how does one stage a coup in such a tightly-held organization?

**Hi Anonymous, and welcome back. You are referring to what I called a "coup" in 2004. I was speaking almost figuratively. Two distinct factions had sprung up over the previous ten years. The newer one might be called "liberal," which held that the church needed to tear down the walls of exclusivity and let new ideas, people and programs come in to invigorate the church. And the other was, well, pretty much the opposite. They liked walls because they believed that any change from what the founder had done, prescribed or thought about would cause the fragile structure of the denomination and belief system to fall apart. As it turned out, both of them were right. A lot of big money from the heyday of Christian Science was still around and able to finance programs like the website I was involved with. The old guard raised countless squawks about how the religion was being watered down, but their objections were overruled by the new leadership, which had the cunning and force of will to hedge itself about with the wealth and ingenuity of several key players. I was part of that new guard, recruited for my rebel nature, willingness to be led and the flattery of being brought to some level of prominence in a new venture.

The reason both factions hastened the demise of the "movement" is that both were based on magical thinking, which couldn't withstand the ever-increasing prevalence of more realistic views of the world. The old guard believed that Mary Baker Eddy had invented something so radical that it was unique, and that its uniqueness - and therefore its very life - was preserved only by keeping it unadulterated, i.e. unchanged in the least degree. The new guard had believed that with just a few tweaks, Christian Science would become popular again. People would look past the nineteenth-century world view and see that it was basic christianity for the modern era, heedless of the fact that christianity itself was dying out because of its fundamental irrelevance and corrupted institutions. At the same time, it believed that many of the central tenets and systems should be preserved. So, for instance, it published Eddy's foundational book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, word for word as she had left it 150 years before. The problem is that the book was prohibited from ever being revised after her death - regardless of new information about how the world works. Her view of evolution, for example, was to ultimately blow it off even while admitting that Darwin had a reasonable explanation. Welcome to the two-mindedness of Christian Science. You can call Darwin a perceptive thinker and at the same time deny his validity because ultimately he was talking about the material world, which Eddy taught was essentially unreal. The liberals failed because they really weren't all that liberal, and all the lipstick they could trowel onto the pig of an outdated world view couldn't convince very many people that here was something they could reliably believe in and practice. Especially when it involved abstinence from the health care practices that have become the standard throughout the world.

So the "coup" came about because there were some other well-financed and savvy people (today we would call them tea-baggers) who were willing to take advantage of the succession system in the church and put a couple of its people on the Board of directors. These, in turn, raising the specter of fiscal irresponsibility (the church had squandered millions in its camouflage efforts) worked on enough of the remaining new guarders to turn on their liberal leader and throw her out. Once she was gone it was easy to undo all the innovations she had put in place. The walls went up again and there was universalrecognition that if the movement was going to die out, life for the old guarders should be kept comfortable to the end. We're talking about a very elderly population here, people generally not inclined to change anyway, and fierce about protecting their comfort. So, the world stopped hearing about Christian Science in either its new or its old form, and never missed it. It's just not an idea that has legs (the image of Darwin's fish comes to mind).

Safely inside its cocoon, the members congratulate themselves on their purity and go about their rituals as always. And Christian Science continues to die with each of their deaths.

I hope you see my point in the last several posts. It's not that anybody did anything wrong that caused the demise of Christian Science. Its basic premises cannot stand up to the realities that the physical sciences reveal. It's old. It's creepy. It's delusional. It's not only snake oil, it's snake oil that has far exceeded its expiration date.

5000 kids

there's still at least 5000 kids in christian science sunday schools

** Continuing the dialogue with my anonymous commenter, who thinks I need to save some of the 5000 kids still in Christian Science Sunday Schools. Again I demur.

1. That's not a large number. There are probably more kids being abused daily by priests in Catholic schools and churches across the country. And that's damage being done right now. Whereas kids of Christian Scientist parents are simply being indoctrinated into a belief system that exposes them to risk, first from their parents' decisions and then from the bad health practices they learn. Also, there are plenty more weird parents of other religious persuasions doing present and future damage to kids just because they're bad people.

