My main problem with Christian Science

**Christian Science is a bogus system with lots of money behind it (more in previous eras than now but still substantial), and still some political support. My complaint is that it is so BELOW visibility. Starting to read "Caught in the Pulpit" by Dan Dennet and Linda LaScola: stories of clergy who have lost their faith and yet are trapped in their clerical and pastoral roles. My problem is that I am as legitimately in their field of inquiry but no one knows or cares about about Christian Science anymore. What's so embarrassing and humiliating is that I got snagged in this 19th century relic and wasted over 35 years of my life on it. If I had been a Catholic or Episcopalian priest people would be interested in me and I might even get some speaking gigs, etc. But as it is, it's like being guilty of philately. Not worth anyone's attention. And I feel like the waste of my life should be worth somebody's attention and sympathy. 

Brainwashing children

I will have more to say later about Barbara Bradley Hagerty's new book, "Fingerprints of God." When I have more time, I will take up some of the issues raised in this well-written book. Suffice it for now that her book confirms for me the fact that those raised in a religion find it very difficult to depart from it even when reason and solid, testable facts intrude. I believe this is especially true for people raised in Christian Science. Where other kids may recoil from stern fundamentalism - and thus be ripe for apostasy - most CS kids are raised in such an atmosphere of pleasantness and self control that they come to associate the metaphysical claims with goodness. So even when their theology is refuted by facts, they still cling to the notion that there MUST be something to the concepts they were raised with. Hagerty's book confirms this. Even after interviewing articulate atheists and scientists, she still, in the end, relaxes into the belief system that gave her comfort and hope.

I am not such a person I was raised as a Catholic, and though I was assiduous in my practice I eventually left the religion, though I clung to the idea of some kind of God for many years afterward. Now that I am free of all that I notice the stickiness of religious education, and recoil against it. I see great wisdom in Dan Dennett's proposal that all kids be required to learn about all religions. Only in this way can the relentless drumming of one orthodoxy be prevented from establishing tyrannical control of a person's mind.

Why I am no longer polite to god

One kind of wisdom says to forget the past and move forward. Another kind, like that espoused by HL Mencken in 1925, says it's noble to contend with stupidity. I might not be so motivated by the latter if I hadn't spent most of my life as a believer. I consider those days a waste, and painfully embarrassing to even contemplate. This is my way of coping.

The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous. Is it, perchance, cherished by persons who should no better? Then their folly should be brought out into the light of day, and exhibited there in all its hideousness until they flee from it, hiding their heads in shame.

Do we need god to be good?

This article compares America's religiosity to free but godless societies. It appears that "community" is the active ingredient in religion, not belief in the presence of a supernatural being. I agree. Most of my present apostate unhappiness stems from isolation from former friends.

In general, you might expect people in less God-fearing countries to be a lot less kind to one another than Americans are.
It is at this point that the "We need God to be good" case falls apart. Countries worthy of consideration aren't those like North Korea and China, where religion is savagely repressed, but those in which people freely choose atheism. In his new book, Society Without God, Phil Zuckerman looks at the Danes and the Swedes—probably the most godless people on Earth. They don't go to church or pray in the privacy of their own homes; they don't believe in God or heaven or hell. But, by any reasonable standard, they're nice to one another. They have a famously expansive welfare and health care service. They have a strong commitment to social equality. And—even without belief in a God looming over them—they murder and rape one another significantly less frequently than Americans do.

Read the whole article here

Fave quotes

Over at Debunking Christianity there's a flash movie showing several quotes about theology and religion. It's embedded here, but these are my favorites because they comment on my own experience:

No man is convinced the Bible means exactly what it says. He is convinced it says exactly what he means. -Mark Twain

One man's religion is another man's belly laugh" -R.A. Heinlein

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. ~Philip K. Dick

The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike. - Delos McKown

Everyone starts our being an atheist. No one is born with belief in anything. - Andy Rooney

Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned. - Unknown

I prayed for freedom for twenty years, but received no answer until I prayed with my legs. -Frederick Douglass

You can't convince a believer of anything; their belief is not based on evidence but on a deep-seated need to believe. -Carl Sagan

Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires. - Sigmund Freud

It is better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however reassuring. - Carl Sagan

50 ways to leave your lord

It is easy to prove to yourself that God is imaginary. The evidence is all around you. Here are 50 simple proofs:

