You think the FTC is bad? Well, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), a UK based regulation division that determines whether advertising is legal, decent, and non-deceptive has decided to take on God. According to a ruling by the ASA, a Christian prayer organization that was handing out advertisement for their prayer group website, was making misleading claims in that God could heal.
The advertisements read:
“Need Healing? God can heal today! Do you suffer from Back Pain, Arthritis, MS, Addiction … Ulcers, Depression, Allergies, Fibromyalgia, Asthma, Paralysis, Crippling Disease, Phobias, Sleeping disorders or any other sickness?
“We’d love to pray for your healing right now!
“We’re Christian from churches in Bath and we pray in the name of Jesus. We believe that God loves you and can heal you from any sickness.”
The ASA said they stepped in, because the group was making claims about curing illnesses without any evidence whatsoever to back it up scientifically.
The Christian group plans to appeal the ASA’s ruling. The group finds it “odd” that the ASA wants to prevent it from stating on its website the basic Christian belief that God can heal illness.
“The ASA has even demanded that we sign a document agreeing not to say this, which is unacceptable to us—as it no doubt would be for anyone ordered not to make certain statements about their conventional religious or philosophical beliefs,” HOTS said. “We tried to reach a compromise, recognizing some of the ASA’s concerns, but there are certain things that we cannot agree to, including a ban on expressing our beliefs.”
In regards to the lawsuit, God had no comment.
