Religion Is Wack

Religion is a placebo for the masses.A placebo is a fake pill, usually given during the double blind testing of a medication or, in the case of a person who is obsessive about medication.

The idea is this tell a person in extreme pain that the pill you are giving him is the best, the strongest etc. with -in half an hour that person will express pain relief..he believes in the power of that pill, there really is nothing in the pill but sugar. If the mind believes something ,then the body will follow through, it is a phenomena. What Dr. House is saying then is, religion is a fake pill, but the masses believe in it... and so they feel better even though there is nothing there.

The suggestion of the last caller was that since a doctor can stimulate faith by a placebo, that seems to have some relevance for the question of faith with Christians. What is interesting and frustrating to me is that there is such a deep misconception about the notion of faith. People have this feeling that faith is something that is resident within you and the power comes from within you. I'm not at all surprised in one sense, because a great portion of Christianity--especially in the area of the electronic church--seems to represent faith as a force in itself. So if you have enough of this faith force you can accomplish more things.

But faith isn't a force; it is an attitude of trust which allows you to depend on someone that can do for you what you cannot do for yourself. Now, this is very important. Faith is trust. Trust allows you to go to the source of the power. Trust isn't the power.

The reference to the placebo seems to imply that faith is the power itself, such that a physician can give you a placebo, like a sugar pill, which has no medicinal qualities, but you think it does. And because your mind has been fooled, this stimulates the power inside of you--call it faith power if you want--that affects your cure. The doctor has just fooled your faith system, so to speak, into thinking it got something and therefore it stimulates this faith and the faith ends up curing you because, obviously, the sugar pill didn't.

What this illustration shows is nothing about faith, but the power of suggestion. Someone can give a placebo to a person and that placebo can make that person feel better. By the way, the placebo doesn't cure the disease. When you have a real disease, it doesn't cure anything. If that were the case, then sugar pills would be used to cure everything. This makes a very important point. Even though you have the faith to take the pill, in other words you are encouraged to act in trust by taking the pill which you think will do something for you, you will die unless the pill really has the capability to make you well. The point being, faith is an act of trust that is only helpful and useful if the pill is not a placebo but it is in fact the real McCoy.