Introduction
CS has always fascinated me as I had 2-3 in my extended family, if you count my bro's piano teacher. I always found it odd the great auntie wore glasses – based on my understanding back some 40 years ago. (As we will find out there is no issue with that,,, I still find it odd though.)
So when this article popped, it caught my attention. [Audio] You see, as the article notes, “In many US states, Scientists were exempt from charges of child abuse, neglect and endangerment, as well as from failure to report such crimes." That of course really got my attention. While the RCC has its problem with pedo priest, CS (and others) rather just murder their children through medical neglect.
And it's not just the kids
they like to kill. Basically if you are a CS follower, if you get
sick or become injured, you may as well kiss your ass good-bye. “A
whole system of Christian Science “nursing” sprang up in
unlicensed Christian Science sanatoriums and nursing homes,,, But
some of these facilities, and the incompetent care they provide, are
covered by Medicare, the US’s national healthcare insurance
program."
Overview
So before we delve in to
article, it is important to know what is CS, who founded it and when,
and what they believe. My initial outline was lifted from Wiki, just
as an FYI, hopefully I have been able to fill in some gaps with other
material.
Simply put, Christian
Science is a set of beliefs and practices
that puts forth the general notion that sickness is an illusion that
can be corrected by prayer alone. IOWs, faith healing.
BUT,,,
The
church does not require that Christian Scientists avoid all medical
care—adherents use dentists, optometrists, obstetricians,
physicians for broken bones, and vaccination when required by law—but
maintains that Christian-Science prayer is most effective when not
combined with medicine.
It was developed in
19th-century New England by Mary Baker Eddy, who argued in her 1875
book Science and Health
that prayer alone would suffice in correcting what ails you.
Eddy and followers were
granted a charter in 1879 to found the Church of Christ, Scientist,
and in 1894 the Mother Church, The First Church of Christ, Scientist,
was built in Boston, Massachusetts. Christian Science became the
fastest growing religion in the United States but has since declined.
The Christian Science Monitor,
a Pulitzer Prize winning paper is owned by the church as well as
numerous Reading Rooms around the world.
Eddy described Christian
Science as a return to "primitive Christianity and its lost
element of healing". There are key differences between Christian
Science theology and that of more traditional Christianity. In
particular, adherents subscribe to a radical form of philosophical
idealism, believing that reality is purely spiritual and the material
world an illusion. This includes the view that disease is a mental
error rather than physical disorder, and that the sick should be
treated not by medicine but by a form of prayer that seeks to correct
the beliefs responsible for the illusion of ill health.
Origin
CS
came forth from the revival period of the late 1800s based in the
mind-cure movement; a strong focus on
healing.
The
movement trace its roots to Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802–1866), a
mental healer, whose motto was "the truth is the cure."
Mary Baker Eddy was associated with Quimby leading to debate about
how much of Christian Science was based on his ideas. Although there
are differences in thought.
Beliefs
CS
consider their theology to be mainstream, influenced
by
Eddy's Congregationalist upbringing. According to the church's
tenets, adherents accept "the inspired Word of the Bible as
[their] sufficient guide to eternal Life ... acknowledge and
adore one supreme and infinite God ... [and] acknowledge His
Son, one Christ; the Holy Ghost or divine Comforter; and man in God's
image and likeness."
Eddy
also proposed that Christian Science was a kind of second coming and
that Science
and Health
was an inspired text. In 1895, in the Manual
of the Mother Church,
she ordained the Bible and Science
and Health
as "Pastor over the Mother Church".
"The second appearing of Jesus is, unquestionably,
the spiritual advent of the advancing idea of God, as in Christian
Science."
Eddy, January 1901: "I
should blush to write of Science and Health
with Key to the Scriptures as I have, were it
of human origin, and I, apart from God, its author. But, as I was
only a scribe echoing the harmonies of heaven in divine metaphysics,
I cannot be super-modest in my estimate of the Christian Science
textbook."
Differences to
Christianity
Christian
Science theology differs in several respects from that of traditional
Christianity. Eddy's Science
and Health
reinterprets key Christian concepts, including the Trinity, divinity
of Jesus, atonement, and resurrection; beginning with the 1883
edition, she added with
a Key to the Scriptures
to the title and included a glossary that redefined the Christian
vocabulary. At the core of Eddy's theology is the view that the
spiritual world is the only reality and is entirely good, and that
the material world, with its evil, sickness and death, is an
illusion.
