Faith Healing: Six Die After Church Tells Them They No Longer Need HIV Treatment

At least six HIV patients have died in Britain after their evangelical church leader told them they were cured and no longer needed treatment.

The Synagogue Church of All Nations, based in London, holds a prayer line once a month where people from across Europe come to be healed of all kinds of illnesses, Sky News reported Friday.

During the prayer line, pastors shout over the person being healed for the devil to come out of the body, while spraying water in the face.

Pastor Rachel Holmes told Sky News the church has a 100 percent success rate.

"We have many people that contract HIV. All are healed," Holmes said.

If we are to accept Holmes' miraculous claims at face value, the obvious next question would be, 'Why did those six people die?'

The church goes on to claim people who were not healed did not fully accept God would heal them.

"We must have a genuine desire if we come to God. We are not in position to question anybody's genuine desire. Only God knows if one comes with true desire. Only God can determine this," the church said.

"That is why, if anybody comes in the name of God, we pray for them. The outcome of the prayer will determine if they come genuinely or not."

The below video, from a Sky news broadcast, contains footage from the church's 'healings.'




This sort of evangelical 'healing' is an example of the many ways in which faith can impede progress, and even kill. This is only one in a long string of recent deaths related to 'faith healing.'

Each of these could have been prevented by simply taking the child to the doctor rather than relying on a supernatural intervention.

A recent study by the University of California at San Diego and a Sioux City, Iowa, group called Children's Healthcare Is a Legal Duty, concluded:

Four of every five sick children in the United States who died after their parents put their trust in faith healing could probably have survived if medical treatment had been sought, according to a study published yesterday in Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The report, which examined 172 child deaths in faith healing families from 1975 to 1995, concluded that 140 of the deaths, or 81 percent, were due to conditions that had a survival rate exceeding 90 percent with treatment.

Eighteen other children would have had better than a 50 percent chance of living with treatment, and all but three children would have benefited from medical help, the report said.

We live in an age where medicine and technology have rendered obsolete the primitive and barbaric treatments of Biblical times. The germ theory of disease has displaced the 'need' for exorcisms, bloodletting, and trepanning. We would be fools to favor prayer over the use of antibiotic ointment in the case of a simple scratch.

And yet:

In one case cited in the report a child choked on a banana and showed signs of life for nearly an hour while her parents reacted by calling people to pray.