3. Kids of Christian Scientist parents don't have much choice about where they're going to spend their Sunday mornings. Their parents just take them there and the kids learn to adapt the best they can. This does not necessarily mean they're getting deeply programmed. Christian Science is boring for kids. For them Sunday School (and camp, and higher schools and that college) it's mostly a social thing. Although, admittedly, some find the beliefs meaningful because of other factors in their lives.

The problem is the parents, the die-hards who make decisions for their kids that put them in danger. Or the ideals or fears they instill in the kids that lead them to adopt this totally unreasonable way of life when they get on their own. It's the same with all religions - get to the kids and make them believe they actually belong to something important and vital to their interests. That's why I never use the term "(x) (religion) kids." Kids are natural atheists until they are warped into identifying with the cults of their parents. Instead, they should be described as "the kids of (x) religionists."

In any case, the musings of this old fart will hardly reach them. I would gladly disabuse parents of the folly of putting their kids into Christian Science (or any other) Sunday Schools if any would seek my counsel - but I doubt any would. And again, the numbers aren't there. Christian Science is an old fad that is rapidly dying out with the wealthy but dying old farts who never broke the spell.

However, there are much more articulate thinkers on this subject who should be studied, my favorite being Daniel C. Dennett. I read "Breaking the Spell," as I was climbing out of the rubble of my destroyed career at the Boston headquarters. From there I moved on to his "Darwin's Dangerous Idea." And once I discovered evolution it wasn't long before Dennett led to Dawkins, led to Harris led to Stenger and the so-called New Atheists.

When the spell broke, I found myself mentally, and emotionally, back to the point just before I began the 35-year-long detour trying to make Christian Science respectable to myself and the general public. It has been difficult closing the gap between then and now, but five years later I am scrambling to accomplish something of artistic value before infirmity or some other cataclysm shuts me down. It's a more positive contribution, I feel, than writing a screed against something hardly anyone cares about anymore. ("Phrenology Exposed!")

Interestingly, for several months after leaving Boston I, for some other reason entirely, wrote short diary-like accounts, which I now see contain signs of my awkward and painful awakening out of a life-long theological trance. These may someday be useful, or at least interesting, to someone trying to break free of religion - though I'm sure Christian Science will be even more irrelevant by then.

The commenter also mentioned I was a "made man in the Christian Science mafia." Well, I have the right kind of surname, and probably the other qualification... Still, they never let me be boss of anything. ;-)

"LIVES DEPEND ON IT!"

** So says my new commenter, urging me to continue to populate this space with my thoughts about Christian Science. I appreciate the intent, but I'm pretty sure no lives will be saved because of this. The time to have spoken up was twenty years ago, when there were enough people maundering down that path to constitute a statistical risk. During that "nova" period Christian Scientists were not only more plentiful but many were proudly displaying their commitment by sacrificing their kids and themselves to it. Kids would clamor for a doctor and would receive prayer from a "practitioner" instead. People would walk around with disfiguring lesions, lumps and limps for years and proclaim that they were responsibly getting "treatment' for the problem. And because the Church still had lots of money, there was more publicity for a health care system that synched with the rising "spirituality" craze. It even invested heavily in the word "spirituality" as a domain name to link its teachings with the hip new Internet culture. If you advertise it, they will come. And lives will be at stake.

But the modern spirituality movement has fizzled, and the attempt to blend a nineteenth-century world view with it depleted serious money from the Church. Which pissed off the conservatives, naturally. So they took their church back and with the remaining assets bought themselves a quiet and comfortable slide into its dotage, the few remaining stalwarts sneaking off to doctors even as they stood up at Wednesday meetings to proclaim how much better their religion is than anyone else's.

No, it's long odds that anyone will stop practicing Christian Science because of me and this obscure little memoir. There just aren't enough of them - or people like me - to have much impact. But it is gratifying to know that this proud and quirky "way of life" is suffocating under its own protective camouflage blanket.

Comment on a recent comment

**

p.s. i'm one of your former colleagues at the mother church. the place may have been odd when you were there, but it's become an insane asylum since you left.

