CHRISTIAN
SCIENCE
Christian Science, a
Church headquartered in Boston, insists that there is no evil for a good God
would not allow it to exist and that it is an illusion. The Church uses this teaching as a means of
effecting healing for they claim that suffering is never God’s will. God has no use for it while traditional
Christianity says he has when he lets it happen. The Christian Science reply is that he doesn’t
for it does not exist. We only imagine
it does. Christian Science is to be
admired for denying that evil has a use in the divine plan. The traditional doctrine has led to much
welcoming of suffering
and is extremely offensive.
However the Christian
Science solution fails for evil would still exist for it would be a bad
illusion. The founder, Mary Baker Eddy
wrote a book that she considered the word of God to teach this called Science
and Health with Key to the Scriptures.
Christian Science denies that she was writing another Bible or a piece
of the Bible but some of her writings say otherwise. She wrote in her Christian Science Journal
in January 1901 that she would be ashamed to write about Science and Health
with Key to the Scriptures if the book had a human origin. She said that God was also its author and
that was why she couldn’t be too modest of the book. In Science and Health she stated that
the gospel as she understood it came not from men but from a revelation from
Jesus Christ (page 107).
She revised and
changed the book many times which shows that she was not divinely inspired when
she wrote the book. The first manuscript
was replete with errors according to the man who edited it. The man was a retired
Unitarian Minister, James Henry Wiggins.
He found that the spelling and the wording and structure was shocking. The
book was full of wrong references and contradictions. He confirmed that he had to rewrite the
entire thing (page 176, The Four Major Cults). God would write better than that especially
when God is the opposite of error as she often stated.
Science and Health
claims to be the inspired Word of God given to explain the Bible. But the Bible never says that evil does not
exist. If it does not exist then there
would be no need for a Bible.
Eddy’s system forbade
the use of medicines and calling in the doctor and people were to treat their
maladies themselves by telling themselves that they did not exist. There has been much suffering and death over
this.
She said that the
Bible was enough to guide one to everlasting life (Science and Health,
126:28-31). Then she inconsistently
stated that we should listen to her version of the Bible though the Bible has
been altered (139:15-22).
She denied the
existence of matter and said there is nothing but Spirit. Her glossary contains eccentric
interpretations of various Bible words.
Fear is heat and desire. The son
of Jacob, Gad, is her doctrine that all is spirit. Evening is tiredness or rest. See page 586 of her book. She said that Jesus came and died to destroy
belief in sin. Christian tradition
always insisted that Jesus came as a ransom for sinners and to atone for it in
death which is an admission that it is real.
Also, Jesus is her teacher and the voice behind Science and Health
so why did he pull his death on himself which even she forbids saying that we
must shun unreality? Jesus would not
pull an unreal death on himself. And she
says the Bible is her guide. Now, if God
wrote the tedious and mammoth Bible to tell us the simple message that there is
one spiritual mind and there is no matter or evil or sin or suffering then he
was mental. This alone shows she is
trying to impose her views on the Bible.
It is not surprising
that she has to pretend that Bible words have bizarre hidden meanings to
explain how a book that gives a lot of genealogies and unnecessary and
repetitive historical details and has people praying to be delivered from
suffering instead of convincing themselves that it is not real could be teacher
and the word of God to a woman that is so anti-matter and anti-mundane. She says the world is unreal yet the Bible
says that God made the world. She would
say God did not make the world for the world is an illusion that originates in
what is not God. The Bible doesn’t even
go a bit nearer her view and say that God made an illusionary world. She said that Jesus died an unreal death on a
cross and never rose from the dead for there was no death to return from. Why couldn’t she or her followers do the same
when death is just an illusion?
She said that even an
atheist could be healed by Christian Science (page 139) and yet she said that
suffering was caused by inability to see that there is no evil but only God and
God is good. On the same page she said
that Moses proved the power of mind over matter when he did miracles. Moses’ miracles were all harmful and she has
forgotten that. Her system should say
that Moses increased the errors of sin and suffering by his miracles. Her book cannot be taken seriously as a
revelation from God in any sense.
As pointed out in Some
Modern Faiths, Christian Science is refuted when somebody takes something
that nobody has heard of and it is poison and gets sick.
Eddy argued on page
177 of her book that if you take some poison and nobody knows it and you don’t
know it will still harm because most people believe that the drug is
poison. But what if it is a poison that
was never known? All poisons started off
as unknown. And most people disbelieve
in the miracles of her system and hold that evil and matter are real so if she
is right they should not work. This lady
advocates reason or the principle of non-contradiction in chapter 11 of her
book entitled, Some Contradictions Answered. It is important that her followers keep that
chapter in their heads and think for themselves.
A lot of the letters
in her Science and Health from people allegedly healed by her system
seem to have the same writing style and the writers are not actually
named. Why would the person from
Wisconsin, the author of the letter on page 682 remain anonymous when he or she
became a Christian Scientist and was very vague on what was wrong with him or
her? A lot of them could have gotten
better anyway and this is what Eddy says is evidence for Christian
Science! Where are the amputated limbs
that grew back?
The Healing
Revelations of Mary Baker Eddy by Martin Gardner shows that Eddy was not
that nice of a person even after her revelations. If her system were true one would expect it
to heal the evil in her soul. This book
is a must. Her untruths and plagiarism
of a similar system called Quimbyism are well
known. The doctor she claimed diagnosed
her as dying leaving her to cure herself by using Christian Science denied it
under oath. The doctor was Dr Cushing
and we read on page 174 of The Four Major Cults that he did not say that
God had cured her miraculously or that she was unexpectedly cured for there was
nothing seriously wrong with her. Yet
she had claimed that this healing was what led her to discover Christian
Science. She charged $300 for twelve
lessons in
She did away with
communion in 1908 and replaced it with spiritual communion (page 214). So there have been serious changes in the
doctrine of the cult.
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THE WEB
www.tparents.org/Library/Unification/Books/Ght-3-0-Tpc.htm
Guidance for Heavenly
Tradition
www.kevinquick.com/kkministries/books/reasoning/nwt.html
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http://alhafeez.org/rashid/beware.htm
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the Ahmadiyya Movement Against
Islam, Syed Rashid Ali
12/06/08