Tag: radical reliance

Question: If a Christian Scientist is gravely ill and prays for healing and dies when a medical intervention could have saved their life is that, in the minds of their loved ones, simply because God didn’t want them to live?

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The following is a Question & Answer post where former Christian Scientists try and explain Christian Science reasoning to fairly commonly asked questions. We will be periodically sharing them, as questions that would benefit from multiple perspectives arise. This post is being answered by EG, who blogs at emergegently.wordpress.com, and  Kat, who blogs at Kindism.org. … Continue reading Question: If a Christian Scientist is gravely ill and prays for healing and dies when a medical intervention could have saved their life is that, in the minds of their loved ones, simply because God didn’t want them to live?

I resigned from The First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church), but they seem to have misplaced my resignation letter

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Back in May 2013 I wrote a letter to The Mother Church announcing that I hereby voluntarily withdraw my membership The First Church of Christ, Scientist, effective immediately, and request you to remove my name permanently from your membership records. My husband wrote a similar letter (actually, I just changed the names around and printed … Continue reading I resigned from The First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church), but they seem to have misplaced my resignation letter

Religious Trauma Syndrome: How Some Organized Religion Leads to Mental Health Problems

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Christian Science isn't really into the hellfire, brimstone and apocalypse, but it does manage to instill a deep distrust of doctors/medicine, and some dangerously unrealistic ideas that you can heal yourself through prayer alone -- and when that fails, it means you've failed, so you have to pray harder... Not a healthy cycle to fall … Continue reading Religious Trauma Syndrome: How Some Organized Religion Leads to Mental Health Problems

Reading the Wrong People

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If only the accusations hurled at me were as simple as “reading the wrong people.” I was accused of “letting mortal mind win” and being a failure as a parent for not “protecting” my children, and doing untold damage to them because I’ve chosen NOT to radically rely on Christian Science (my misplaced faith nearly got me killed).

Matt's avatarJericho Brisance

Table of Major Written WorksSome friends have considered that my departure from Christianity must be due to a misplaced emphasis of the sources that I have consulted. That is, perhaps I spent too much time reading “the wrong people”, and so came to bamboozlement. This is a legitimate concern, and I suspect that it may be more broadly held than I would hope. It struck me as incorrect on first blush, but I did go back and actually catalogue my sources by worldview.

Taking only the major written works that I read (a few dozen), the statistics sum as shown in the first chart. As can be seen, theist sources dominate the atheist/agnostic sources by 3 to 1. Neutral sources included generic information without direct bias or commentary on Christianity one way or another, while the mixed category denotes resources like “multi-view” type books.

Table of All SourcesIf the net is cast more broadly and extended to…

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