American - Writer | -
I was afraid to admit feeling ill because even when I was 4 or 5, I knew that my father viewed sickness as a sign of weakness, of sin, of disobedience.
Caroline Fraser
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My father was a particularly zealous Christian Scientist, but young Christian Science children, who have little choice but to believe what their parents are telling them, are taught that illness originates in errors in their parents' and, eventually, their own thinking.
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Christian Scientists not only don't like to acknowledge illness; they don't like to see it. On occasion, I was sent to my room from the dinner table for sneezing or coughing; I now know that I was allergic to our cat.
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Nearly every Christian Scientist I have known has been involved with the Church from childhood and has a long family connection to it, going back several generations.
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Christian Science is often inherited, and like many inheritances, it comes with family secrets. The religion encourages secrecy. Members of the Church tend to hide their illnesses from one another, even within families. My father has never once, in my presence, admitted to feeling ill.
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I think that Mary Baker Eddy was a fascinating character in American religious history.
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Christian Science has been enormously influential in our religious history, and the church is very powerful. It has won an extraordinary number of legal battles in this country. It has succeeded in passing a number of what are called 'religious exemption laws.'
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As a teenager, I had been growing away from the beliefs of the church, but one of the main things that caused me to question Christian Science was that the year that I left home to go to college, a boy who I knew in my Sunday School, whose name was Michael Schram, who was 12 years old, died at home of a ruptured appendix.
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Christian Science has always appealed to the middle-classes and the upper middle classes. In part, this is because it requires a certain amount of education to study 'Science and Health' to the degree that Christian scientists do. It's not an easy book to read! It's 700 pages, and it's written in a nineteenth-century manner and diction.
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Fortunately, most religious people accept medicine as a gift from God and reap the benefits of both realms.
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Americans are squeamish about anything that seems to punish people for their religious beliefs.
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Between the fictional Laura of the books and the even more heavily fictionalized girl of the TV show, we've tended to lose sight of the fact that Laura Ingalls Wilder was a real person who was complicated and intense.
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