Don't know who this is but I appreciate the visit. I haven't been very active on this "column" for a long time, a victim of the "social networks." I can only imagine how insane Christian Science headquarters is these days. It's the insanity of senility.
When I was fired, it was part of an implosion that had been building for several years. A desperate attempt to "modernize" this odd and insane belief system by a small group of rebels taunted and terrorized the old guard, who with a kind of ancient wisdom knew that it would never work, and in 2004 staged a successful coup. They knew, better than the innovators, that all the lipstick applied with a 4-inch brush could never disguise this antiquarian pig. I had been getting glimpses of the underlying insanity of Christian Science ever since I was an accomplice in a young child's death from medical neglect. I spent the ten years after that tragedy trying to rationalize it, defending through speeches and writing the myopia of the underlying beliefs that led to it, and letting myself become a symbol of its new modernity.
Still, it took a complete revelation of the insanity of any religion to set me free from this odd little "movement." I never hear from anyone who still works there but I can readily imagine what is going on five years since I left. Like a dying star, during my tenure there, this church and its "movement" issued a nova flash of vitality as the last expendable energy gave out. Now, as it collapses, it is becoming even smaller and denser and cold and dark, with the brittleness of old age and imbued with the stink of death. And yet, as my commenter suggests, the zombies are still wearing their sweet smiles and making wonderful predictions about a resurgence.

Woody Allen speaks for me

Interviewed by a priest for the Catholic Commonweal magazine, Woody Allen clearly articulates his world view. Most people will find it depressing, not because it isn't true, but because it isn't hopeful. Until five or so years ago, I was in that class. All my life I had sought a meaning, a principle, an unfailing source of goodness that controlled me and the universe. Even when I stopped believing in "heaven" as a place I still thought of it as a state of mind produced by a connection with an orderly, loving and benevolent "higher power." I now know that none of that is true. Woody and I are about the same age and his views are similar. It took a long, long time but I now view the universe as a cruel, brutal, purposeless state of being. All the forms of religion and positive thinking are attempts to mask the vacuousness we innately sense as soon as our infantile megalomania bursts. These masks don't have to be lifelong commitments or affiliations with organizations. They can be momentary, repeated and simple. Woody calls them "oases":

Well, you know, you want some kind of relief from the agony and terror of human existence. Human existence is a brutal experience to me…it’s a brutal, meaningless experience—an agonizing, meaningless experience with some oases, delight, some charm and peace, but these are just small oases...You can sit down and hear a Mozart symphony, or you can watch the Marx Brothers, and this will give you a pleasant escape for a while. And that is about the best that you can do…. I feel that one can come up with all these rationalizations and seemingly astute observations, but I think I said it well at the end of Deconstructing Harry: we all know the same truth; our lives consist of how we choose to distort it, and that’s it.

They are forms of consciousness-altering drugs with one purpose: to relieve us of the awareness that our lives are ultimately meaningless. And they work, more or less. But as with such drugs there are dangerous side effects. Religious zealots try to bring everyone under the spell of their dream and are at the least a PITA, and at worst terrorists who kill innocents for their god. "Bright-siders" try to add to the chorus of cheeriness that masks their own inner screams and make you feel guilty for your realism. Booze, pot and other pharmaceuticals have their obvious hazards.

Artists practice a peculiar form of masking. Not only do they provide audiences with momentary escape from existential anguish, but they achieve a kind of eternality by leaving behind their works. At my age, this appears to be all that is left for me to do. So I compose and record little musical works that may live on with someone somewhere someday. It's a far cry from the "eternal life" I sought and thought I had understood for so many years. But it is a kind of oasis for me. and this article comforts me with the assurance that someone of Allen's stature sees it the same.

 

Thoughts after a power outage

Our complex of about 250 homes lost electrical power for about 8 hours yesterday. I was working so I didn't even know about it until I was informed that we'd be eating out since there was no power for cooking at home. Coming to a darkened neighborhood after dinner, we did the usual setting up of battery-operated lights and then just sat in the dark waiting for the lights to come back on. Which they did around 10:30PM.

