Saturday, May 7, 2011

Darren Brown: Miracles For Sale (Religious Hucksters)

A friend sent me this link today.  It is quite interesting in how it exposes the fraudulent faith healers in the United States and elsewhere.  California has been filled with these religious charlatans for decades.  We are fertile breeding ground for these fraudulent belief systems.

Soon after I came to Pasadena Peter Popoff hit the news with his charade exposed.  It was close to the time of Jim Jones, WCG's Receivership, and other religious leaders being brought down to their knees because of their lies and deceit.  Soon Jim Bakker and Tammy Faye, Oral Roberts, Tilton, Binny Hinn, and many others had their deception spread across the news for all the world to see.  Binny Hinn is the biggest fraud out there today.  He owns more homes, jets, and cars than HWA ever did.  Yet, he is is exactly like HWA in the way he uses his words, his actions, and his manipulative way of speaking that stirs people to action.

WCG has always been filled with countless stories of miraculous healing.  I wonder how many of them are actually true.  How many have you ever witnessed first hand or were they stories you heard?  While I have no doubt in my mind that miraculous things can happened, I still have to wonder how much of it is mind over matter?  Do we want it to happen so bad that we deceive ourselves that it has?



10 comments:

DennisCDiehl said...

Outstanding video. My son was chefing at a restort where Hinn was paying thousands a night and one of the rules for kitchen staff was that at no time were they to look in Hinn's eyes. That was Hinn's rule. It's probably because one could see the lie more clearlyif that was allowed.

DennisCDiehl said...

Ps. It is painful to watch this kind of deception. The short leg routine reminds me a couple chiropractors I know..ha.

I have a brother who is blind, deaf and cannot speak. It is painful to think there are people that would trick him and my parents for gain, and be good at it. These charlatans need to be exposed for who they aren't and power they don't possess.

DennisCDiehl said...

One more comment. I have just finished this video and I am undone by it. Probably the best posting and example of how humans manipulate others to their harm.

I am in tears over this. It is well done and more loving and honest a teaching to those who could feel deceived by it. Notice when it is revealed he is not a faith healer how quickly they accept it and how gullible they were. Powerful powerful stuff Gary. Thank you for putting it up.

The fellow who played the evangelist deserves a lot of credit because you could see the struggle he was having in being deceptive for the greater lesson to come.

Good job and an excellent example of real truth making one really free

Anonymous said...

I have witnessed healings and other supernatural events while I attended churches under the HWA banner. Ministers were not present in all but two interventions.

The miracles were needful, yet very quietly played out.

Whether you accept what I state as true is inconsequential to me. I know and give thanks.

As a counter point, there were numerous times when prayers were not answered. Over time, I realized there was a point.

DennisCDiehl said...

To my knowledge, I never saw a healing after anointing of any condition that could not or would not eventually get better on it's own. I have anointed many with cancers who followed its natural course to death.

I have blessed little children and years leater buried them due to some accident we had hoped to avoid by blessing them and asking God's protection etc.

I know, it was my lack of faith in the scriptural promises in James 5.
Or perhaps the asker didn't have the proper faith. I know it was not God because it never is.

"My ways are not your ways," gets the promise maker off the hook every time.

And yes, I also believe a positive mind and attitude can go a long way to actual healing in a metaphysical way. I know the inexplicable does happen too. I just can't attribute it to asking and some nebulous thing called faith.

Anonymous said...

Let me be specific, my experiences of supernatural intervention are unexplainable by science, or modern medicine. It was not natural by any stretch of the imagination.

Ministers were NOT present in any miracle except two examples. Does that say something? I am not sure.

I learned long ago that people doubt themselves. How much more will they doubt me? I guess it is true that you and you alone know that you know what you know.

DennisCDiehl said...

"Ministers were NOT present in any miracle except two examples. Does that say something? I am not sure."

Whatever "supernatural" healing there might be is unconnected with anyone else being present or not present. It is a spiritual/physical experience between the person and something greater or at times I am also sure a misunderstanding of the physical problem.

I had a young deaf man in my congregation once. I have a brother who is deaf so I know how the deaf behave and their mannerisms. This fellow read lips very well. For a year I tested him. I'd speak to him before he saw me coming up behind him. I'd speak to him where he could not see my mouth. Once I called him and we had a nice talk, on the phone. Finally I took him out for lunch and told him I knew he could hear everything everyone was saying. He began to cry. This young man was known to all as "the deaf boy in church." Seems he was blocking out hearing, and he really was at times, due to former abuse and "not wanting to hear any more..."

We talked it out. He went back to church as the boy who used to not be able to hear but now was healed...

It was an easier transition for him to do so....

Allen C. Dexter said...

rhangnizI used to believe wholeheartedly in the healing doctrine. I now realize that the human body and mind is capable of many things we tend to regard as miraculous.

When I left my middle aged father alone on that ranch to handle all that hard work with the double groin rupture he had suffered from for more than 15 years, I prayed fervently for him to be healed.


When I learned later that both ruptures had spontaneously healed, I attributed it to my prayers. Since, I have found that such healings take place all the time and have no connection to divine healing.

In 1958, shortly before he was killed in that horrible car wreck, Richard Armstrong anointed and prayed for a Korean War vet, Howard Clark. Howard had been wounded in the spine and was helplessly confined to a wheel chair.

He began walking immediately, and to my knowledge, never used a wheel chair again. He became a minister and bolted a from the organization about the same time I did.

I now know that the human mind and body is capable of fantastic repair and regeneration under the right stimulus and determination. I've had serious injuries to my own joints, etc. self-correct, Partly because I expected and determined that the correction was going to happen.

Anonymous said...

No2HWA, thank you so much for that video.

May you be blessed.

Anonymous said...

"Whether you accept what I state as true is inconsequential to me. I know and give thanks."

Describe these miracles, in detail. I am always interested in the possibility of the supernatural.


Thanks,
Paul Ray