Putting Faith Healing to the Test

Back in August I posted up a blog response to the Christian documentary "Finger of God," which claims Christians can resurrect the dead and perform other healing miracles. During my discussions with the individual who recommended the movie, and several of his acquaintances, I frequently heard claims of magical healing brought on by faith in Jesus. There was, of course, never any evidence to back up these claims. Tiring of my constant demands for evidence, several of these religious folks put together some money for Megan and myself to take a trip to Portland, Oregon and experience faith healing ourselves at the Church of Grace. A 10 minute video documenting our encounter with Christian healing can be viewed below.



It should go without saying that of course no magic healing occurred. What's so humorous to us about this trip is that we were constantly frustrated with the gentleman who paid for us to go to Portland because of his staunch refusal to research any issues or look at any scientific evidence available. That came back to haunt him in a big way on this trip. Before we left, Megan even discussed with this guy that the church's website was entirely in Russian (apparently he hadn't bothered to look before taking it on faith that this was the right healing church for us.) His response was that the Russian text was a "server error" and that there would be English speakers waiting for us on the healing service on Tuesday, which of course turned out to be a Russian prayer service that we were specifically told not to go to.

As quick side note - people have asked what I meant when I said "You lose $600" at the end of the video clip. That was the amount the religious folk gave us to go visit the healing church and have Megan’s Type I, child-onset diabetes magically removed.

On the non-religious front, our trip to Portland was amazing! Powell's Books was a truly awesome experience, as it takes up over a full square block and they give you a map when you walk in. I came out with way, way more roleplaying books than I needed, rounding out my collection of Vampire: The Masquerade stuff and picking up the new Trail of Cthluhu game. A blog covering some of the great meals we had there can be found at this location. We of course had to spend a good deal of time basking in the glory of Whole Foods and all the other stores we don't have in Montana. One thing that we didn't expect was that their liquor sales laws are a lot different than ours (where you can buy bottles until 2AM any day of the week and on all holidays) - so we ended up having to buy wine at a gas station one night. Of course, I forgot the corkscrew, so I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to tear out a cork with my keys :) For anyone wondering, yes, I was eventually successful after several episodes of The Next Iron Chef on the hotel TV.

Back on to the documentary: we knew that the people who sent us to Portland wouldn't ever watch the video, as they have consistently refused at every turn to read any articles or watch any clips that don't come from an explicitly Christian source. Unfortunately this meant we had to undergo a little mild deception when we got back and let them assume magic healing had occurred (as they aren't willing to do any research and actually call the church in question to find out themselves....). For a week on Facebook we only posted ambiguous or carefully worded phrases. We didn't ever lie about anything, but all our posts were worded in such a way that Christians could choose to interpret them from a religious angle. The best part? We learned that little bit of coy ambiguity from them during our discussions. If karma were real, it'd be a bitch.

For anyone who was wondering about certain posts or hasn't seen them, here are my Facebook comments in chronological order. The part in parentheses is my explanation of what was really meant.

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Just posted some photos from the Portland trip. You'll note that Megan isn't wearing her insulin pump for some reason in some of these... (This is true, Megan wasn't wearing her insulin pump in most of the pictures, but it wasn't because her diabetes was magically healed. Her pump requires that infusion sets be replaced every so often, and her new infusion sets hadn't arrived in the mail yet before we left for the trip. Megan had to do normal needle injections of insulin during the trip without the infusion sets)

Heading out to shoot the final scenes for our Portland trip documentary. Hopefully will be online very early next week, as we have a powerful message about faith that the whole world needs to see. (The message is that blind faith isn’t just silly nonsense, it leads to lack of judgment, poor decisions, and can even be actively dangerous, as in the case of Christians who let their children die because they think prayer works better than medicine.)

Dressed up on a Sunday morning. This hasn't happened in years. (We felt like looking nice when we went out for lunch. We didn’t go to church.)

So many amazing and miraculous things happened yesterday - could they have really just been coincidences? Video of our Portland trip is just a few days away! (The amazing events included incidents such as the massively long line at Sam’s Club disappearing by the time we got to the register with our apple cider – so unless Jesus really wanted me to spend all day getting drunk on cider and rum, then yes, it was in fact just a coincidence.)

An elderly woman approached us out of the blue at Albertson's today to share a testimony of love. Yet another amazing event that's happened since our Portland trip. Video documentary coming very, very soon! (A woman saw us with our arms around each other and told us how cute it was that a young couple was showing love so early in the morning on a random errand. She shared a story with us about someone approaching her and her now-dead husband many years ago in a similar fashion in Norway. It had nothing to do with testimony about Jesus.)

After our Portland trip we have some big life changes staring us in the face that will be hard to implement. On another note, the video explaining the events that took place there will hopefully be up on Sunday. (We've been seriously considering moving out of state for some time now, and Portland was near the top on our list of possible choices. Packing up all our stuff and driving it all the way there will indeed be hard to implement, and a royal pain in the ass, when it finally happens.)

What a blessing! We had the wonderful opportunity to get this vacuum at no cost. Wonderful things just keep happening since our amazing trip. (I got the vacuum free because I'm a member of the Amazon Vine program, which sends out free products for people to review. It had nothing to do with Christianity or magic.)

To all the doubters: If God can cure diabetes, then surely he can touch the heart of an atheist! (Some people had started to doubt my conversion was real, so I needed something to keep up the ruse. This is a "half truth" statement. Surely if the Christian God could cure diabetes, he could in fact touch the heart of an atheist. But as it should be clear, neither the Christian deity, nor any other mythological figure, cured Megan's diabetes.)

Just saw the first edit of the Portland trip documentary. It's 10 minutes that just might change your life. My hope is that the people who need to see it most will watch it and be touched. (Whether it changes their lives by waking them up to how absurd supernatural beliefs are, or they get touched in a sexual manner immediately after watching is fine with me!)

And here it is - the mini-documentary of our Portland trip is now online! Anti-Christian comments are not welcome on this post and will be deleted. If you have something negative to say about faith, you can send it to me in a private message. (Anti-Christian comments weren't welcome and would be deleted, because they would have tipped off the Christians that this isn’t a pro-Christian video, of course!)

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Let me know what you think of the video, and we'll be back to our regularly scheduled responses to Christian documentaries and conversations with the religious next week! There's also a good deal of additional footage of me ranting about the evils and contradictions of Christianity that didn't make it into the final cut of the video clip. We'll be posting that up as a separate video down the road.

Everything's Inevitable

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