I've recently been reading Richard Clarke's Cyber War, whose subtitle is: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It. I'm reading it on our iPad. The glow from the iPad and the decreasing power available in its battery got me thinking about how isolated we would be if there were to be a cyber attack that targeted the power grid - as Clarke was saying while I read in the dark. The power grid in the US is probably the easiest to bring down since it is so tied into the Internet and there is no security that a child hacker can't crack. Why have we been so lucky? Because it isn't to any enemy's advantage yet to bring us down? Every personal computer (especially those running Windows) is a potential, and likely, carrier of hidden software that can be commandeered from a great distance to inflict some kind of damage. You don't have to know about it, don't have to approve of anything - it just runs as though you had approved. Tens of thousands of such computers can be stealthily united into a potent military strike force. Commerical antivirus software is way too slow and imprecise to prevent the zombification of your computer.

What to do about all for this? I don’t' know, but Clarke seems to be promising some practical ideas later in the book. I will watch for these and hope there's a way I can participate. However, I have serious doubts that I - or most people - can do anything about this. How about the next generations? It'll probably be your full time preoccupation. I wish you luck.

Interview at ABC news

Other commentary

 

The bone-on-boneness of living in only one world

Having done it myself for over 35 years, most Christian Scientists attempt to live in two worlds at the same time - the ideal and the real - though they won’t admit it. I would take every opportunity to deny the less-than-ideal facts of the real world, calling it just a dream or delusion, or at most a “temporary” accommodation to inferior understanding, while asserting that the world of the “spirit” was tangible and real, even though our sensory apparatus cannot detect it. By “real” I mean the world where scalpels get the job done, even though believing in a perfect other dimension may provide comfort and may induce relaxation that aids the physical process.

Now that I am out of it, I readily notice that giving this freebie to CS is a trait that seems indelible in people who were raised in that system. As often, and in whatever way possible, they rise to give credit to their religion for every good outcome regardless of simpler material explanations.

But the tyranny of a “lifer’s” indoctrination may be no worse than the chronic agony of a jilted convert, like me. I find it difficult to shake the resentment of the mental abuse I suffered from the ideas I ingested. I know I should forget about it and move on, but I still have a pain whose cause needs to be fully excised. Or else I should learn to live with it, the same way I used to live with the physical difficulties that didn’t get resolved through prayer. Some Christian Scientists I know eventually turn to medicine - and the older they get the more readily they turn to it - and get the relief they’ve been postponing out of loyalty to the theory of spiritual healing. They even conclude that prayer and spiritual forces had something to do with it, if only to enable acceptance of and peace with themselves afterward. Good for them. But it’s all still out of reach for me. I don’t have the alternative of an ideal, spiritual world to explain away the bone-on-boneness of walking around in the real world. The only one.

The new look

**I really liked the old template but it was pretty old - about ten years. and the archives and comments modules were broken. And since lately I seem to have stirred up some comment activity, I chose another template that will display them. Hope this one isn't too wacky for your eyes. I'll work with it awhile and change if I see something better.

Poor but typical defenses of Christian Science

There are two predictable responses you'll get from Christian Scientists when they are challenged about the ineffectiveness, and danger, of their particular brand of spiritual healing:

1. People have bad medical outcomes too
2. They know without a doubt that healing happens because they’ve experienced it themselves.

