Faith Healers

James Randi, the celebrated magician, has written a damning indictment of the faith-healing practices of the leading televangelists and others who claim divine healing powers. Randi and his team of researchers attended scores of "miracle services" and often were pronounced "healed" of the nonexistent illnesses they claimed. They viewed first-hand the tragedies resulting from the wide-spread belief that faith healing can cure every conceivable disease. The ministries, they discovered, were rife with deception, chicanery, and often outright fraud.

Self-annointed ministers of God convince the gullible that they have been healed - and that they should pay for the service. The Faith Healers examines in depth the reasons for belief in faith healing and the catastrophic results for the victims of these hoaxes. Included in Randi's book are profiles of a highly profitable "psychic dentist", and the "Vatican-approved wizard."

YA Are there people chosen by God to heal bodily ailments through the power of prayer alone? Randi's answer is ``maybe,'' but on the basis of his three-year investigation into faith heal ers, he hasn't found any evidence of it and suggests it may be nothing more than a religious con game. The author, a professional magician, has made it a sideline to expose fraud and miscon ceptions in the realm of the paranormal. Leading evangelists such as Oral Rob erts, Peter Popoff, W. V. Grant, Pat Robertson, and others are all shown to use tactics that are at best misleading, to guide the faithful into believing that they have been supernaturally cured by prayer alone. At worst, some of these men are shown to be cynical frauds preying on the desperation of the seri ously ill. The book is not tightly writ ten, but it can be read for enlighten ment. Karl Penny, Houston Pub . Lib .
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.