Biology trumps spirituality

Here's another in an occasional series of "deconversion" stories. Though there are many more over at debunkingchristianity.com I only feature those that stir a responsive chord in me. This one is from a former Seventh-day Adventist and hits at the point that even learned Bible scholars can see the light eventually. As a Christian Scientist I had taken "the inspired Word of the Bible as our sufficient guide to eternal Life," and studied the Bible diligently, applying the unconventional interpretation that religion imposes on the texts. Gradually, over several years, several of the supporting concept of Christianity began to crumble. I could no longer believe in the doctrines of the virgin birth, the resurrection, or even the very existence of the person who is claimed to be the founder of Christianity. Eventually this led to my complete disbelief in the existence of any "supreme being" or individual "Creator" of the universe. Like "Evan" in the following account, the evidence of evolution became the universal acid that dissolved every supporting column of spiritual belief.

My departure from Christian Science, and all forms of "spirituality," came as a result of long and deep thought, observation and testing. After thirty years of immersion in a specific form of it, Christian Science, I believe my decision should not be taken lightly by those who continue to cling to spiritual beliefs. I am someone who has gone before you and worked it out. I encourage you to take on the adventure for yourself. I'm not saying it will lead you to bliss -- in fact, it will probably be difficult making the transformation - but you can rest in the conviction that your views are more truth-based than any religious or spiritual doctrine.

Here's an excerpt from Evan's story:

I was a believer in biblical inerrancy and a young-earth creationist just like all those around me. I was the best in my age group at Bible trivia (we called them Bible sword drills) to the point that our Sabbath School teachers would keep me from playing because it wasn't fair to the other kids.

In high school some of my friends were growing disillusioned with our church and I listened to their arguments but didn't find them compelling until I got to college. I wanted to go to medical school eventually, but I initially declared a major in Religion while taking all the science prerequisites needed for my premed aspirations. The second quarter of my freshman year, I took a class in Jesus and the Gospels. This was the first exposure I had had to higher literary criticism of the Bible and my exposure to the textual theories about the Gospels astonished me, and made me realize the all-too-human nature of the text. This also led me to investigate other German theories regarding the Bible including Graf/Wellhausen, which confirmed my concerns.

My study of religion abolished my faith in biblical inerrancy and I changed my major to biology.

I began to see strong evidence for evolution, even though all my professors were young earth creationists.

Full text at: http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2008/02/my-deconversion.html

Why I rejected Christian Science

It was 1976 when I found out about Christian Science, a religion I soon adopted and practiced for over thirty years. I did much, much more than "sign up," I studied it deeply, thought about it deeply and jumped on the escalator of prestige within the CS community: I became a "practitioner" of its healing method, a public lecturer on the subject, and an authorized teacher of its doctrine, method and metaphysics. I eventually wound up at the headquarters of the movement, in Boston at the "Mother Church." I was brought on as one of the developers of a new website, spirituality.com, and became its Senior Editor for the last five years of my identity as a Christian Scientist. For over 25 years, the Church's various publications published around 150 articles of mine that explained and defended the religion. Prior to moving to Boston I was a defendant in one of the more notorious and protracted legal cases in the Church's 100-year history, concerning the death of an eleven-year old boy whom I had been hired to heal with CS.

The above should blunt the usual charges against critics, that they’re lightweight, inexperienced and misinformed. I also have no animosity toward the Church, and, with few exceptions, still have a high regard for the sincerity, humility and good intentions of the Christian Scientists with whom I have associated for over thirty years. As a deep and thorough student of the literature – including the Bible, several biographies of Mary Baker Eddy (founder of the religion) and historical accounts – and as an experienced defender of criticism of the religion, I know exactly what I eventually rejected, and why. I have been more or less silent about my experiences the past couple of years, preferring to establish myself in a new life while lying low against attacks on me personally as some kind of traitor, and free from the tyranny of the absurd worldview I had adopted, practiced and promoted.

One of the claims that could be made against me is that I had not grown up as a Christian Scientist, having come into it in my mid-thirties, and therefore had not witnessed its power and practicality while an impressionable youth. This is true, and I have found that among most of the people with whom I became friends, the "lifers" were the ones most unable to forgo its teachings, even when life experiences posed serious challenges to the sanity of their convictions. (To me this is one of the most persuasive arguments against religious training and upbringing of children. I agree with Daniel Dennett that children should be taught about the varieties of religious theories that abound in the world, but not identified with and indoctrinated into the religion of their parents.) The effect on these holdouts is to create a form of schizophrenia, where they live one life but proclaim another, with rationales for the ensuing cognitive dissonance.