I was Christian Scientist who had no medical insurance for over 30 years, but never needed it anyway because I never got seriously sick. Then I started to get old and age-related things started to happen. This was coincidental with a complete loss of faith in any deity and any religion. I now have frequent medical interventions and take a few medications every day.
A critic might conclude that it was Christian Science that kept me healthy enough for those 30 years and it was only when I lost my faith that I started to get sick. I don’t think this is true. I have three other siblings. Two of them have several health issues, some of them serious enough to require major surgeries. The eldest of the four, my sister and I, have been relatively healthy all our lives. She worked in the health care industry during the time that I was a practicing Christian Scientist. It seems obvious that we either got the good genes - or else something changed after our births caused our mother to give birth to sickly children. Nutrition? Smoking? Diabetes? We don't know and it would be hard to find out. My point is that my sister didn't have the "benefits" of Christian Science and she has been pretty much as healthy as I.
The fact is that if public health had been left up to the teachings of Christian Science and those who seriously practice it, we would be a third or fourth world nation today. For instance, bad water, a major source of disease, would never have been purified because microbes are considered by Christian Scientists to be illusions. (Besides, right thinking of this sort would make everyone invulnerable to any suggestion of infection.) If Christian Scientists were in charge no one would have done the research to identify the microbial source of disease and nothing would have been done to purify water. Prayer alone and a highly spiritual life would have been sufficient, in that belief system. And yet today even Christian Scientists benefit from the fruits of those who worked on the problem.
Yes, medical practice isn't perfect, and yes there have been serious mistakes made in its history. And yet, on the whole, today people are generally healthier and live longer because they get regular medical attention. Progress still needs to be made, especially in America where Corporate Scientists have taken charge of the food and pharmaceutical industries. But this does not warrant the kind of condemnation implicit in the retorts of Christian Scientists that medicine has its failures too. As I have said many times before, if Christian Science prayer were truly as effective as its adherents claim, it would have overtaken conventional medicine by now. There would be huge industries dispensing that kind of treatment because it would be meeting a vast need. And yet, Christian Science practitioners are an infinitesimal portion of the health care industry, catering mostly to church members who have been taught from infancy to fear doctors and abhor medication and who are all too eager to testify to the supremacy of Christian Science treatment even when it means bending the facts or exaggeration. Christian Science is not the better mousetrap that the world will generously pay for.
Despite the lack of evidence, Christian Scientists desperately fall back on their own inner convictions as a final defense against the claim that its health care system is impotent and therefore dangerous. But every philosophy student knows that basing an argument on unverified personal convictions is bad logic and provides unreliable guidance for others.
While it's true that there seems to be a "god hole" in human consciousness, this is no proof that a god must therefore exist. Not all dreams come true. In fact, most don't. Delusions may be comforting, but they are still delusions. You can't always get what you want, but for most people, most of the time, they get what they need from the conventional medical community.
A recent article in the Washington Post provides an overview of these issues.

The few, the healthy, the lucky

A “truce” with medicine

A mild stir has ensued from a report that my former church is trying to make some efforts to ward off criticism that its form of spirituality is in conflict with general standards of health care. The NYT story didn’t go the way the PR department at the church had expected. It conveys the image of an organization in the final throes of its own death. The few remaining adherents are getting deeply into old age.

To be a Christian Scientist is to attribute health and healing to right thinking about reality. It includes the belief that there is a universal benign power that creates and inhabits a world of perfection and happiness. It also attributes all imperfection and unhappiness to wrong thinking, or the belief that we live in some other universe. Healing involves aligning “thinking” with the the perfect world. So, ultimately the responsibility for health is on each individual.

One of the most serious consequences of this belief system is the implication that sick people are to blame for their problems. I have seen people with every kind of ailment endure pain, disfigurement and various degrees of impairment because they believed that these problems would go away as soon as their minds clicked into alignment with the belief that everyone is perfectly OK.

As detailed here recently, a fine and spunky member of the family succumbed because: 1) she refused to have a fibroid removed, and 2) because, at her insistence, no one would give her nourishment via some alternative means.

The church can posture as much as it wants about how it is liberalizing its policies, but the fact of the matter is that most of its dwindling membership is seriously senior and their brain pathways are deeply grooved in the old policies. Most of them will judge the church as straying from the true path and will continue to hobble through the rest of their lives hoping they will pass away quietly in the night with little or no discomfort. And a few of them may welcome the excuse to finally get a medical diagnosis or a prescription for a pain killer or antibiotic or whatever they need. Parents have been scared for the past ten or so years because of legal measures that provide severe punishments for failure to provide medical care to children - so they aren't a significant part of the intended audience.

The whole belief system is defined by a book, Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy, which she has deemed perfect and complete and is not subject to revision or updating in light of new facts that may emerge to challenge some of her assumptions. One of the most egregious, for me, is her damningly faint praise for Darwin’s discoveries. She basically says that as far as wrong explanations of the natural world are concerned he is less wrong than most. But still wrong. The world isn’t material, she claims, is not governed by universal physical laws, but is a dream state that is the exact opposite of the true spiritual state, which is totally good and eternal. What I eventually came to realize is that the “spiritual” world is the dream state, while the material one is the one that deserves and needs our attention.

