I recently surfed internet and found a blog entry at Times of India Blog site by Jug Suraiya (http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/jugglebandhi/entry/faith-as-spiritual-homeopathy).
I will quote some of the lines before my comments:
……….”How can you believe in mumbo-jumbo like homeopathy, for which there is no scientific basis whatever? The few cases in which it’s supposed to have worked are obviously instances of the placebo effect: you believe strongly enough that something is going to cure you, you cure yourself. How can you behave in homeopathy, how can you have faith in it?”…………
The author has beautifully woven some nicely picked philosophical words into lines, and concluded Homeopathy to be mumbo-jumbo or faith centered. Author must have contacted a quack for understanding Homeopathy. How can one “conclude” any science to have no scientific basis? Let scientists experiment and establish. And to best of my knowledge some world class researchers have been already done. Readers may see some Fundamental and Basic research studies at http://www.audesapere.in/researchstudies/
……….”In fact, faith itself – faith in a religion, or in a non-denominational Divine Principle which is synonymous with the cosmos – is like homeopathy in that sense: you don’t have to have faith in faith in order to try it out, to practise it, keeping your fingers crossed that it works.”……..
………”You only seek faith when in desperation you are driven to faith by the opposite of faith, which is despair. Despair is like a bad attack of spiritual sciatica, an unbearably painful condition brought on by an overwhelming sense that not just your particular life, or human life in general, but the working of the universe itself is totally devoid of meaning.”…….
Faith is poorly understood by many. For us faith is not by virtue of “no alternative” but by virtue of values. We do faith when we experience something positive and “working”, and this faith grows if the things are working. If faith could have been the only factor for people to believe in homeopathy; and suppose homeopathy is placebo, both “faith” and “Homeopathy” could have been vanished hundred years back (placebo effect will not last for more than two hundred years).
“……….When the pain of despair can no longer be borne, we seek relief. Some might seek it in psychological counselling, or in medication, or in narcotics like alcohol. Some seek it in the homeopathy of faith…….”
Do you have faith in God? If yes, you must have been in pain of despair or some of your life problems would have been grown exponentially, so that you have to rely on God, meditation or alcohol and obviously “faith”!
“……….Homeopathy is based on the (pseudo-scientific?) principle of toxin-anti-toxin, that a very diluted dose of the poison that is causing your ailment will cure your ailment……….”
The quack must have told the author about “toxin-anti-toxin“. Homeopathy uses more than 2000 sources including healthy plants, animals, insects, chemical, minerals, etc. etc. etc. to prepare medicines. If dilution is your concern, there are remedies in low potencies (and mother tinctures) which have active medicinal substances in them and they are homeopathic. What will you call them?? Pseudo-Sciences are the first one to be rejected by nature (I hope the author must have “faith” in Nature). High dilutions act by virtue of energy transfer from medicinal substance to organism. We are in process of researching in this area, and many concepts have been put forth. If these concepts are not accepted fully, they are not either rejected completely. If homeopathy is pseudo science, why not researchers shred it into ashes. Many researchers from allied scientific fields have accepted the existence and action of Homeopathy. (Refer earlier hyperlink).
“…………Pascal called spiritual faith a gamble, a wager, in which if you lost you lost nothing, because you had nothing to begin with, but if you won, you won infinite riches. So try the gamble. Because – as with homeopathy – what have you got to lose? Nothing but the anguish of despair” ……………”
Faith for Indians is not a diagonal alternative of despair. We have faith because we have it from roots. If we deny this fact, everything is a gamble for us. It is not the matter what we have to lose or what we are going to lose. Many people “try” many things without knowing their effects and side effects. AND ALSO you are yourself giving the possibility of “winning”. Great!