#Christian Science

[trials-and-transvestigations]

[greatwyrmgold]

I recently watched a video about Christian Science and the medical neglect of its members—that is, parents (and one aunt) who let their children/niece suffer or die because their religion claims disease doesn't exist. (Long story.)

The video's author emphasized that in several cases, the parents (or Christian Scientist practitioners "treating" the kids) accepted medical care for their own ailments, often relatively minor compared to the children's.

By and large, the parents/aunt got away with it. Some cases went to court, most didn't receive any punishment, one couple was put on "probation" for three years. Part of this comes down to religious exemption laws, which let you get away with murder (well, manslaughter) if it's done for religious reasons, under specifications which make it obvious that they were written for one very vocal Christian sect.

But a lot of it is how children are seen as property. Parents can more or less do what they want with them. If a parent wants to sacrifice their child on the altar of their religious beliefs, even if those beliefs are overtly hypocritical...well, that's unfortunate, but it's their kid, so who are we to condemn them for it?

[theexodvs]

Given the (warranted) suspicion given towards the disease denialism found in both Christian Science and Scientology, it can be said that if the claims of the neurodiversity movement were attached to organized religion, they too would be constantly lambasted.

[queer-flesh-simulacrum]

God's Alternative Medicine | Christian Science

YOOOOO information about christian science that doesn’t indorse it!

[moovees]

From Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox by Lois Banner

[gettothestabbing]

Putting in another Christian Science ask: what kind of position does Mary Baker Eddy have? As in, are you required to accept all of her pronouncements, and if not, what's the criteria for what isn't and is accepted? Is she a prophet, or just the person who figured out Christian Science?

This is one of the things that people wonder most about Christian Science, and which also invites comparison to Scientology, which during its founder's lifetime was constructed around his personality. First off, no one ever prays to her. She is not an intercessory figure. We are not required to have all the opinions Mrs. Eddy had as a person, but we do follow all her writings. The only writings of hers we do not follow are her older drafts of Science and Health. While they are historically and theologically notable, Christian Scientists only follow the final, authorized 1910 edition of the book, in accordance with her wishes. She also wrote a lot of poems. 7 of them are the lyrics of some of our most beloved hymns. But we do not go to her poetry for theological instruction.

Mrs. Eddy held a few titles in her lifetime, notably Discoverer and Founder, but the ones that have officially endured past her death are Leader and Pastor Emeritus. I think the term prophet would be appropriate too; I certainly consider her such. But most CS people would stick only to the titles she allowed in her lifetime. They do this out of respect for her heightened spiritual understanding.

For those unaware, a brief explanation. [Well as brief as I, the perpetually long-winded person, can be.] Mary Baker Glover Eddy (1821-1910) was an American woman who had poor health and bad luck in marriage for the first half of her life. After a bad fall on ice in 1866, attending doctors told her that death was imminent and they could do no more for her. She asked to be given her Bible to read, and turned to the gospels. Reading a story of one of Christ Jesus' healings (which one has been long forgotten, even by Mary herself), she soon rose from the bed, and, after a short relapse later that day which she treated through the same method, she was fully healed of the injury. She spent the next three years completely focused on reading Scripture and praying to try and figure out how the healing had occurred.

The rest of her life was devoted to writing Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, a text Christian Scientists hold with the Bible as central to our faith and practice. Though first published in 1875, Mrs. Eddy continually revised and worked on this book for the rest of her life, with the final edition coming out the year she died. She always described this as being " a scribe under orders." She hoped that all Christian churches would read and accept the ideas in her book and that it would leaven the whole of Christianity and elevate worldwide Christian practice. This did not happen, and while some considered her ideas helpful to their understanding, many more clergy and Christians were openly hostile or declared it unchristian.

So eventually Mrs. Eddy founded her own church, now known as the Church of Christ, Scientist. In her lifetime, the Mother Church in Boston was built and then extended to fit the rapidly growing congregation. There was a room built in the original edifice called the Mother's Room, specifically for her to use and take rest in before or after giving a sermon. Many Christian Scientists called Mrs. Eddy "Mother" during her lifetime. She wrote against this several times, but among the people who worked in her household, she was less strict about this affectionate title. No one uses it today, and it would be weird and frowned upon if they did.

After her three years of study, Mrs. Eddy increasingly became famous as a healer. People would be healed passing her on the street, having only made eye contact with her, or while attending her lectures and sermons. But most healing accounts were the result of direct conversation with her or the patient requesting her to come. There are hundreds if not a thousand or more accounts of her healing works, and the Mother Church (the central governing body of CS) works hard to preserve, retrieve, and triple-check the authenticity of all such accounts.