People who take up the Christian Science way of life are idealists who sincerely want a better world, and are appalled that there is so much evil and ugliness in their daily lives. The ones who defend it the most, however, are those who have strong constitutions, good genes and a ton of good luck. Their commitment to advancing the cause of Christian Science allows them to attribute their good fortune to the ideas and techniques taught in Eddy’s book.

However, the aging process moves inexorably along and even the Directors of the church must be feeling it - a recent photo of the five of them is scary. If it weren’t for the attempt to get the public to pay for their religion’s wacky prayer treatments they wouldn’t have bothered to posture as “liberals.” Incidentally, most of the Directors took over the church in 2004 coup because they represented staunch conservatives who thought the religion was being diluted by appeal to an increasingly skeptical public and as well as an increasingly confused and discouraged membership. The effort to get this brand of “right thinking” health care covered by government-paid health insurance is laughable and its rejection is a scrap of evidence that there are still some legislators who can think straight - at least for a few moments at a time.

Christian Science Church Seeks Truce With Modern Medicine

Oops! Condolences to those who were affected by the Pre-
Truce standard. I'll have more to say on this later, but for now here's the article as it ran in the NYT:

Christian Science Church Seeks Truce With Modern Medicine
By PAUL VITELLO
Published: March 23, 2010


Since the founding of their church 131 years ago, Christian Scientists have been taught to avoid doctors at all cost. It is a conviction rooted so deeply in church dogma that dozens of members have endured criminal prosecution rather than surrender an ailing person to what they see as the quackery of medical science.
Enlarge This Image
Ángel Franco/The New York Times

But faced with dwindling membership and blows to their church’s reputation caused by its intransigence concerning medical treatment, even for children with grave illnesses, Christian Science leaders have recently found a new tolerance for medical care. For more than a year, leaders say, they have been encouraging members to see a physician if they feel it is necessary.

Perhaps more significantly, they have begun a public campaign to redefine their methods as a form of care that the broader public should consider as a supplement rather than a substitute for conventional treatment, like biofeedback, chiropractic or homeopathic care.

In recent years, the church has been lobbying to convince lawmakers that its approach is an alternative way of tending to the sick, and that its costs should be covered by insurance companies and included in health care legislation.

Lobbyists succeeded in getting provisions that encourage private insurance coverage of Christian Science care into both the 2006 legislation overhauling health care in Massachusetts and the United States Senate version of the health care overhaul; both measures were removed in negotiations. Church officials say they intend to keep trying, at both the state and federal level.

“In the last year, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been called to pray at a patient’s bedside in a hospital,” said Philip Davis, 59, the church’s national spokesman, who has been tending to the sick for three decades as a Christian Science practitioner. The church trains and registers its practitioners to help patients with their prayers.

His credentials as a practitioner consist of a friendly Midwestern manner and a certainty that sickness is the manifestation of a conflict between “correct” and “incorrect” thinking. He does not believe in germs or the existence of illness, which they consider a dreamlike state.

The faith’s guiding textbook forbids mixing medical care with Christian Science healing, which is a form of transcendental prayer intended to realign a patient’s soul with God.

But rigid thinking has not served the church well in the last half century, Mr. Davis said. Though officials do not provide membership statistics, scholars estimate that the church’s numbers have dropped to under 100,000 from a peak of about twice that at the turn of the 20th century. The faith has about 1,100 churches in the United States and 600 abroad.

In New York City, falling membership forced the Christian Science church on Park Avenue to lease its building part time to a catering service in 2006. Another Manhattan church remains open; a third closed in 2005.

“We are a church on a slow curve of diminishment, in good part because of what people see as our stridency,” he said in an interview at the church’s New York offices on East 42nd Street near Grand Central Terminal. “So we asked ourselves, ‘Are we only going to pray for you if we find you pure enough and spiritual enough?’ ”

Mary Baker Eddy, who founded the Church of Christ, Scientist, in 1879 in Boston, wrote in the church’s textbook, “Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures,” that anyone inviting a doctor to his sickbed “invites defeat.”

Mr. Davis said that by toning down “the judgmental part of our nature” and opening the doors to people seeking Christian Science prayer as a sort of “value-added health care,” the church hopes to keep alive a form of religious practice that its adherents still see as the true path to salvation.