Reinterprets key
Christian concepts
For
example. Eddy accepted as true the creation narrative in the Book of
Genesis up to chapter 2, verse 6—that God created man in his image
and likeness—but she rejected the rest "as the story of the
false and the material", according to Wilson.
the
Trinity
Her
theology is nontrinitarian: she viewed the Trinity as suggestive of
polytheism. She saw Jesus as a Christian Scientist, a "Way-shower"
between humanity and God, and she distinguished between Jesus the man
and the concept of Christ, the latter a synonym for Truth and Jesus
the first person fully to manifest it.
Atonement
and resurrection
The
crucifixion was not a divine sacrifice for the sins of humanity, the
atonement (the forgiveness of sin through Jesus's suffering) "not
the bribing of God by offerings", writes Wilson, but an
"at-one-ment" with God.
Life
after death/soul
Her
views on life after death were vague and, according to Wilson, "there
is no doctrine of the soul" in Christian Science: "[A]fter
death, the individual continues his probationary state until he has
worked out his own salvation by proving the truths of Christian
Science." Eddy did not believe that the dead and living could
communicate.
He
view that disease was a mental stat; that disease was something
their minds could control
His work was published
posthumously as The Quimby Manuscripts
in 1921—and was generous in allowing his patients to copy one of
his essays, "Questions and Answers." This became an issue,
from 1883 on-wards, when Eddy was accused of having based Christian
Science on his work.
Christian Scientists'
Association
Spofford and seven other
students agreed to form an association that would pay Eddy a certain
amount a week if she would preach to them every Sunday. They called
themselves the Christian Scientists' Association.
Her book
Initially
called The Science of Life, 1874. The book—Science
and Health by Mary Baker Glover, with eight chapters and 456
pages—finally appeared on October 30, 1875, published in the name
of the Christian Science Publishing Company.
To the 6th edition in
1883, Eddy added with a Key to the Scriptures (later retitled
with Key to the Scriptures), a 20-page glossary containing her
definitions of biblical terms. The book sold 15,000 copies between
1875 and 1885.
When
the copyright on Science and Health
expired in 1971, the church persuaded Congress to extend it to 2046.
The law was overturned as unconstitutional in 1987, after a challenge
by United Christian Scientists, an independent group.[175]
By 2001 Science and Health
had sold over nine million copies.
The article
Now I dont want to get too
deep into the health claims made by Eddy, and CS as a whole, but they
were a major drawing point.
The
early popularity of Christian Science was tied directly to the
promise engendered by its core beliefs: the promise of healing. The
overwhelming majority of those attracted to the movement came to be
healed, or came because a husband, wife, child, relative or friend
needed healing; the claims of Christian Science were so compelling
that people often stayed in the movement whether they found healing
or not, blaming themselves and not the church’s teachings for any
apparent failures.
\
But ultimately it was the
beginnings of its eventual downfall, although it took 70+ years for
that to happen. Even back in its heyday alarm bells where evident.
Newspapers
and prosecutors noticed the casualties, especially children dying of
unreported cases of diphtheria and appendicitis. In the early years
of the church, this touched off battles with the American Medical
Association, which tried to have Christian Science healers, or
“practitioners”, arrested for practising medicine without a
licence. Since practitioners did nothing but pray, however, their
activities were protected by the US constitution. Reacting with
righteous zeal, Church leaders doubled down for decades, furtively
slipping protections into the law and encouraging insurance companies
to cover Christian Science “treatment”. Since it cost very
little, the companies cynically complied.
And to be clear CS is notthe only sect of Christianity that practices faith healing.
Faith
healing is widely practiced by Christian Scientists, Pentecostalists,
the Church of the First Born, the Followers of Christ, and myriad
smaller sects. Many of these believers reject all medical treatment
in favor of prayer, anointing with oils, and sometimes exorcisms.
Some even deny the reality of illness. When they reject medical
treatment for their children, they may be guilty of negligence and
homicide. Until recently, religious shield laws have protected them
from prosecution; but the laws are changing, as are public attitudes.
Freedom of religion has come into conflict with the duty of society
to protect children. The right to believe does not extend to the
right to endanger the lives of children. A new book by Cameron
Stauth, In
the Name of God: The True Story of the Fight to Save Children from
Faith-Healing Homicide, provides the chilling details of
the struggle. He is a master storyteller; the book grabs the reader’s
attention like a fictional thriller and is hard to put down. He is
sympathetic to both the perpetrators and the prosecutors of
religion-motivated child abuse, and he makes their personalities and
their struggles come alive.
Hall then goes on to tell
the story of Rita and Doug Swan. Rita went on to found the Matthew
Project, which developed into a foundation called CHILD (Children’s
Healthcare Is a Legal Duty)
In 1998, pediatrician Seth
Asser and Rita Swan published an article in the medical journal
Pediatrics
entitled “Child Fatalities from Religion-motivated MedicalNeglect“. They documented 172 faith-healing deaths over a 20-year
period, involving 23 different sects in 34 states.