Mrs. Eddy is deeply revered by Christian Scientists today as in her lifetime. I would never deny that there were personality-cult elements in the first generation of CS believers. It was easy, due to personal love for her and to her many healing works, for early students to make the mistake of focusing on her personality and imagine her as more than she said she was. Some students would lavish her with praise that made her uncomfortable and was theologically inappropriate, such as calling her Christ come again or claiming (as Bliss Knapp famously did in his 1946 book) that she was the woman crowned with stars from Revelation.

The Bliss Knapp book, The Destiny of the Mother Church, was controversially printed and briefly distributed by the Mother Church in 1990, which caused a minor schism within CS. The Church Manual has a section about Incorrect Literature, which this book clearly violated:

No Incorrect Literature. Sect. 11.  A member of this Church shall neither buy, sell, nor circulate Christian Science literature which is not correct in its statement of the divine Principle and rules and the demonstration of Christian Science. Also the spirit in which the writer has written his literature shall be definitely considered. His writings must show strict adherence to the Golden Rule, or his literature shall not be adjudged Christian Science. A departure from the spirit or letter of this By-Law involves schisms in our Church and the possible loss, for a time, of Christian Science. (Manual of The Mother Church, Mary Baker Eddy, p. 43:21)

It was done for monetary reasons, which the Directors admitted, and has only recently been removed from publication. Bliss Knapp is one of the few students who both knew Mrs. Eddy personally and who proclaimed such heretical statements about her without being rebuked by her (as she was already dead) or being excommunicated. But this is purely due to how he set up his will and this book in trust, leading to the complicated monetary/theological situation in the 1990s. Had she read the book, Mrs. Eddy would have never allowed it to be published.

There are a lot of directions this could go, but I think the best way to explain Mrs. Eddy's ongoing role in the church is to tell you about Augusta Stetson. Augusta was an immensely popular preacher of Christian Science. Trained as a professional elocutionist, she converted to CS after hearing Mrs. Eddy speak in 1884. Although Mrs. Eddy disliked Stetson's style of preaching, she still sent her in 1886 to help found a church in New York City. Stetson's personal magnetism led her to develop her own cult of personality and enormous influence within this branch church. It became the largest and richest of all the branch churches.

Even when preaching was replaced with reading the weekly Bible Lesson [explained in a later paragraph], Stetson would not stop preaching until Mrs. Eddy personally told her to, and this change did not lessen her absolute control over that church congregation. Stetson held the First Reader position for so many years that as a direct result, the Church Manual specifically includes a term of three years for readership. Mrs. Eddy cared for Stetson personally, and for twenty years she tried to alternately praise and rebuke her into correct behavior, but she was not stern enough to cause Stetson to truly repent. Stetson saw herself, and soon styled herself to others, as Mrs. Eddy's successor. Mrs. Eddy and Stetson had their final conversation in 1908. Stetson appeared repentant, but the next year, she wrote a letter to Mrs. Eddy speaking of her in deifying, heretical terms, at which point Mrs. Eddy sharply rebuked her and asked for the Board of Directors of the Mother Church to investigate her. When Stetson heard of Mrs. Eddy's death, she declared that Mrs. Eddy would rise from the grave, appear to her personally first, and then appear to the rest of the world. She repeated this claim the rest of her own life, while running an offshoot of CS centered around her 'Church Triumphant,' noted as being anti-CS, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, and promoting protofascist ideas and Nordic supremacy at various points in the 1920s. [None of these elements were ever present in CS theology or literature, naturally.]

I think that many people unfamiliar with Mrs. Eddy would assume that she was a person like Stetson. Mrs. Eddy never claimed to be a second Christ, the woman in Revelation prophecy, a reincarnation of any Biblical figure, or any part of the Godhead. Students who claimed this were rebuked universally. We refer to Mrs. Eddy as the Discoverer, Founder, and Leader of Christian Science. The discovery and founding are complete. They are not perpetual, as Christian Science recognizes no successor to Mrs. Eddy's work or position. She retains the titles of Leader and Pastor Emeritus.

Partly due to students like Stetson, who both wanted her position for themselves and attempted to flatter or deify her inappropriately, and partly because of the many offshoot spiritual movements that tried to appropriate her ideas without giving her credit for introducing them and tried to remove the Christian theology that gave those ideas backing, Mrs. Eddy was very firm on remaining Pastor Emeritus after her death. She often said that those who sought her [as a person] would find her in her writings. She also spoke out emphatically against Spiritualism in her writings and speeches. Our theology holds that there are no ghosts, nor can there be any communication between the dead and the living. Any Christian Scientist who claimed or claims to be in communication with Mrs. Eddy personally after her death is rebuked or excommunicated, depending on the extent of the claim made. Her leadership of the church is purely in her writings, in the ideas she gave us "as a scribe under orders."