Religious scholars say the church’s past reticence, even secrecy, in the face of what its leaders have considered persecution, makes it difficult to know how widely the new message is being embraced among members, or how long it will last.

Publicly, the church has always said that its members were free to choose medical care. But some former Christian Scientists say those who consult doctors risk ostracism.

The truth may lie somewhere in between, said Rennie B. Schoepflin, a professor of religious history at California State University in Los Angeles and author of “Christian Science on Trial: Religious Healing in America.”

“There has never been a monolithic ‘Church of Christian Science,’ ” he said. “There has always been a tension between those in the church who were more zealous and those who were less so.”

The source of deepest tension, said Gary Dorrien, the Reinhold Niebuhr professor of social ethics at Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan, “is the fact that Christian Scientists are best known right now for denying medical care,” especially to children who subsequently die.

Over its history, more than 50 church members or practitioners have been charged in connection with such deaths. Prosecutions have come in waves, most recently during the 1980s and ’90s, when the church and its practitioners were linked to the deaths of a half-dozen children whose lives, the authorities said, might have been saved if they had not been denied medical care.

“The church of today would not let that happen,” said Mr. Davis, who was quoted last June in The Christian Science Journal, an official church publication, as telling parents to “do what you have to do for your kids’ health,” including seeking a doctor’s help.

Church officials recently permitted two practitioners and two patients to talk about Christian Science treatments with a reporter from The New York Times — a rare public discussion that they said they hoped would demonstrate the commitment to transparency, and would help people understand their beliefs.

They would not discuss the care of children or let a reporter witness a treatment session. And neither practitioner was willing to discuss the new flexibility described by Mr. Davis.

But in conversations liberally supplemented with citations from “Science and Health,” they explained their basic beliefs: In Christian Science, they said, sickness and suffering are misunderstandings — or as Mrs. Eddy wrote, “a mistaken belief” in the “power of ill health.”

One of the practitioners, John Q. Adams of Manhattan, said a patient who came to him with a lump under his arm was experiencing “a manifestation of fear, not a lump.”

The other practitioner, Rebecca Odegaard of Boston, said that if a patient had a bleeding gash in his arm, “I would try to calm this person, and help him overcome the fear.” Such a patient is suffering anxiety over the illusion that something has injured his “true self,” when the gash has only happened to his “material self,” Ms. Odegaard said.

In both cases, said Mr. Adams, healing requires engaging in “an argument with yourself to restore the truth.”

While both practitioners said they would continue to consult with patients who see a doctor, Ms. Odegaard said, “it would not be the same kind of prayer.”

“In that case, I would be available to that person,” she said. “I would never abandon someone.”

About 1,400 practitioners are registered with the church, roughly half as many as were listed in church publications in 1985, Professor Schoepflin said.

The treatment does not cost much. Patients pay $25 to $50 per consultation, whether for a five-minute phone conversation, an e-mail exchange or face-to-face.

The low cost is among the concerns expressed by some critics, worried that poor people might be attracted to the $25 treatments. But the main opposition to Christian Science and other prayer treatments has come from the medical establishment, most forcefully the American Academy of Pediatrics.

“Given the complete lack of scientific evidence of the efficacy of prayer in treating any illness or disorder in children,” academy officials wrote Senate leaders in October, “mandating coverage for these services runs counter to the principles of evidence-based medicine.”

Jane Warmack, the director of the church’s legislative division, said nothing in the measures it had proposed would hurt children. Insurance companies, she said, would simply have the option to cover prayer treatments.

Given their low cost, she added, “the insurance companies would have little to lose — it’s kind of a no-brainer for them.”

A version of this article appeared in print on March 24, 2010, on page A20 of the New York edition.

Family-assisted suicide

Dr. Kevorkian was pilloried and branded "Dr. Death" because he was willing to help terminally ill people who had come to a decision to end their lives voluntarily. "Physician-assisted suicide" became synonymous with the macabre, the unprofessional, the criminal.

And yet, when religious beliefs enable people to do the same thing by withholding essential medical or nutritional aid, we chalk it up to religious "freedom" and "patient rights."

