TIM BOUCHER RAW!

Been meaning to do some research about Christian Science for a while. Actually, the official name is Church of Christ, Scientist. The key thing that most people know about Christian Scientists is that they tend to shun modern medicine. Technically, church members are free to engage in modern medical practices as they see fit, but people claim that in practice there is much social pressure not to.

So instead of modern medicine, what do these people rely on? And what’s all this stuff about Christ being a Scientist? As mentioned earlier, the origin of our word science is the Latin scientia, which means knowledge or learning. The founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist believed that she recovered the lost knowledge of the Bible. Mary Baker Eddy began to believe that she understood the “science” of Jesus with which he performed his works of healing – one of the biggest but least addressed aspects of his ministry.

Eddy was raised a Calvinist but spent many years studying other religions and spiritual traditions of the time, before founding her church in 1879. She seems to have been afflicted with poor health, and searched these many traditions of the time looking for a reliable method of healing. According to various sources, she studied allopathy, homeopathy, hydropathy, Mesmerism (hypnotism & spiritualism, basically).

One of her main teachers during this time period was Phineas P. Quimby. According to Religious Tolerance’ entry on Christian Science:

Quimby had been a clockmaker, with relatively little education. But he had developed a method of natural healing which involved techniques of hypnotism and animal magnetism. He emphasized the role of the human mind in achieving bodily health. Quimby felt that the key to healing lay in the confidence by the healer in the patient’s recovery, and in the confidence that the patient has in the healer’s ability.

She seems to have taken what’s called Quimbyism and reformulated it so that the ultimate source of healing came from God himself. She’s said to have discovered this after a near-fatal accident. From Wikipedia:

A fall on ice left her confined to bed and a doctor diagnosed grave injuries. She called for her Bible, and, reading an account of a healing by Jesus, she found herself suddenly well. Not knowing how this had occurred, she spent the next three years studying the Bible, experimenting and praying to discover if the experience was repeatable and if there were knowable laws that governed it. She claimed that she was able to heal others and began to be called out to the bedsides of those whom the medical faculty had not been able to help.

She eventually put her understanding into the form of a book called Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. This book, along with the King James Version of the Bible is used as a sort of sacred text by Christian Scientists.

Her basic concept is that God is completely good and perfect. Solving the problem of theodicy, she simply claimed that evil, suffering, sin, disease and death were all completely illusory. The material world in her cosmology is thus an illusion separating us from the Truth of God. The closest thing the Christian Scientists have as a creed is something called the Scientific Statement of Being which comes from Eddy’s book:

There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter.
All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-all.
Spirit is immortal Truth; matter is mortal error.
Spirit is the real and eternal; matter is the unreal and temporal.
Spirit is God, and man is His image and likeness.
Therefore man is not material; he is spiritual.

Eddy taught that sin and evil are not the problem, but that belief in them are the problem. As the Religious Tolerance site explains: “the belief in sin is punished so long as the belief lasts.”

This all sounds very similar to item number 29 in Philip K. Dick’s Tractates Cryptica Scriptura:

We did not fall because of a moral error; we fell because of an intellectual error: that of taking the phenomenal world as real. Therefore we are morally innocent. It is the Empire in its various disguised polyforms which tells us we have sinned. “The Empire never ended.”

The Christian Science Church also differs significantly from mainstream Christian doctrine in it’s understanding of the significance of Christ’s death on the Cross. (Here’s a quick rundown of their belief system) Wikipedia states:

Christ did not die for the sins of man; rather, Christ’s works, crucifixion, and resurrection serve to reveal the non-existence of sin and death. Christian Scientists believe that through proper adherence to the teachings of Jesus, one can also demonstrate (albeit on a smaller scale) the non-existence of such “error.”

To explain the illusion of evil though, Eddy borrowed the concept of animal magnetism from Mesmerism, renaming it “malicious animal magnetism.” From her book:

As named in Christian Science, animal magnetism or hypnotism is the specific term for error, or mortal mind. It is the false belief that mind is in matter, and is both evil and good; that evil is as real as good and more powerful. This belief has not one quality of Truth. It is either ignorant or malicious. The malicious form of hypnotism ultimates in moral idiocy.

