What would Mary Baker Eddy do?

The Christian Science Monitor is a great paper. Its coverage is balanced and solution-oriented, unlike the info-tainment most corporate-owned media puts out. It's true that the world needs this perspective -- hopefully more people will discover it online!

Christian Science is a dying cult. On the surface, it is a harmless religion that is going extinct. In reality it has caused much harm. My brother died from untreated diabetes. I watched the whole heartbreaking process. My mother had alzheimer's disease and the " church" left me in an impossible position trying to convince a person who did not believe in the medical profession to get help. The "church" walked away and wished me luck. The church is dying as is the newspaper. The world will be much better off when it happens.

It's probably the most unbiased paper there is, and it's international coverage is excellent. While other papers recycle the same stuff from AP and Reuters, the Monitor has their own correspondents doing independent journalism. It's a shame that "Christian Science" is in the title of the paper, because I'm sure it instantly turns off a lot of people, but the paper is not the least bit religious.

As a church member, this was astonishing to read on the web, and I am only concerned about those who do not have access to the Internet or even computers. I guess the weekly magazine can reach them. I have long thought that we (as a human race) had to eventually get beyond cutting down trees and printing stuff on paper. I hope the Monitor will become available on Kindle if it isn't already. Podcasts of articles would be more helpful to me than online articles. I am a working parent...I barely have time to read my Monitors, and they pile up, but I could listen while I fold laundry.

Certainly, the Monitor stands alone as perhaps the only completely objective paper left without a lean in any particular political direction. People should really take more notice of this important paper.

The Monitor used to be a fairly good newspaper, but that was years ago. For the last 20 years, since the late Katherine Fanning was forced to resign, it has gone downhill in terms of the quality and depth of its news coverage. I used to subscribe but it's been years since I found the paper worthwhile reading.

Trent, I'm sorry to hear about your brother and your mother. Your anger toward the church is certainly understandable under the circumstances, but please know: The church never has and never will require anyone to go without medical treatment. That is a personal choice, and in fact, we are expected to take Jesus' command to "judge not" VERY seriously when it comes to others' decisions about health care.

I use CS because I personally have found it more effective than other forms of health care. For instance: The medical establishment could not heal me of endometriosis; a CS practitioner did. The medical establishment spent three years trying to heal me of chronic yeast infections, to no avail. Herbs offered temporary relief, but the problem returned. Four years ago, in extreme frustration, I called a CS practitioner. I was healed overnight, and the problem has not come back.

A couple of summers ago, I dropped a 12-foot, pressure-treated 4x4 on my foot from waist height, crushing my instep. The pain was blinding. I met it with prayer. The pain stopped instantly, I could feel something shift inside my foot, and I was completely healed in a matter of seconds; I didn't even have a bruise the next day.

But the most important healing in my life was not my own. It was my mother's. She desperately wanted children, but doctors told her she was infertile, and there was no hope for her; they advised her to give up and adopt. She and Daddy took Primary class training (a two-week, intensive course in healing through prayer) in July 1974. Mom was pregnant by August; I was born the following May. To convince me that CS does not work, one would first have to convince me that I do not exist.

The ideas that The Monitor is objective and that its relationship to the religion is merely a daily column are absurd. While the coverage of the third world was exceptional for a paper of it's circulation, it was otherwise not only undistinguished, but severely biased. When it reported about third world poverty, it rarely recognized the contributions of disease to the misery of the poorest (church doctrine claims that disease is not real and that symptoms are an illusion of the mind), and refused to acknowledge the contribution of vaccines and public health and medical interventions to alleviating suffering.
When the annual Nobel prizes are awarded, the Monitor regularly announced the winners in peace, literature, and economics but consistently ignored the winners in the sciences, particularly medicine, which is antithetical to the church's core philosophy, ie Mary Baker Eddy's belief that since man is a perfect creation of god, there can be no real disease.
When public figures have been ill or the general public threatened by contagious organisms, this glorified church newsletter wasn't there to inform or enlighten, but merely to reinforce the central dogmas to the faithful. I say good ridance.
As for the notion that members have a choice about seeking medical care, survivors of this cruel cult consistently report that the intra-group pressures to rely exclusively on fee-for-service prayer "treatments" is extreme, and the babies and children who have died horrible, painful, slow deaths from treatable illnesses....well, where was their choice?

Seth Asse