Why there is no spiritual healing industry, cont.

The reason there is no spiritual healing industry, no massive IPOs for companies offering new spiritual healing methods, products or practitioners, no TV spots or infomercials touting spiritual healing, is because it just plain doesn't work and isn't worth the investment. Sure, there's a huge market - all of us - but after millennia of wishing for it, no one has come up with a legitimate, testable, mass marketable product. That wish is extremely strong, so strong that it leads some people to impute to prayer remarkable healing power. But no amount of magical thinking can effect the kind of change in physical conditions that make prayer an effective tool that millions of people would gladly pay money for. Having been a sincere practitioner of spiritual healing for over 30 years, I speak from experience. The market is so small that a decent living can't be made solely from the practice. That "market" is a tiny bunch of magical thinkers, most of whom belong to some kind of church that promotes spiritual healing as proof for the validity of its theology.

Here's the kind of "testimony" that won't be made in those churches:

I go to a private religious university, and for the most part I get a nice, secular education. Occasionally, though, someone will stand up in a cafeteria and announce that they witnessed a miracle or some such. "He was in constant pain but after we prayed the cancer went into remission" -- that kind of crap.

One day, I had had enough of it, so immediately after one girl told her magical success story, I stood up and cleared my throat:

"I'd like to follow my friend's story with a similar tale of my own. I had an uncle who never took care of his body, and eventually he developed type II diabetes. He wouldn't listen to his doctors or do anything to treat his condition. Eventually it got so bad that they had to amputate his foot. This all but destroyed his lifestyle. He spent his entire day at his job on his feet, and he couldn't do anything with his new disability; he couldn't even afford a prosthetic. None of us in my family was religious at the time except for my mother, but she convinced us all to join hands in prayer, as that was the only thing we could really do. We were skeptical, but we humored our mom and asked God to help our uncle in anyway He could, and his foot grew back!"

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And Why won't God heal amputees