But, to be fair, there is a lot of respect and interest in Mrs. Eddy's personality anyway. She was a warm, loving person. She was very strict about cleanliness. She loved ice cream. There are a multitude of church-sanctioned biographies about her, most of which I've read, some of which were even part of my homework for Christian Science Nursing training. Growing up, I had a children's book about her life.

Many CS churches also have one or more portraits of her, usually as an older woman with a serene expression. And because more CS churches have portraits of her than of Christ Jesus, I have been asked more than once if this means that we see her as a replacement for Jesus. To this I would say that Christ Jesus lived long enough ago that CS people are uncomfortable choosing a portrait of him, whereas Mrs. Eddy lived recently enough that we know for sure what she looked like. But I admit that it does invite suspicions of a cult of personality more than anything else.

In turning her church away from personal preaching by establishing the system of Bible Lessons and readership, Mrs. Eddy denied power to those who would seek, like Stetson, to take the theological rudder of the church away from her writings. Bible Lessons are compiled by a committee within the Mother Church three years in advance. There is one every week of the year, in a rotating system of subjects set out by Mrs. Eddy, so that we have each subject twice a year. The Sunday sermon is always a reading of this weekly Bible Lesson, with the First Reader reading the Bible citations and the Second Reader reading those from Science and Health. The books are meant to be read together, but the Bible always comes first. Wednesday sermons are compiled by the First Reader, but they must purely consist of quotations from these two books, which we collectively consider our Pastor.

Mrs. Eddy as Pastor Emeritus is similarly in a position in our church from which she cannot be removed. To pretend that CS owes her nothing would be wrong, and would inevitably lead us theologically astray. Every splinter group off of CS makes this mistake, and all of them lack the power to heal that CS demonstrates. Mrs. Eddy learned very early that the only way to heal was to understand that it was not a personal power. Only by knowing God as the only power and healer could she see others be healed while praying for them.

Sometime in the 1870s, she did take personal pride in having healed a little girl. When she reached home, a message had come saying the child had relapsed. In grief and repentance, she fell to her knees and spent the next several minutes repenting of this self-centered pride and giving the glory back to God. Soon, another message came from the family saying that the girl was perfectly well.

It was a lesson swiftly and absolutely learned, and it shows how Mrs. Eddy saw herself. She was the scribe under orders, no more and no less. To finish up, here's what she said in her Message to the Mother Church for 1901:

Finally, brethren, wait patiently on God; return blessing for cursing; be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good; be steadfast, abide and abound in faith, understanding, and good works; study the Bible and the textbook of our denomination; obey strictly the laws that be, and follow your Leader only so far as she follows Christ. Godliness or Christianity is a human necessity: man cannot live without it; he has no intelligence, health, hope, nor happiness without godliness. (Message to The Mother Church for 1901, Mary Baker Eddy, p. 34:20–28) (emphasis added)

[sabistarphotos]

April 6, 2022

Washington, DC

[trials-and-transvestigations]

This is why I only read bangers such as Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy and You Can Live Forever in Paradise on Earth by the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society

people will read books they Do Not Like™ and then wonder why they hate reading

[brainypixel]

Did you know you can watch the ENTIRE first season of Lily's Lab on www.answers.tv? You absolutely can! Go check it out and keep an eye out here for future Lily's Lab updates!

Link: https://www.answers.tv/lily-s-lab

[mossadegh]

• Mossadegh media: newspaper & magazine articles, editorials

[littlemodernbabe]

Very funny to me when a religions main pull is “we believe in immortality” like that’s the worst thing ever thanks no

[greatwyrmgold]

Edgar Kaiser is running his Permanente deal for profit. And the reason that he can do it—I had Edgar Kaiser come in, talk to me about this and I went into it in some depth. All the incentives are toward less medical care, because the less care they give them, the more money they make. The incentives run the right way.

—John Ehrlichman, White House counsel for Richard Nixon

John Ehrlichman was a Christian Scientist, a denomination of Christianity which believes in using its own spiritual healing practices instead of actual medicine. (If you've heard a story about fundies who let their kids die of treatable illness and don't get convicted of child neglect, they were probably Christian Scientists.)

The quote above was part of a speech where he convinced Nixon to propose what became the Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973. While he never said that his spiritual beliefs influenced his proposal, it's hard to imagine how else he could have come to the conclusion that encouraging patients to receive less care could be considered incentives running the right way.

