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.

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.