Which brings me to the reason for this post, a kind of "outing," of myself as an apostate. The Washington Post's "On Faith" website has published several accounts by Christian Scientists explaining and defending their adherence to the faith. As is common in online articles there is the option to add comments to articles. A recent comment struck me as the most eloquent and correct refutation of Christian Science I had ever seen. It made me exclaim: I wish I'd written that! It is so well done that I include the full text of it here, along with a link to it for as long as it will be available. The writer is identified only as "Mike." Mike is a 'lifer," having been raised as a Christian Scientist, and is living proof that even deeply indoctrinated persons can break free of its spell and not go crazy in the process. More power to him and to others, particularly boomers, who are concerned that their good luck behind the wall of denial is running out.

As someone who was raised in Christian Science, and survived, I want people to know exactly what kind of religion it is.

While Christian Scientists are genuinely kind and well-intentioned, the worldview they choose to embrace can and does do great harm.

That worldview is this: that what we think of as reality simply isn't real. Because in this reality, people get sick, have problems, and so on. If God is all good and all powerful, they say, how could he permit disease to exist?

The answer is that he cannot and does not. Instead, the only reason such bad things exist in the world is because we humans mistakenly *believe* they exist. Once we eliminate this belief in ourselves (called "error" or "mortal mind" in Christian Science), the appearance of disease or discord simply disappears. This is the method of Christian Science "healing" in a nutshell.

For example, I never had a cold as a child. Not once. I had the *belief* of a cold many times, sometimes even the "claim" of a cold, but becuase there's no sickness in God's kingdom, I never had a real, actual cold, because colds simply aren't real.

This way of thinking is so simplistic that it raises hopes of healing, and when healing doesn't happen, you have practitioners like the person profiled here saying, "Well, Christian Science is very complex." Yet if you read the church's publications, you'd think that "knowing the Truth," as Christian Scientists put it, is as easy as falling off a log, and as reliable as a Japanese car.

And what the Christian Scientists call "healings" -- when they do happen -- can almost always be attributed to the body's ability to heal itself. Think of it -- we haven't had modern medicine for very long, maybe just around 100 years, and before then doctors were pretty much quacks. This is why Christian Science proved so popular at first when it debuted shortly after the Civil War.

So if you don't have competent medical treatment, you basically suffer through things until they pass (or *you* pass!). And a lot of the so-called healings I've read about or been told that I experienced are nothing more than that.

Christian Scientists will point to the testimonies of healing in their publications, but the church's guidelines for publishing them do not demand any sort of verification. Other Christian Scientists who have witnessed the "healing" (and who are predisposed to believe the religion's worldview anyway) are certainly accepted as witnesses, but in the absence of those, a person who can vouch for the testifier's character suffices as "verification" of the "healing." Hardly rigorous or objective, certainly not enough to merit the word "testimony."

Christian Scientists will also point out that they are not *required* to rely on Christian Science for healing, and that is technically true according to the church Manual (kind of like the church's constitution).

However, the real-life social pressures to reject medicine is so strong as to be nearly irresistible. Contempt for medical science runs through every aspect of Christian Science teaching. Just open to any random page of Science and Health, the Christian Scientists' companion text to the Bible, to see Mary Baker Eddy's attacks on medicine as false and ineffective.

So the social pressure is great indeed. If, for example, Mr. Davis from this article chose to rely on medicine to treat an illness, his status as a practitioner (a prestigious status in the church) might be jeopardized. And if he were a church officer in his local branch church, he would almost certainly be asked to step down from his position (though his basic church membership would not be affected).

I could obviously go on forever about this. As someone raised in the religion by a very devout family, I know how well-meaning and how wrong Christian Scientists can be. I'm glad I survived the experience. But I reject their insistence that the world we perceive isn't real, that there's something better. The world *is* real, with all its imperfections and problems. Christian Scientists don't like imperfections or problems, and simply try to pray them away, convinced they're not real. I embrace the imperfections and the problems, because they *are* real. But so am I. So are we all. And our power lies not in our ability to deny them, but to fix them, one by one, together.

What I Now Believe

** Someone recently asked me to explain “how someone can see what Christian Science is and then unsee it.” What follows is a set of conclusions arrived at over a couple of years of careful investigation of alternatives to the ideas I deeply studied, professed and taught over the course of thirty years.

