Faith healing or healing faith?

I got around to watching Sunday's Derren Brown program last night, interesting but not surprising. In it he recruited a guy off the street who learnt how to become a faith healer, he was then whisked off to Texas USA to perform in a real "healing revival" in front of an audience of unsuspecting Christians via a number of dummy runs with friendly audiences and people on the street. Suffice to say the stooge was a complete success, performing a full range of stage scams; convincing the gullible punters that they were cured of some illness or other and that God was communicating to them via the phoney pastor.

What I found interesting about the program was the way in which the final reveal was handled, rather than plainly explaining the deception to the audience (something which was done with the people in the street) the team chose to deliver a speech which went to great lengths to avoid criticising Christianity itself, but rather tamely advised the audience to be cautious when giving money to faith healers and giving up conventional medicine, they also covered some of the techniques used by the scammers, like adrenalin based pain relief. I suppose this approach avoided upsetting the Christians watching but in my mind completely missed the humongous elephant in the room RELIGION and from the look of some of the faces in audience while the speech was being delivered some of those people looked to me like they were actually disappointed, bordering on confused or even mildly hostile.

Brown is an atheist, but the guy he chose to be the fake pastor was supposedly a Christian although he had a pretty fertile potty mouth, anyway, at the end I thought it was a bit of a cop out. In my mind there are two main reasons people were sitting in that room, or any "healing revival", either they are mentally ill or they've been indoctrinated from birth to believe that "faith" is a virtue, indeed the "logic" being pumped out by these snake oil salesmen is that the only reason the healing doesn't actually work is that the recipients don't have enough faith.

Like the self harming junkie kid, who is the immoral party here, the junkie, the supplier or the dealer?

I can't find many (or any?) mainstream Christian commentators that attack this stuff regularly, I guess either they think it's OK or that they'll leave atheists like Brown and Randi to do that job for them. I can't believe that the moderate Christians out there actually think it might be true... can they?

This doesn't mean there's a lack of Christian commentary on this subject however most of it is by puffed up and vacuous apologists who actually attack secularists/atheists for simply pointing this stuff out or what used to be called "calling a spade a spade". Accusing us of being aggressive, strident or theological simpletons, unqualified to comment; I see a lot of that kind of duplicity from Christians. Take this recent commentary from Chris Patten (a Catholic and future head of the BBC) when talking about atheist attacks on the recent Pope's visit within the context of the world-wide Catholic child abuse scandal...

"Some of the arguments put forward by secularists against the Pope's visit were lacking in intellectualism and were extraordinarily mean-spirited," said Lord Patten, who oversaw the Government's preparations for the papal trip. I'm surprised the atheists didn't have better arguments."

So apparently you shouldn't speak out against the rape of children by priests and the subsequent cover up by the hierarchy of the organisation that facilitated it; according to Patten such criticism shows a lack of intellect and mean spiritedness, well, up yours Patten at least we have arguments, there's a good reason why your faith healing overlords call your lot a "flock" you know.