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. 

Treated like a dog

**Went with my daughter to a veterinary care facility in the Charleston area to pick up my her old, sick dog. Spent about half hour there but came away wondering why the health care facilities I deal with aren't as good. Not that they're horrific. No, they are quite organized, modern looking and well staffed. In my system the docs, nurses and other providers have access to all my medical information. And I have access via email to docs and nurses.

So what's my complaint? I don't feel as cared about as clients of that animal care facility. Maybe it's because of the enormous bureaucratic load imposed on health care providers by insurance companies. I always get the impression that I'm taking up a doctor's time, rather than giving him or her the opportunity to give me attention. I read a survey a few years ago that the average amount of time between when a patient starting to talk and a doctor interrupting is EIGHTEEN SECONDS. I have some who take less and some who take more time. But it's always UNDER A MINUTE.

Knowing this I've taken advantage of my health care system's email access and can write up a thorough description of the issue I'm coming to discuss with the Doc. Did this last week about the screwups involved with dealing with my frozen shoulder. This cut the in-person discussion down to about one minute and it started with an apology from the doc about the way things were handled, and then an agreement with me about the next steps to take in treatment.

I wonder how many older patients would have availed themselves of this tactic. I suspect many or maybe even most people just show up, mumble a few things, get talked to for a few minutes and then get an Rx. I time every one of my visits and the average is about 12 minutes per visit. Maybe that's enough for most people. It certainly is enough when I provide the doc a backgrounder on the issue in advance. Otherwise, I think it's too short, way too short, if it's up to me to provide the doctor with what I feel are the relevant circumstances and facts about the issue. I need time to describe things, to suggest things, to wonder about things. And time is what they get paid for. Not empathy.

But to get back to my main impetus for writing this: the vet people seemed to be genuinely thoughtful and empathetic about the patients entrusted to them. Maybe because they were being paid directly instead of by insurance. In any case, I wish I could be treated more like a dog than as a time sink for an insurance company.

Mother Teresa's "verified" miracles

**I like Pope Francis because he's not such a stickler for church dogma or custom, but seems to be more interested in practicing the essence of Christianity than flexing the Church's dogmatic muscles. He's back in the news again, with some of that old time religion nonsense.

Pope Francis says there is now enough evidence to elevate Mother Teresa into a "saint" of the Catholic church. That evidence comes from a couple of "healings" attributed to her intercession. Aside from the speciousness of the evidence, the promotion of this woman to a semi-supernatural status, means that others will now turn to her in desperate cases of illness, some of them refusing more reliable medical attention.

I wrote several blog entries about her a few years back, that may be of interest now that Mother T is back in the news. A link to one of them is in the "Featured Post" listing at the top right of the home page of this blog. You can also search at upper left "Mother Teresa" to see the other entries.

Review of “Sleep With Me” podcast

** I usually don’t have trouble getting to sleep. The problem is that I tend to wake up three or four hours later and have trouble getting back to sleep. I talked to a sleep doctor about this and he immediately reached for his Rx pad 
and wrote one for Silenor. I asked my pharmacy how much it would cost, with insurance coverage. $65/month. You have to take a pill every night whether you need it or not, and that would cost me $780/year. 

Compare that to the “Sleep With Me” podcast (iTunes, Overcast, etc), 
which is not only FREE, but 100% effective with NO side effects (though it may become delightfully habit-forming) I don’t know how “Dearest Scooter” makes a living doing this day after day, but I know adding advertising would severely limit the effectiveness of his work. Besides, as an advertiser, would I really want to make my pitch in an environment that completely flushes all memory of my message? Sleep usually comes within the first ten to fifteen minutes of the podcast. I sometimes awake at the end, when he’s reading comments from users, and thanking them. (Today he closed by reading from the building codes for Gwinnett county.)

At first, the beginning of the podcast didn’t seem promising for getting the job done because I found myself laughing heartily several times. But that’s about all I can recall. 

As one of the reviewers (moshverhavikk) put it, it’s a form of guided meditation “irreverently executed in a Coach McGuirk-like way.”  He also calls them “disorienting like the second act of a movie that never figured out its ending…It follows the logical rules of syntax and conversation but completely disregards meaningful content. Because of the natural pacing and topical words you are tricked into thinking you are listening to a real story.” Sounds like a plausible explanation.