Both experts and laymen online seem to be rather adamant in asserting that Christian Science has no relation at all to the similarly named Scientology. But they seem to actually have a great deal in common to me. Particularly because Dianetics/Scientology is focused around correcting the “errors” of the mind. The auditing process seeks to trigger and then erase all the erroneous beliefs that the reactive mind is holding onto. It might very well be described as “un-hypnotizing” oneself and freeing oneself from automatic responses. Once the reactive mind is made “clear” the analytic mind is free to use an ever-greater portion of it’s potential power. Scientologists too are notorious for shunning both medical and psychiatric treatment in favor of this power of the mind. Seeing as Mary Baker Eddy’s work preceeded Hubbard’s by some 50 years, it seems rather likely that Hubbard had at least heard of it, or perhaps had drawn upon similar sources.

As discussed elsewhere, Scientology is often compared to certain strains of Gnosticism. In a certain sense, Christian Science would seem to hold a little closer to some of the Gnostic ideas. Making any blanket statement about traditional Gnostics is tricky as they were a hugely diverse group doctrinally, but certainly a belief in the illusory nature of the world was at the heart of many Gnostic systems. Eddy herself died several decades before the Nag Hammadi codices were discovered though, but there is certainly some possibility that she drew upon other surviving gnostic teachings. It’s also possible she just came to these ideas about the material world being illusory on her own, or perhaps from an influx of Hindu and other oriental ideas.
In any event, the practice of healing in Christian Science is designed to dispel the “illusions” of evil, sin, suffering, death, etc. Though there have been many legal battles surrounding this as a “medical” approach, the Christian Science Journal maintains an extensive list of what they claim are certified examples of successful healings, verified by multiple witnesses. Ordinary members of the church may pray to heal themselves and one another. The Church also conducts training programs for “Christian Science practitioners” who specialize in these techniques and work to help other people boost the efficacy of their prayer-power. Their actual techniques seem to not be publicly explained other than a “deep private study” of the Bible and Mary Baker Eddy’s book. (Here’s the site of a professional Christian Science Practitioner) They also seem to allow members to practice regular medical procedures when it’s believed to be necessary or when Christian Science is failing. During regular treatment periods, Christian Science prayer is not conducted, as it’s not thought spiritually acceptable to “serve two masters.”

The Christian Science Monitor is an internationally-renowned newspaper owned and operated by the Church of Christ, Scientist – though it is not a religious-themed paper and does not necessarily reflect the teachings of the church. Wikipedia notes that the paper does not rely on wire services like many others, and instead utilizes it’s own reporters. Formerly they were members of the church, but this is no longer true today. Also interesting:

In comparison to other major newspapers and journalistic magazines, the Monitor tends to take a steady and slightly upbeat approach to national and world news. Some of its readers prefer the Monitor because it avoids sensationalism, particularly with respect to tragedies, and for its objectivity and integrity, although the staff, working under the close eye of the church’s five-member board of directors, avoids reporting controversial and unfavorable issues involving the church.

The Monitor (or “CSM” as it is known in the intelligence community) is widely read by CIA and other intelligence agency analysts because of the newspaper’s attention to accuracy and global perspective. Project Censored noted that the Monitor often publishes factual articles discussing topics under-represented or absent from the mainstream mass media.

I guess they have their headquarters in Boston. I think I visited it with my sister once. As I recall they had this weird room where you are standing on this bridge, and the room is shaped like a globe, with you standing at the center of it. It has a rather bizarre temple quality. Christian Science churches also regularly have a “reading room” where the public is allowed to go to study, borrow and buy Mary Baker Eddy’s writings and other church materials. As weird as people make them out to be, their basic ideas don’t seem to be a lot different from a lot of other spiritual groups. And you gotta dig all that Matrix-style action of overcoming illusion and stopping bullets, etc. Plus there’s all that cool stuff about calling Jesus a “scientist”. There were also a ton of offshoot groups from the main church. I’ll try to come back some time and look at how those threads moved through culture to the present time.

• Baltimore Gnostic Meetup
• Are the Illuminati Gnostics?
• Science, Cut the Shit!
• Anarchism & Religion
• “Verbal Tech” in Scientology