{"id":619,"date":"2014-05-05T23:42:55","date_gmt":"2014-05-06T06:42:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/?p=619"},"modified":"2014-05-05T23:42:55","modified_gmt":"2014-05-06T06:42:55","slug":"monday-messiah-mary-baker-eddy-unchristian-nonscientist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/2014\/05\/05\/monday-messiah-mary-baker-eddy-unchristian-nonscientist\/","title":{"rendered":"Monday Messiah: Mary Baker Eddy, Unchristian Nonscientist"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"eddy1j\"<\/a>\u201cChristian Science\u201d\u2014which George Bernard Shaw aptly described as neither Christian nor Science\u2014was founded by the female prophet Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), aka Mary Morse Baker Glover Patterson Eddy.\u00a0 But the story starts with her mentor, who was influential in the genesis of both the New Thought movement and Christian Science: a Massachusetts watchmaker, philosopher, mesmerist, inventor and healer, with the wonderful name of Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802\u20131866).<\/p>\n

Quimby had developed a healing technique which he called, obviously, the \u201cQuimby System,\u201d and which sounds a little like a primitive form of pious psychotherapy.\u00a0 It boiled down to the belief that there was no such thing as disease: all ills were all in the mind, and could therefore be cured by right thinking, with a hefty dose of bible-thumping.\u00a0 He does not seem to have been particularly charismatic, however, and it was left to others to pick up his ideas and run with them.<\/p>\n

\"quimby1aj\"<\/a>
Phineas P. Quimby<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

One of his patients and sort-of disciples was the nervous and delicate Mrs. Patterson\u2014Mary Baker Eddy in a previous marriage.\u00a0 She was apparently prey to all sorts of ills in early life: as a child, prone to visions and voices; as an adult, neurotic and emotionally unstable, given to what were then called \u201chysterical\u201d illnesses, and too much an invalid to care for her one child, whom she essentially gave away.\u00a0 Christian Science biographers make a great deal of her suffering and saintly character, but an outsider may pick up disturbing echoes of a self-serving hypochondria, and behaviour typical of borderline personality disorder.<\/p>\n

Her association with Quimby began in 1862 and continued to 1866, during which he healed her frequently<\/i>.\u00a0 An enthusiastic and humbly grateful disciple, according to her preserved letters to him, she began to give public lectures disseminating his system, and doing some healing off her own bat.\u00a0 Then, just before Quimby died in 1866, Mrs. Patterson had what could be called an apotheosis, <\/i><\/b>a transfiguring experience.\u00a0 According to what she wrote and said at the time<\/i>, she had a nasty fall on the ice, the effects of which were healed by the magical Quimby System.\u00a0 However, by a few years later, her narrative was very different.\u00a0 Now, the story went that the fall had been nearly fatal, and her injuries were such that her life was despaired of.\u00a0 She was dying; the doctors could do nothing for her\u2014which was news to the doctor who attended her, when he was interviewed a few years later.\u00a0 But here is how she reported what happened then:<\/p>\n

\u201cOn the third day thereafter, I called for my Bible, and opened it at Matthew ix. 2 [the healing of the man with palsy]. As I read, the healing Truth dawned upon my sense; and the result was that I rose, dressed myself, and ever after was in better health than I had before enjoyed.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"apotheosis\"<\/a>This detail would also surprise her doctor of the time, who continued for some time treating her for a number of ailments.\u00a0 At any rate, that was her account of the \u201cinvention\u201d of Christian Science, as a revelation straight from God, a miraculous origin story.\u00a0 Note the nice little detail that it was on the third day she rose again.<\/p>\n

What had happened\u2014though of course Christian Science writers put a very different spin on it\u2014was that Quimby died a couple of weeks after Mrs. Patterson\u2019s accident, leaving Mrs. Patterson in possession of his privately circulated paper Questions and Answers<\/i>, which she gradually rewrote as her own.\u00a0 Unlike Quimby, she was a forceful, messianic personality.\u00a0 By 1875, she had pushed Quimby pretty much out of the memory her developing cult, adapting his ideas and plagiarizing his manuscript<\/a> to produce her own holy writ: Science And Health, With Key To The Scriptures<\/i>.<\/p>\n

By then, she had also divorced Dr.Patterson and married Mr. Mary Baker Eddy\u2014or, rather, sewing-machine salesman Asa Gilbert Eddy.\u00a0 Reading between the lines of her hagiographies, we can again see the messianic character at work, the familiar pattern of behaviours: absolute dictatorship, a raging temper when crossed, a dark descent into paranoia, assiduous milking of the faithful for financial contributions, a tendency to demonize and especially to sue<\/i> her perceived enemies, and to excommunicate critics \"51PD2P5PA8L__SS500_\"<\/a>and rivals.\u00a0 The tendency to rewrite history, to construct a miraculous origin myth, is also accounted for: in this case, the assertion that Phineas P. Quimby had been a near-illiterate bumpkin, and had nothing to do with Mrs. Eddy\u2019s astonishing discovery of the true secret of life.\u00a0 Further, she showed a classic tendency to claim miracle cures where there was no possibility of verifying or falsifying her claims<\/p>\n