First let me say that I believe Christian Science makes the best sense of all the religions. But the realization I came to is that the issue isn't which theology is the most correct, but that none of them are. Until recently I had always assumed that there was a divine agent that created and maintains the universe and that having a clear insight of this fact could positively alter events and conditions in my life (aka healing.) But now I do not feel this is correct. Phenomena attributable to this divine agent can be explained in other, more rational and verifiable ways. My departure from Christian Science has to do with its very basis, not certain people or the Church itself. Most of the Christian Scientists I've known are fine people and I'm always happy to count them as friends even though we may not agree on what constitutes ultimate reality. Christian Scientists, like most sincere religionists, are among the nicest people in the world even if they believe their goodness rests on spiritual or divine principle. Also, I have no quarrel with the Church or its administrations, present and past, other than its theology. I do not believe in so-called spiritual healing, again because I feel that these phenomena can be explained in other, more convincing ways. Beyond that, I can no longer believe in the various doctrines of Christianity, including the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the divine nature (or possibly even the existence) of Jesus, and the afterlife, among others. I believe death is the end of an individual's existence and so we should strive to improve ourselves and the world through good deeds, cooperation, kindness, patience and the other virtues often ascribed to Christianity, but which are simply wise ways of behaving that everyone instinctually knows. I also believe that much of conventional health care is useful and should be employed when necessary for the alleviation of physical problems, the maintenance of health and enhanced longevity.

Obviously, this puts me completely outside the belief system, and community, of Christian Science. I have done a lot of reading on the subject, and some of my favorite books are by the DDHH quartet: Dennett, Dawkins,Harris and Hitchens, links to which have been posted here earlier.

• Breaking the Spell - Dennett
• Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Dennett
• The God Delusion - Dawkins
• The End of Faith - Harris
• God is Not Great - Hitchens

There have been many others, but these books were most influential. Very well documented, very well written and very persuasive. I feel freer now than I ever thought possible. Everything is a wonder and fascinating.

The MT life - me and Mother T

**Daniel Dennett in his latest book Breaking the Spell makes the distinction between belief in god and belief in the belief in god. The former accepts the existence of an actual being who controls the universe and with whom one can interact through prayer, worship and obedience to that being’s commands. The latter indicates a frame of mind that holds that it is right, practical or otherwise necessary to profess and/or act as though such a being exists.

It’s obvious that much good has been done by those who profess belief either way. But Mother Teresa appears to be one of those in the latter camp. Her just released journals "Come Be My Light" chronicle deep inner conflicts, many of which were expressed to her superiors or confessors over the course of fifty years.

Some may see her angst as an indication of faith, as does this writer for the Christian Science Monitor:

Mother Teresa may have believed she had no faith, but was not her persistence an act of extreme faith? And is it not faith in something greater than themselves that sustained leaders, such as Mr. Lincoln and Mr. King, as they carried out their missions?

The answer has to be: NO. Faith, according to the Bible, is "the evidence of things not seen." Mother Teresa worked on without evidence. People can persist with actions because they believe the actions are worth the darkness of doubt. Obviously she cared deeply about suffering humanity and tried to do something tangible about it. But none of it indicates faith in the existence of something for which there is no evidence, whether external or internal. The goodness of the work itself supplies enough motivation in people of strong will and deep dedication.

The revelations of Mother Teresa’s lonely journey resonate with some of my own experiences. Though I never accomplished anything on the magnitude of her achievements, I tried to help people who were suffering, and I thought I could best do it through the practice of Christian Science. In that microscopically small community I was regarded as someone who had achieved a certain success. I was a spiritual healing practitioner, a teacher of same, a frequently published writer in the denomination's magazines and websites, and a somewhat popular (in the church community) lecturer on the subject. I was considered to be a person of some deep understanding of that belief system.

I persisted in that belief and work for over thirty years. I was a proponent, defender and exemplar of its truth and effectiveness because I believed it supplied the most reasonable explanation of reality. What I hadn’t realized all that time, however, is that I had never actually questioned the basis of all religions: belief in the existence of a supreme being. This was a belief that went all the way back to my upbringing in the Catholic community. Once I had the opportunity and occasion to reflect on what I had committed a good chunk of my life to, I investigated the subject with the help of Messrs. Dennett, Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, et. al. Over the course of about a year, I saw that the existence of a spiritual dimension and spiritual beings, supreme and otherwise, is entirely unnecessary. While I am happy and satisfied with the world as it now appears to me without the veil of “faith,” probably like Mother Teresa I will die knowing that whatever good I accomplished was in spite of and not because my faith. No hospitals, no clinics, no interesting memoirs - just a nice guy trying to do good while a baseless metaphysics got the credit.