How to get on FOX News? Support real medicine

Correction: it turns out that, contrary to what FOX and the Western Daily Mail reported, the ASA didn’t instruct HOTS Bath to add the words ‘We believe’, but rather rejected this as a ‘compromise’ when the faith healers proposed it. See me renewed thoughts on the matter, in light of this, here .

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My skeptical compatriot Hayley Stevens, who is a ghost , will be on TV tonight and just made FOX News . Her crime? She made an Advertising Standards complaint when faith healers in Bath were giving out leaflets saying ‘God can heal you from any sickness’ – even cancer, multiple sclerosis or paralysis apparently.

What have the Christian group involved – who last year had an income of over £160,000 – said, now the ASA’s been in touch with them? A full statement is on their website, but here is a pared down version:

The ASA wants to prevent us from stating on our website the basic Christian belief that God can heal illness [and] has even demanded that we sign a document agreeing not to say this, which is unacceptable to us – as it no doubt would be for anyone ordered not to make certain statements about their conventional religious or philosophical beliefs.

It appears that the complaint to the ASA was made by a group generally opposed to Christianity, and it seems strange to us that on the basis of a purely ideological objection to what we say on our website, the ASA has decided it is appropriate to insist that we cannot talk about a common and widely held belief that is an important aspect of conventional Christian faith.

Oppression indeed! Political correctness gone mad, one might almost say. What then had those aggressive secular extremists at the ASA told them? They’d had them change ‘God can heal you’ to ‘We believe God can heal you’ – not banning statements of belief, in fact, but the opposite – and ‘ told them not to refer in their ads to medical conditions for which medical supervision should be sought’. Golly gosh, it’s radical stuff.

Hayley, as she’s already said herself on her blog, is not ‘generally opposed to Christianity’, let alone a group. I myself am [opposed to Christianity], but had Christians actually been prevented from expressing their beliefs I’d have been the first to defend them, as I’m the first to defend anyone whose free speech is under attack . There just exists a gulf between expressing religious belief and cloaking it as fact-based medicine.

No matter how sincere or well-intentioned your prayer may be, leading someone to believe their cancer or MS has been cured with no evidence to that effect is not a kind or loving act.  It is an extremely cruel thing to do.  Perhaps in the final days of your existence, people of Engage, you’ll prefer not to be made aware of your impending nothingness, or even to be conned into believing your health is in fine shape. Fine; but don’t dare act with the hubris, the sheer  arrogance , of making that decision for other people.

Bloody morons.

Alex Gabriel