Most diagnostic of all, while she claimed to reject deification or the formation of a personality cult, she also presented herself as the Second Coming of Christ, the prophesied female<\/i> messiah who would bring about the millennium by destroying the old world.\u00a0 But she would not destroy it through the usual bloodshed and fire and roasting of unbelievers, which was at least a refreshing change.\u00a0 She would destroy the old world by spreading the truth until everyone<\/i> was a right-thinking Christian Scientist: that is, the old allegedly evil world would end when everybody realized that the world, the body, the universe itself, were nothing more than illusions of the divine mind, and that all apparent illness, evil and sin were just errors.\u00a0 Once you grasped the fact that there was no reality except your mind and the mind of God, then bingo\u2014you could make your reality be anything you wanted. If your body was an illusion, then so was your cancer.\u00a0 Even death was a big booboo on the part of the mind. Or, as she put it herself, death is:<\/p>\n

\u201cAn illusion, the lie of life in matter; the un-real and untrue; the opposite of Life. Matter has no life, hence it has no real existence. Mind is immortal. The flesh, warring against Spirit; that which frets itself free from one belief only to be fettered by another, until every belief of life where Life is not yields to eternal Life. Any material evidence of death is false, for it contradicts the spiritual facts of being.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"asagilberteddy\"<\/a>
Asa Gilbert Eddy<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But of course, there were problems.\u00a0 She was sick frequently, was known to take morphine, had a lot of dental work done, and had to wear glasses.\u00a0 Various close relatives died of cancer, without her doing anything to heal them except tell them to read her book.\u00a0 And her husband Asa died of a coronary thrombosis about six years after they were married.\u00a0 How to square failures like that with her triumphant teachings? Well, there were some features of her version of reality that enabled her to cover awkward facts like those.<\/p>\n

The first, on the face of it, was a positive thing: distance healing, or \u201cabsent treatment\u201d.\u00a0 A Christian Science practitioner did not have to be in the same room, or even the same city, as a patient.\u00a0 Treatment consisted of prayers and a mental<\/i> effort to cure the error which the patient was feeling as an illness.\u00a0 No examination or laying on of hands was required.<\/p>\n

But the flip side of that, the negative side, was that error could be contagious<\/i>.\u00a0 Even hearing about somebody else\u2019s illness could be enough to plant the thought in your own mind strongly enough to cause you<\/i> to fall into the same error.\u00a0 Therefore, even now, there is provision for the children of Christian Scientists to be excused from health class at the request of their parents, who fear that even hearing about things like hygiene and disease prevention will cause their children to \u201cfall into error,\u201d as will going to a doctor for a diagnosis or a checkup.<\/p>\n

\"eddy1870j\"<\/a>
1870<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But that was not the worst.\u00a0 There was also a doctrine called, variously, malicious animal magnetism (MAM), malicious mesmerism, or mental malpractice.\u00a0 According to this, somebody who wished you ill could do exactly that: from a distance, project evil influences into your mind that would cause you to fall into error and get sick.\u00a0 To guard against this required constant vigilance and much prayer; and Mrs. Eddy, as she became more powerful and more paranoid (another messianic trait cropping up) was certain that this was happening to her.\u00a0 Squadrons of prayer warriors were activated to ward off the effects of her foes\u2019 evil thoughts, particularly the thought-attacks of apostate ex-devotees and the Catholic church, her special bogeymen.\u00a0 This also made for an atmosphere of suspicion within the church: Mrs. Eddy claimed to be able to tell telepathically when any of her flock was committing MAM, and could always find a scapegoat to accuse if things went wrong.<\/p>\n

As for what happened to poor Asa Eddy, his widow was convinced that some of her disaffected ex-disciples had murdered him by arsenic poisoning.\u00a0 She demanded an autopsy.\u00a0 But when the autopsy turned up no trace of arsenic poisoning, she insisted her diagnosis was still correct, but it was a case of MENTAL MALPRACTICE, where someone who wished her ill had poisoned her dear husband from a distance with mental<\/i> arsenic.\u00a0 The same explanation was used for her own illnesses and poor eyesight.\u00a0 These principles could be used to protect her claims from being falsified.<\/p>\n

\"1900\"<\/a>
1900<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Church of Christ, Scientist survived when Mary Baker Eddy fell into the ultimate error\u2014that is, when she died\u2014and it survived the power struggles that followed, to become a recognized and routinized church.\u00a0 But it has been declining for decades; the only time we really hear of it is when some unfortunate child<\/a> of Christian Scientist parents is denied medical attention, and dies of a treatable condition.\u00a0 This is not a new thing, by the way, but has dogged the Church of Christ Scientist from its earliest days. Deaths were blamed on the deceased themselves by this messiah of healing; it was not her fault, she would say, if people could not stop wallowing in error.\u00a0 Mrs. Eddy, it has to be said, lived to the ripe old age of 90, which might be taken as validation of her principles.\u00a0 But then, she took no chances.\u00a0 When she<\/i> was sick, she went to a doctor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cChristian Science\u201d\u2014which George Bernard Shaw aptly described as neither Christian nor Science\u2014was founded by the female prophet Mary Baker Eddy…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,17,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-atheism","category-featured","category-secularism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=619"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/lateraltruth\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}