Talk:Faith healing/Archive 8

Article scope
It should be made clear that this is entirely a topic of modern American Protestantism, it is disingenious to try to connect this with Roman Catholicism, let alone healing magic in a comparative sense. An article about healing charms in anthropology or comparative religious studies would be set out completely differently, it would describe the intimate connection of religious ritual and healing magic since the Bronze Age, and stretching back into prehistory, and treat the American phenomenon as a section under "modern history". This would be a valid topic, but it would be a different article, not entitled "faith healing".

Informed criticism or examination of "faith healing" should obviously be aware that this is just a culture-specific expression of a human universal. If your "criticism" is too naive to treat the phenomenon in this light, it may just be advisable to look for a better reference. It is still fair to scientifically test falsifiable claims made by proponents, of course, but it is naive to think that the phenomenon is exhausted by disproving a bunch of falsifiable claims. The interest in the topic is not in the claims made by proponents, but in their actions. Nobody tries to cover, idk, African witchcraft in terms of trying to do a bunch of studies disproving claims made by random African witches, that's not where the interest lies. The interest is in the fact that this is an ineradicable part of human behavior in spite of the absence of any measurable effect under double-blind laboratory conditions (the entire point being, of course, that the exercise only has meaning where participants aren't double-blinded but actively communicating whatever collective group phenomena are conjured up by these things).

tldr, "faith healing" is an American Protestant phenomenon, and you should leave Catholic intercession of saints or Bronze Age healing magic out of it unless you want to write an entirely different article. --dab (𒁳) 11:07, 20 June 2018 (UTC)


 * The problem with the above is that you are simply asserting "The scope of this article is X" without giving us any particular reason other than your "disingenious"[sic] insult. That doesn't mean you are wrong, but unless you give some explanation other than "I don't like it" or "obviously" for why your preferred scope should be used, we can't discuss the merits of your proposal. --Guy Macon (talk) 17:38, 20 June 2018 (UTC)