(August 14, 2014 at 1:11 am)Esquilax Wrote:(August 13, 2014 at 6:50 pm)Huggy74 Wrote: But since I've been saying all along that faith is A-religious, it can act in the positive or negative.
However, one doesn't have faith in a medical placebo, as you have the evidence of, oh, I dunno, the entire history of modern medicine to demonstrate that doctors are quite adept at curing things.
You really are trying for the false equivocation double reacharound here, aren't you? First you attempt to equate faith healing in the religious sense with the placebo effect, and then in order to make that comparison at all functional you're attempting to equate reasonable expectations of success based on evidence, with blind religious faith.
Don't you ever feel bad, that the only way you can defend your belief in god is to devalue the meaning of other words? Isn't that a tacit admission that the terms of your religion can't stand on their own, without other terms being handicapped?
Of course one doesn't have faith in a placebo, the point is for them not to know it's a placebo, but are told it is a revolutionary procedure, That is what they have faith in.
As it was stated in the article I posted: a man is dying of cancer of the lymph nodes, has difficulty breathing, and is bedridden. He receives injections of a new anticancer drug called Krebiozen (a placebo). Within days the tumors shrink by half and he is eventually released from the hospital. After he finds out he was given a placebo, he dies days later.
Since you say faith has nothing to do with it, why don't you try explaining how this phenomena works?