But as the main article notes
this led to “an incredible array of legal rights and privileges
across the US.”
As a
result, by the 1970s – a high-water mark for the church’s
political power, with many Scientists serving in Richard Nixon’s
White House and federal agencies – the church was well on its way
to accumulating an incredible array of legal rights and privileges
across the US, including broad-based religious exemptions from
childhood immunisations in 47 states, as well as exemptions from
routine screening tests and procedures given to newborns in
hospitals. The exemptions had consequences: modern-day outbreaks of
diphtheria, polio and measles in Christian Science schools and
communities. A 1972 polio outbreak in Connecticut left multiple
children partially paralysed; a 1985 measles outbreak (one of
several) at Principia College in Illinois killed three.
This led to a whole array
of issues, with the consequences being felt today.
In
many US states, Scientists were exempt from charges of child abuse,
neglect and endangerment, as well as from failure to report such
crimes. Practitioners with no medical training (they become “listed”
after two weeks of religious indoctrination) were recognised as
health providers, and in some states were required to report
contagious illnesses or cases of child abuse or neglect, even as
their religion demanded that they deny the evidence of the physical
senses. Practitioners, of course, have no way of recognising the
symptoms of an illness, even if they believe it existed, which they
don’t.
Example (2014), pretty sad
when specific piece of legislation needs to be introduced to
eliminate an exemption in Washington state law that allows Christian
Scientists—but not members of other religious groups—to treat
their children with prayer or faith-healing methods instead of
traditional medicine.
If I am reading
information correctly this bill did not pass. My Google-foo seemed to be lacking in finding more exact information.
And while the AV stance
has been around since day one, CS has had a hand in the mess we now
have. What the author describes is horrid.
A
whole system of Christian Science “nursing” sprang up in
unlicensed Christian Science sanatoriums and nursing homes catering
to patients with open wounds and bodies eaten away by tumours. There,
no medical treatment was allowed to interfere with prayer. Assigned
only the most basic duties – feeding and cleaning patients –
Christian Science “nurses” are not registered, and have no
medical training either. Instead, they engage in bizarre practices
such as leaving food on the mouths of patients who cannot eat. They
provide no assistance for those who are having trouble breathing,
administer no painkillers, react to no emergencies. “Do not
resuscitate” is their default. But some of these facilities, and
the incompetent care they provide, are covered by Medicare, the US’s
national healthcare insurance programme.
Now bear in mind, I have
no issue with what grown adults do to themselves. While I may not
agree, it is your personal decision. The only caveat to that is when
issues of public health are being undermined. What I do take issue
with, when your stupidity is foisted upon children and the elderly;
or when you promise a cure/treatment that is medically unproven and
in some cases out right dangerous – MMS, UT, Turp, JJ, etc.
An apt observation by the
author,
Still,
by this point, few people know or care what the Christian Scientists
have been up to, since the average person can’t tell you the
difference between a Christian Scientist and a Scientologist. The
decline of the faith, once a major indigenous sect, may be among the
most dramatic contractions in the history of American religion.
While I was aware that the
interest in CS was waning, I did not realize how drastic the drop,
in
1961, the year I was born, the number of branch churches worldwide
reached a high of 3,273. By the mid-80s, the number in the US had
dropped to 1,997; between 1987 and late 2018, 1,070 more closed,
while only 83 opened, leaving around a thousand in the US.
The
slide into irrelevance has been inexorable. The number of
practitioners has fallen to an all-time low of 1,126, and during the
last decade the Sentinel magazine has lost more than half its
subscribers. The Monitor, the public face of the Church, has become a
kind of zombie newspaper, laying off 30% of its staff in 2016. It is
now available as a five-days-a-week emailed newsletter, or a thin
print weekly that has been bleeding subscribers.
I find this a bit telling,
But
the reality of the existential crisis remained elusive to church
officials. In 2005, Nathan Talbot and J Thomas Black, longtime church
leaders who had promoted recklessly irresponsible policies
encouraging the medical neglect of children, endorsed ambitious plans
for raising the dead. Black argued that Eddy wanted to keep alive the
possibility of defeating mortality, saying, “What would set us
apart as a denomination more than raising the dead?” What indeed?
Black himself has had ample opportunity to demonstrate it: he died in
December 2011, and hasn’t been seen since.
The author continues,
But
for all its attempts to reach a wider world, the church has found
that the world could not care less.
Were this true for all
religious belief!! While it sounds harsh, I am a firm believer that
ALL religious mythos must die. When you have a religious leader(Peter LaRuffa) who states that he would believe the Bible even if it said 2+2=5, we are in a
world of hurt.