I'm brought to these considerations because a dear woman in our family circle was allowed to starve to death because she had instructed her family not to intervene when a physical condition made it impossible for her to take food. I don't know what the physical condition was, but from all appearances she had a very large growth in her abdomen. It might have been a fibroid or some other kind of tumor that had grown so large it could have compressed her digestive system to the point where she could not take food normally. We will never know because she was a Christian Scientist and was sequestered in a Christian Science "care" facility where no medical diagnosis is allowed, much less medical treatment.

So I am presented with the stunning picture of a starving woman insisting that her children in attendance not allow her to take nutritional sustenance. After about two weeks of starvation, the woman died. No surprise there. Yes, she was elderly and frail and who knows if something else was eating up her innards, but to die from starvation when food in some ingestible form is available seems like a macabre tragedy. But what makes it outrageous is that her children took turns watching her die that way. As far as I know, none of them even suggested that a medical diagnosis be given, simply to see if some natural means might be used to keep her alive.

I was a deeply committed Christian Scientist for over 35 years, an advanced student who had been elevated to the position of "teacher," so that others might learn how to "heal" through prayer alone. I eventually (after far, far too long) realized the lunacy of this belief system and severed all ties both official and psychological with Christian Science. But my deep knowledge of the intricacies of that system reveal several "outs" with which these children could have probably prolonged their mother's life. Specifically, there are passages in the "sacred literature" that allow for consultation with medical experts on "the anatomy of the case." Meaning, that they could have at least known the physical situation that was causing their mother distress. Perhaps in that "anatomy" there could have been a workaround that would have allowed the poor woman to receive essential nutrition. And continue living.

However the four children of this dear woman had been raised from birth in this belief system, which probably explains why they found it at least tolerable to sit mutely by and watch their mother starve to death. I've found that "lifers" like this are firmly imprisoned in their ways and despite all rational explanations to the contrary just cannot let go of a reverence for a system that believes there is a "spiritual" power available to the faithful that can reverse natural processes of life and death. There isn't. Plain and simple. There isn't. And those of us who did not get programmed at an early age to believe the lunacy find it a little easier to let go. But brain pathways so deeply imbedded are very, very difficult to reroute toward the reasonable.

There will be a memorial service for her at a Christian Science church in her area, and I have been asked to not attend if I cannot celebrate her life instead of being swayed by the tragedy of her death. Her death is not the tragedy. It is the manner of her death that is so odious. That her children, her church members and friends are asking reasonable people to come to "celebrate her life," is almost too preposterous to contemplate. Perhaps I can be removed from the mawkish "celebration" by helping to park cars, babysitting or something.

My dear son, whose mother-in-law was the victim of this Family-Assisted Suicide, knows better. But he is a more gentle and tolerant man than I will ever be. I know that he would not want his family to let him die from neglect. And neither would I! Yes, the medical establishment is not perfect. Insurance companies, political pressure groups and the huge industries that profit from the physical frailties of humans make caring for each other a difficult choice. But I would hope that reason, sweet reason, might prevail should he -or I- be the victim of some malady that gave my family the power to facilitate my life or death.

Religion may be more than a headache for non-believers

The damage that religion does may start in the brain of the believer. This post cites findings of a team of researchers in Italy who found that "damage to a specific region of the brain (the posterior parietal cortex) can increase a person’s feelings of “self-transcendence,” or the feeling of being connected to others and to the universe." If so, I'm not sure if surgery is the cure for this affliction. In my case, there was no surgery, just a growing recognition of the basic insanity of religious beliefs and practices. But perhaps this was abetted by brain changes. In any case, there's something not quite right about people who fervently espouse religion, but I doubt there will be a physical cure for this anytime soon.
If and until then, education and honesty will still be the most effective liberator.

I am published!

** In December '09 my friend/drummer Rick and I arranged to record five of my songs at Ex'pression College of Digital Arts in Emeryville. We gathered most of the RedHouse AllStars plus a bunch of other musicians and recorded the old fashioned way, on two-inch tape. While I continue to work on the rest of the songs, and on some new ones, I managed to get the first two songs published on iTunes, amazonmp3.com and a few other online stores. When the present crop of songs is finished I intend to publish them all as an album.

In the meantime, here's a link to the current offerings online: