God’s healing powers
Brendan O’Neill criticises the ASA’s censure of religious advertisements for God’s healing powers
The ASA has been itching to ban the words “God heals” for quite a while. Last June, it rapped the knuckles of a church in Nottingham for putting up a poster that said “God can heal you today!” after the church was grassed up to the ASA by some snitch in Nottingham’s Secular Society. And now it has actually banned a Christian group from proselytising about God’s healing powers. What next? Should we ban groups from declaring that “Jesus loves you!”, considering that is probably also technically untrue and could promote “false hope”? How about banning depictions of Jesus walking on water, since that is a physically impossible feat and might encourage children to try it out, with potentially deadly consequences? There’s no end to the expressions of religious faith that might be banned by the Secular Inquisition that the ASA is speedily morphing into.
However, Tom Chivers says that religious organisations should not be exempt from advertising laws if they make such claims:
Compare these two self-described contrarian journalists: Brendan O’Neil and Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens’ contrarianism always had a genuine moral passion and deep knowledge behind it; whereas O’Neil is “contrarian” in a really scatter-shot, deadline-journalism, unprincipled way.