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.
2 comments:
Microbes are not considered in Christian Science to be illusions. There is a spiritual truth to microbes just as there is to everything else. If we could understand that clearly, we wouldn't find them harmful. In the interim, basic hygiene is in order, and I have never met any Christian Scientists who had a problem with using basic hygiene. (In fact, as a Christian Scientist I have many cleaning products in my own bathroom--probably too many for the sake of the environment!)
All right, I should have been more specific. It’s the harm from microbes that is the illusion. Of course, if you ask the microbes they’re just doing their thing. Just like your body is doing its thing. The “harm” comes from when the two “things” conflict. Your body doesn’t like having its cells eaten, say, but the microbes think it’s a great meal. How would the “spiritual truth” change this? The microbes would realize that they didn’t like your cells? Or your body would get along without the cells that have been eaten?
Even trying to answer these questions points up the looniness of the Christian Science point of view. In the end, the claim that there is no harm at all from microbes is an unproven assertion. In millions and millions of cases, microbes cause physical harm. But in few cases do we find that they don’t, and any exceptions will have a physical explanation, not a spiritual one. Wait as long as you want until you “understand” that bad bugs don’t bite, but in the meantime you’ve got to kill them in order to survive.
And to be clear, I’m not talking about “cleaning products,” I’m talking about antibiotics, antiseptics and other agents that attack the bad guys directly. While there are some Christian Scientists who won’t use these, there are many who would - mouthing the convenient rationalization that it’s an “interim” thing.
The better the Christian Scientist you are, the more you are living in two worlds at once, even though you deny that you are living in one of them. It’s crazy-making.
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