The "Permanente deal" is Kaiser Permanente, which is (legally) a non-profit organization which ran (and continues to run) for-profit medical groups. You can find out more about it here, but they were the inspiration for the medical insurance systems that are still used in the United States, so you can probably intuit the gist.

And they were used as inspiration in part because they would lead to people receiving less medical treatment. Don't get me wrong, part of it was absolutely Nixon being a modern Republican, supporting privately-owned systems designed to funnel profits into the hands of their owners. But not only was getting people the health care they needed not a priority, failing to do so was seen as a benefit of the scheme by at least some of its architects.

Fuck insurance companies.

[theexodvs]

The leading figures of neurodiversity are Grandin, Robison, Silberman, Baron-Cohen, and Atwood. All of them are 65 or older, so adherents of the movement will have to consider, "Where do we go from here?"

While one might want to hope that one group keeps the name while abandoning the cultic teaching, like what happened after the death of Herbert W. Armstrong, but most Armstrongists broke fellowship with this reformist faction led by Tkach and continued promoting Armstrongist doctrine.

On the other hand, one might envision a scenario where the group remains, and its teachings do not change substantially, but its numbers and influence wane, like what happened after the death of Mary Baker Eddy. While the disease denialism certainly paints the picture of the neurodiversity movement consisting of Eddy's spiritual descendants, her group was way too small and centralized and she did basically everything possible to avoid splintering.

One might anticipate something similar to the aftermath of Joseph Smith, CT Russell, or Ahn Sahng-hong, where two major groups emerge, or one major group amidst a flurry of smaller groups emerge, each swearing on their life they are promoting their founders' actual teaching. However, again, these movement were way more centralized than the neurodiversity movement.

The best comparison is likely what happened in the years after the deaths of Alexander Campbell and Barton Stone. They engineered a movement that was decentralized by design, so there were several different figures all insisting the others were promoting false ideas. A few major groups have arisen, some more decentralized than others, but their movement is still primarily decentralized.

The likely causes of splintering for the neurodiversity movement in the coming years will likely include functioning labels, which illnesses they think are quirky enough for inclusion under their umbrella, whether to use communication devices and which, the validity of self-diagnosis, how much treatment is too much treatment, and which books and studies fit into the neurodiverse canon.

These are the issues the neurodiversity movement will find itself contending with.

[wisdomfish]

Mind science groups such as Christian Science, Religious Science, the New Age, and Hindu thinking proclaim the principal problem of human beings is ignorance or lack of enlightenment, not sin or moral evil.

Samples, Kenneth Richard. ‘Without a Doubt: Answering the 20 Toughest Faith Questions. p. 240

[gettothestabbing]

Though i am not nor have ever been a member of a christian science church, would i still be able to come to practitioners of the church for treatment? i have recently found a lot of comfort in the teachings and am honestly quite interested in how spiritual healing works. does the patient have to come in with a certain level of awareness of what needs to be done or is it all up to the people caring for them?

-Mary

Hi! I'm so glad to hear that C.S. has brought you some comfort 💟

Yes, membership in a church or society is never a requirement for receiving a Christian Science treatment! Any practitioner you will talk to will have no issue with you not being a member, and may take extra time to explain things to you if you are interested.

Many, many people, including my father, only end up in the church because of a successful healing they had before joining. Historically, it was also the main way the C.S. movement grew in the late 19th and early 20th century.

I would say that healing is more easily achieved when the patient has a greater knowledge of the theology behind the treatment. That shared knowledge makes it easier for them to grasp whatever spiritual ideas the practitioner shares with them. If also makes it easier for them to trust the process of treatment.

All that being said, easier does not at all mean "only possible with." So many healings have been accomplished for unconscious patients or for people who were using C.S. as a last resort. Even for those who were somewhat hostile to it, healing has been possible!

In fact, the chapter on Christian Science Practice discusses how the thought of parents influences their children's health, specifically to warn practitioners that to successfully heal a child, the concerns and fears of their parents must also be dealt with. (Anecdotally, I heard about more healings from kids who had two C.S. parents than from kids who only had one. But there is no study or objective evidence I know of on that topic.)

The true healer is God. The only power is His!

[the-harvest-field]

DNA Mutation: What is Christian Science and faith healing?

I pray to know every creature’s love of the creator of Heaven and Earth. I pray that God is true to his promises, I know he is, I know His love is endless, his wrath is perfect and his judgement on inevitability is a gospel even in the Old Testament already. I know I wanted many things, but my true desire is to remember God in the times when my faith was lost, in this I ask what is God? God is…