It's a Miracle!

When I complain about faith healers here at Augoeides, it usually has to do with people who insist that faith healing cannot be done in conjunction with conventional medical treatment. Faith healing - that is, magical healing - can and does work, but just like with any other spell, the mundane steps that you take towards your goal such as conventional medical care help to bring the likelihood of a successful cure within the probability range that the spell can create. So with anything life-threatening, arguing that conventional care somehow undermines magical care is especially dangerous.

But this article is not one of those cases. Pastor Mboro of South Africa, a popular celebrity preacher who does faith healing, used his powers to cure a man's erectile dysfunction on his television program. The man and his wife immediately had sex, which prompted the television station to refuse to show the episode - even though the sex was blurred out. Mboro is planning a march on the station to protest the decision.

He told Sunday World: ‘Thabisile came to church a while ago and complained that although she was blessed with three children and recently got a promotion at work, she was sex-starved because her husband suffered from erectile dysfunction. I went there and entered their bedroom and asked them to put their hands on their private parts. After that I prayed for them and the husband immediately regained his erection.’

Grateful wife Thabisile said: ‘My husband got his erection back and when he came back from outside to call the crew to film our testimony, we were already busy having sex. We just couldn’t wait as it had been long since we had sex. I apologised to the pastor for doing that because that was embarrassing.’

Pastor Mboro has blurred out the sex for his TV show and claims the testimony of the couple is no more pornographic than other programs on the station. ‘Every weekend we watch movies which have episodes where people are shown having sex. Here there is no sex but they can’t show it. They have not shown two of my shows as a result of this dispute.’

Now you can point out that a lot of erectile dysfunction can be psychological, which makes it a prime target for faith healing, and I won't disagree with you. Just from this incident, it's hard to say (pun intended) whether Pastor Mboro really has highly effective paranormal healing powers. Mboro has come up on Augoeides before, and his previous statements make him sound like a complete fake, or at the very least highly prone to exaggeration.

But at the same time, my first rule of magick is that if it works it works, and that's apparently what happened here - to the chagrin of the television station in question. I also think that it's good to see a Christian pastor doing something that is basically sex-positive, as opposed to the anti-sex fire-and-brimstone stuff that usually makes the news, even if it is an over-the-top self-promoter like Mboro.

As far the television station goes, I don't know how explicit South African television is, and I'm sure that there probably are various standards that they try to adhere to with obscenity laws and so forth. I can see American authorities being squeamish about this sort of thing as well, even though it seems to me with the actual sex blurred out, there really isn't much to see compared with what is shown on a lot of other programs.

So I think the television station should go ahead and air the episode with the offending portion blurred out, as Mboro is demanding - that is, unless there's a compelling reason under South African law that prohibits them from doing it.