Unsurprisingly, yes. I have thoughts on most matters.

Much of the religionist uproar in response to the ASA ruling has been based on a claim that it undermines religious freedom; that is, that it stops Christians from being able to express their beliefs, specifically regarding medically directed prayer. This is a specious, disingenuous reaction: the ASA never suggested that conveying a belief in the medical effectiveness of prayer was unacceptable, it only said that amending ‘God can heal you’ to ‘We believe God can heal you’ wasn’t a sufficient response to the issues raised by Hayley’s complaint.

Stating ‘We believe God can heal you’ on its own isn’t in any way deceptive or misleading, unlike presenting that belief as a medical fact. Moreover, as far as can be made out, it’s true: if it isn’t demonstrably the case that HOTS Bath believe that, and therefore a straightforward fact, it’s just irresolvable. The ASA has no capacity to rule on the truthfulness of ‘We believe…’ claims, any more than it could rule on the probability of God when Stephen Green complained about the ABC .

What the ASA actually said, in that case, about the claim ‘There’s probably no god’ is as follows:

The ad was an expression of the advertiser’s opinion and [.] the claims in it were not capable of objective substantiation. Although the ASA acknowledges that the content of the ad would be at odds with the beliefs of many, it concluded that it was unlikely to mislead.

The same, precisely, applies to the statement ‘We believe God can heal you’: like ‘there’s probably no god’, it does require evidence and substantiation for its claims to be demonstrated, but that doesn’t mean it can’t appear in an advertisement, presented as opinion rather than fact. If HOTS Bath had actually been told in the first instance that ‘We believe God can heal you’ was an unacceptable thing for their material to say, as they seem to be alleging, I would be on their side.

However:

Hayley’s complaint identified the ad as misleading on numerous grounds other than the simple expression of that belief. Had this been, for example, a flyer or website advertising a church’s services and listing a belief in faith healing as a important to them, I doubt would have been an issue; but this material displayed testimonials prominently from people whose symptoms had receded after prayer, used the (unqualified) phrase ‘God can heal’ with respect to conditions like cancer, paralysis, asthma and multiple sclerosis, as well as ‘any other sickness’. People who received prayer only received a letter afterward advising them not to discontinue medical procedures - exactly the kind of hand-out which typically gets thrown into a bin after street campaigners give it to someone.

The ASA’s point, as it seems to me, was not that expressing belief in prayer as a form of medicine was out of order, but just that adding the words ‘We believe’ to the flyers and website, as HOTS Bath suggested as a compromise, wouldn’t have done enough to correct the issues.