In my Christian Science days, I'd have Joan read aloud from "Science and Health," and that usually put me out quickly. But you don't have to put someone else through that ordeal when Dearest Scooter does it all for you. Save yourself hundreds of $$$ per year and subscribe to this extremely useful podcast.

"The Reason for the Season"

**True, Dan. Yet, I try to respect people’s religious beliefs insofar as they keep them to themselves, especially at this time of year. And for the most part, most of them do. But silence on the subject shouldn’t be interpreted as acceptance of the premise. The other day I was cautioned to remember "the reason for the season" after I 'd joked about all the frenzied commercialism rampant since Thanksgiving. It's not a direct denigration of religious beliefs to simply point out some of the underlying counter-facts that cause those beliefs to crumble. Several good books have been written, some of them recently, showing that a person named “Jesus” (or one of the many forms of that name) cannot be reliably verified to have existed. More likely the “person” referred to is an agglomeration of characters, real and mythical, that served to symbolize a specific religious movement. This doesn’t diminish, for me, the value of certain “Christian” ideals, even when they’e been imported from other traditions. The “Beatitudes,” the “Golden Rule,” and the like, are plainly good rules for human living. But they don’t require the existence of a particular historical figure to make them credible. They are good ideas unto themselves that do not depend on any kind of deity for their validity. Many rituals and other habitual activities that give comfort have grown up around these myths, and one can attempt to graciously back away from puncturing the bubble of comfort they provide.

Even good religionists participate vigorously in the commercial enterprise known as “Christmas,” which started as an economic incentive many years ago. Gracing it with religious gravity only makes it ludicrous to those who know what is really going on. Yet, even severely religious people eagerly go out and buy so much stuff at this time of year as to make it an essential practice in order to sustain the economy (hence, “Black Friday” and the like).

In short, the “reason for the season” is money. Not the birth of a mythical character, even one identified with good human attitudes.

That doesn't mean that sincere, loving human beings can't hijack the commercial juggernaught of Christmas to extend good wishes, cheer and benevolence to their fellow human beings. And I hereby do.

My music in online stores. Again.

**I used to put all my music on iTunes and several other online stores. But I stopped after two or three years because the distribution service (TuneCore) charged much more than the income from sales would cover. I went over to bandcamp.com, which was free, and put up the entire catalog of music Rick Martinez and I had recorded and produced over five years. We worked under the name of RamonaStGeorge, the streets where we both lived at the time.  Most of it was my stuff, although we had begun to produce other singer/songwriters too. Nothing came of it. Just before Halloween this year, Rick asked me to put on Facebook a song we had recorded a couple of years ago, "Scary Maryann."

I recently heard about another distribution service, DistroKid, that was about half the price of TuneCore and offered a hefty discount for new subscribers. So I decided to put the single and our first album, "Mind Zones," back on the more popular online music stores. Here are the links:

Mind Zones

Amazon  

Spotify  

Google Play  

iTunes  

Tidal  

Scary Maryann

Amazon 

iTunes 

Google Play 

Amazon 

Spotify

When I have time and inclination I'll post the other twenty or so songs we produced. In the meantime they can all be auditioned on our bandcamp site, RamonaStGeorge.com

Lamar Smith: what kind of scientist?

**VOX.COM recently published a troubling article about the current chair of the House science committee, Lamar Smith (R-TX) .

"Are you now or have you ever been a climate scientist?"

The headline proclaimed:

The House science committee is worse than the Benghazi committee

The article claims the committee's "open-ended, Orwellian attempts to intimidate some of the nation's leading scientists and scientific institutions" has more dire consequences for the nation than Gowdy & Co's brazenly partisan attack on just one politician, Hillary Clinton. That's because recently Republicans granted chairman Smith vastly more subpoena powers than previous chairs, which Vox points out has much wider and more devastating implications than the Clinton witch hunt. Think of all the critical issues the science committee can affect – climate, NASA, stem cell research, etc – and think of the damage it can do if its aim is to discredit and halt the work of the scientists and institutions that focus on them.