If I remember correctly,
the context of the statement was in regards to biblical innerrancy
and by his statement he would prefer to believe nonsense that he does
not understand rather than allow evidence to show his doctrine of
biblical inerrancy to be false.
And so he is not standing
up for the truthfulness of the Bible. He is, on the contrary, showing
that his beliefs about the Bible are unfalsifiable, that they cannot
be tested and so are “not even wrong.”
The following month, he hired a Christian Science nurse to stop by. She watched him struggle to wash his foot, and loftily told him that she had seen such conditions “healed completely” by Christian Science. She gave him sanitary napkins to wrap his foot in, urging him to see it solely as a mental problem.
According to the article
it wasn't until 2010 that the church began to rethink the whole notion
of prayer alone for healing
By
2010, signs of the church’s impending mortality had become so
unmistakable that officials took a previously inconceivable step.
They threw Mary Baker Eddy under the bus. A century after the death
of their “beloved founder and leader”, the directors took her
most precious principle, radical reliance – requiring Scientists to
hew solely to prayer – and renounced it in the pages of the New
York Times.
But as the author notes, a
little too late,
,,,glossed
over the scores of bodies left in the church’s wake. No one will
ever know how many, because the church does not keep statistics.
Fraser mentions more than
50 Christian Science parents or practitioners who have been charged
with crimes for allowing children to suffer or die of treatable
conditions.
While, according to Fraser,
the church had begun “pulling back on aggressive state lobbying,
often taking a neutral position on religious shield laws,,, Neither
Davis nor any other official has expressed remorse for a century of
suffering and death caused by the church. And while the softening may
have curtailed medical neglect involving children of Scientists, it
has done nothing to stem abuse by other sects – abuse the church
alone enabled.”
IOWs, it is analogous to the pedo priests,,,
IOWs, it is analogous to the pedo priests,,,
It
was the Christian Science church that put religious exemptions to
child abuse on the books, opening a Pandora’s box and releasing all
manner of religious extremists and militant anti-vaccination
fanatics. It was church officials who engineered the 1970s US federal
regulation that led to virtually every state enacting laws allowing
parents to neglect children and get away with it.
Fraser goes on to mention
Doug and Rita Swan mentioning the repeal in Oregon and ensuing
debacle in Idaho.
The
Oregon legislature became so ashamed of allowing Followers of Christ,
a Pentecostal faith-healing group, to fill a cemetery with newborns
and stillborn children that it repealed its religious exemption laws
in 2011. But some Followers simply picked up and moved to Idaho,
which has become the go-to state if you are prepared to let your kids
die.
Fraser, I believe, asked a
pertinent set of questions,
So
did the softening of some Christian Science attitudes suggest that
the church was undergoing a genuine change of heart? Or were they
trying to save their jobs, their pride and the institution?
Questions that can also be
ask of not just the RCC, but other institutions dealing with the pedo
priests. In my experience, aggregating reports of various abuses
within the entire religious community, whether its pedo priests,
anti-LGBTQI+, child neglect, or even financial fraud etc, any
actions taken by THE CHURCH is one big ole PR campaign.
Fraser sums it up well,
Fraser sums it up well,
It is
hard, at this late date, to be moved by Scientists’ threadbare
theological squabbles and internecine court battles, by the minutiae
of their predicaments. The church deserves to die, and it is dying.
It just can’t happen soon enough.
Fraser finishes by
describing her father's last days, concluding with this,
Sometime after his death,
I dreamed about him. I was alone in a warehouse – a dark, menacing
space – and in it my father had dissolved into a miasma, covering
the floor with a kind of deadly, toxic slime. Somehow, I was tasked
with the problem of cleaning it up, without ever touching it. It was,
of course, impossible.
That is where Christian
Science leaves us. It could disappear today or tomorrow or years from
now, but its own beliefs, and the religious exemptions it has seeded
in laws all across the US, will leave a disaster in their wake,
resulting in lives ruined, in unnecessary suffering and death, and in
legislation that allows every crackpot cult and anti-vaccination
zealot to sacrifice their children. Christian Scientists can renounce
Eddy all they want, but it will not undo the evil they have done.
That is their legacy.
This was a response/rebuttal also from he Guardian,
,,,yet
her depiction of the Christian Science church is almost
unrecognisable based on my own experience. Yes, like many other
Christian denominations, our church has had important lessons to
learn – and has seen a decline in numbers. But the Christian
Scientists I know strive to provide unconditional support for their
loved ones, with each individual free to choose the type of
healthcare, including medical, that is most effective for them. The
five years I spent as administrator of a Christian Science care home
– a place full of joy and longevity for those choosing spiritual
healing – were far from what Ms Fraser describes.
