles of healing and many other kinds of miracles. They believe that he is a god who was born of a virgin mother. Like all such miracle workers, he is a fake, a phony, a magician who performs his tricks with slight of hand.

The followers of Santeria worship Santos and use a rooster in a sacrifice intended to cure the sick. In Venezuela the people perform velacion or the candle ceremony in which a sick patient lies on an oracolo, a drawing of esoteric symbols made on the ground. He is surrounded by candles and fruit and is showered with flower petals meant to impart energy.

In Lac Albania, followers of Shna Ndo believe that they can be healed by touching a rock. The shamans of Siberia communicate with the spirit world and summon the spirit using the bodhran, a kind of drum, for the purpose of healing people.

Tribal religions worldwide are replete with miraculous healings. The cultural gap between the witch doctor of the Mersi tribe in Africa and the televangelist, Benny Hinn, is not wide. The Mersi are the people who implant large plates in their lips to extend them grotesquely. The warriors of the tribe have competitions in which they batter each other with poles. It is a primitive type of sword fighting and a rite of passage for young men. Some are badly injured. They suffer broken bones and terrible cuts and bruises. They go to the witch doctor for recovery. She waives her hands over them, recites some incantation, and they believe that they are healed. It is no different than the healing by Benny Hinn and many others in the various sects of the Christian religion.

I was discussing this with a deeply devout Catholic woman recently. I asked her whether she considered all of these healings by people of other faiths to be false, or whether she accepted them. She was confused, but claimed that Catholicism is the only true religion, and that the healings within Catholicism are the only ones that have been documented and verified. She pointed to the healings at Lourdes and Fatima. When I informed her that no faith healing has ever been proven, she claimed that many have been proven. When I pointed out that if there was truly a God, and he was a good God, he would heal all sickness, injury, and evil in the world. She said that we must not question God. God has his own ways, and we are unable to see or understand God’s will. We see only narrowly. I pointed out if God was real, he would not be good or even mostly good. He would be the height of evil. If he has the power to heal people, and does sometimes heal people, and does not use his power to heal all of the millions of people all over the world who right now are suffering from horrible, devastating, painful, hideous, unspeakable diseases and medical conditions, he is the most callous, unfeeling, cruel, evil being in existence.

We not only can question God, we must question God. We have a moral obligation to question God. If God exists, he is the very essence of immorality, a being who could easily step-in and stop all suffering in the world and who does practically nothing. According to Christian belief, he does step-in once in a while, but for the most part he is unwilling to interfere. That is grotesquely immoral. That is pure evil. Thus, the God that most people, most Christians, believe in is horribly evil.

The answer given to me by most Christians is that although there appear to be problems with Christian beliefs, we need to accept them as a matter of faith. Faith is the basis of all Christian religion. It allows people to ignore the obvious contradictions and simply accept that we cannot know the reason for God's actions. Faith is a cop-out. It is the abandonment of rational thought in favor of ignorant and confining discipleship.

So we have to ask, what is morality? Most dictionaries give the standard definition. Morality is: 1. The quality of being in accord with standards of right or good conduct; 2. A system of ideas of right and wrong conduct; or 3. Virtuous conduct. The dictionaries are inadequate in their definitions of morality.

There is more to morality than simply good conduct or good thought. Fundamental morality is the use of the human mind to apprehend the good. No person who abandons the search for truth is truly moral. No religion that pretends to have the full truth without proper examination can ever be moral. No religion existing today is moral. The failure to question God and question the very existence of God is grossly immoral. It is what enabled the 9/11 hijackers to fly into the World Trade Towers and kill thousands of people. It is what enabled the officials in Salem to hang innocent women as witches. It is what enabled the leaders of the Spanish Inquisition to burn thousands of heretics and Conversos at the stake. It is what enabled the forces of the King, at the behest of the Pope, to murder and destroy the Albigensians and the Waldensians. It is what drives all religious persecution and intolerance.

Historians say that Queen Isabella of Spain, wife of King Ferdinand, was a devout person. She lived a life of goodness and kindness to others. Nevertheless, she inaugurated, promoted, and thoroughly supported the Spanish Inquisition. She drove all of the Jews out of Spain causing unimaginable hardship. She was the kindest, sweetest, most evil and horrible bitch in history. There have been many other such people. A number of such persons have been declared saints by the Catholic Church.

I believe that it is simply impossible to be moral and to believe in God. In order to believe in God one has to believe that God is all-good, omnipotent, and omniscient. Yet, at the same time, one has to believe that God, who created the universe, has decided to allow enormous, outragous, unspeakable evil to exist in the universe. In order to accept this contradiction, one has to believe that our rational powers are simply insufficient to know or even search for the truth. The truth is beyond our comprehension, and therefore, we must accept a set of doctrines handed down to us by men burdened with the same insufficient powers of reason as us. We have to believe that these men were contacted by God and given special knowledge. We have to abandon our own powers of reason, stop asking questions, and accept the tenets of the religion handed down by these men. Although it takes the use of our minds in order to accept these doctrines, that acceptance is the limit on how far we are allowed to think. If God declares that Abraham must take Isaac to the mountain for a sacrifice, so be it. We must accept the will of God.

So what is morality? Morality is the maximum use of one’s mind in the search for truth and goodness. The opposite of morality is to abandon the search for truth and to accept the inflexible doctrines of some religion. Although we must accept that our minds are limited and often mistaken, we must use our minds to their utter exhaustion searching for what is true and right. The most moral humans have always been the people who stood up to religion and to accepted doctrines and dared to think beyond the morality of the day. We can be like Isabella and Torquemada and live lives of adherence to some religious doctrine while authorizing unspeakable crimes, or we can be like Socrates, Galileo and others who dared to search for truth.