But it's even worse than that

It would be bad enough for any clueless politician with only a secular ideological agenda to head up such an important committee. But it's even worse when you consider this individual's religious beliefs, which few seem to have noticed. I wrote a response to Vox, and this post is an expansion on it:

Thanks for a well-written article on the abuses of Lamar Smith as chair of the science committee. I think the problem is even worse than you detail when one considers that Smith is a long-time Christian Scientist. No, not a scientist who happens to be a Christian, but a card-carrying believer in the religion of Christian Science. I am a former believer and teacher of Christian Science doctrine and can verify that the ideas that his religion espouses are diametrically opposed to what the rest of the world knows as “science.” And the mission of the House science committee. A fundamental concept of the religion is that “matter,” the stuff that normal science investigates, is “unreal.” Yes, the very substance of science is an illusion, and those who profess to be normal scientists are deluded and therefore erroneous from the get-go. The first premise of Christian Science is that only “spiritual” things are real. His hidden agenda, then, is to destroy or at least weaken the credibility of the whole field of all normal science. Republicans in general tout the idea that it’s good for a government official to let religion influence his or her governance. It’s pretty obvious that Lamar Smith, whom I’ve met, intends to shape government policy by his religious beliefs and agenda. Most Christian denominations are not this radical, and have a long history of opposing Christian Science. Do Republicans think that the religious tenets of this politician are acceptable? 

How many of his colleagues understand the nature of Lamar Smith's religious convictions? Could it be that current Republican reasoning is as simplistic as to conclude that if he's a Christian Scientist, well, that's close enough to head the science committee? It's not really that far-fetched. And as the visibility and influence of Christian Science has waned almost to invisibility, he might even seem innocuous, maybe like Ben Carson's Seventh-day Adventism. But he's not.

I met Smith in 2004 while I was working at the headquarters of the Christian Science church in Boston. We exchanged mere pleasantries at a church event, but his attendance attests his commitment to its teachings. Unless he has become a worse Christian Scientist since then, people need to consider the implications if he still believes what his religion teaches. And fundamental to that teaching is the specious nature of the material world – the same material world that most scientists study and work in. If you personally know some Christian Scientists you probably don't think of them being as crazy as that. And perhaps the reason is that in order to appear less fanatical, Christian Scientists tend to practice an unstated dualism, holding privately to the primacy of absolute spiritual reality while going along with the "seeming reality" of the physical world. This sustains a subtle hypocrisy whereby many, if not most, believers indulge in all sorts of materiality, including medical treatment, rationalizing that they and the rest of the world haven't advanced to the wisdom of their teachings. What suits this dualism is a characteristic velveteen veneer, a terminal niceness that hesitates to get all absolute on people – and having to put up with all that push-back. Smith exhibits this veneer, even while wearing the brass knuckles of his newly amped subpoena powers.

Who am I to criticize?

Though I am hostile, for what this blog chronicles are good reasons, I am not an ignorant sniper at Christian Science, as many of its opponents are. My knowledge is deep and extensive: I was a believer and church member for over thirty-five years; wrote for its publications, lectured about and taught its precepts and practice. For twenty of those years I was a professional practitioner of what I ultimately came to realize is the sham of "Christian Science healing." It eventually didn't seem right taking money from people in order to convince them of the unreality of their problems, especially when there was never any discernible, verifiable physical healing as a result. I even pressed those precepts on a mother who let her child die of diabetes even while he screamed for medical attention. That horrendous event and its legal consequences plus five years snarled in the gears of Christian Science church politics led to the end of my faith.

Playing the religion card?

Let's remember that what Republicans mean when they blow the dog whistle of "religious liberty" is that government officials (like Kim Davis) should be free to institute, change or overrule public laws according to their personal religious beliefs. The world is a lot scarier place when legislators like Lamar Smith have extraordinary legal power to frustrate, harass and squelch real scientists and their work. The whacko fringe of the party (arguably not just a fringe) may have found a velveteen-clad wrecking ball in this mild-mannered "scientist."

Government officials like Smith frequently allow their religious beliefs and power to infiltrate the legal realm to generate religious exemptions* that include practices like Christian Science "healing." Though fortunately many of those exemptions, especially for children, have been overturned in recent years, it would not be surprising that a believer like this newly-superempowered chair of the House science committee would try to influence public policy based on his religious convictions. He is and will be as anti-normal-science as his religion, in its purest form, teaches.

Yes, I'm playing the religion card. But not in the way it was played against Romney, whose religion had little to do with government and more to do with its (and his) weirdness. It's more akin to JFK, whose opponents suggested that as a Catholic president he would be more loyal to the Vatican than to the US. But Kennedy stated publicly and firmly that in a conflict between his religion and his country his loyalties would always be with his country. How likely is it that Lamar Smith will publicly proclaim his allegiance to normal science versus that other kind?