First of all, to know if God can heal, or is healing someone, you would have to know the will of God. From what I read in the Bible, God has been said to do three things:
1. Heal people.
2. Make people sick.
3. Do nothing.
Without knowing what God intends it is impossible to claim that he is doing any of the three above. God also causes sickness in those with faith, such as Job and his awful boils. My opinion is that we can't know (hence my agnostic slant).
On faith healers, it just doesn't make sense. Would a faith healer only heal a few people on Sunday? If you had this power, would you sit around and watch football on Saturdays, all the while knowing that people that could be cured are dropping dead around you? How christian is that?
Secondly, if this were for real, why aren't there people lined up a mile deep? Perhaps for the same reason that you can't bet on professional wrestling in Las Vegas? Even the congregation deep down knows that it is fake, but they still enjoy the pagentry and the social interaction. The jig is up, but everyone is having too much fun to care.
However, it is not all fun and games (personal story starts here). There was a mentally handicapped man who lived in the community where I grew up. A stroke had caused partial paralysis on one side, slurred speech, and overall mental retardation. This stroke happened when he was fairly young (20's I think), but in spite of this he was the garbage man for the local community. He really respected our family, and us him. One day he knocked at the door, which he rarely did. As it turned out, his VCR was broken and he wasn't able to tape his favorite show. Guess what his favorite show was. Benny Hinn, a faith healer who is a regular on one of the more prominent christian stations (TBN I think). Of course I agreed to help him out, but I was red with anger. Here was a proud man who thought that his life could be changed by the touch of a faith healer. Out of anyone, this man did not deserve to be given false hope and it sickened me to no end. To this day, I have a beef with faith healers not because of what they have done to me but because of what they did to this man. Well, I'll quite before the profanity starts.
[This message has been edited Loudmouth, 05-03-2004]
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