Are Doctors the Answer?
Written by staff on December 3, 2024
Are doctors the answer? – by Carl Vonderau.
All the consternation over RFK Junior and his skepticism about vaccines is strange to me. I was raised a Christian Scientist, a religion in which adherents are supposed to be able to heal any illness by correctly reflecting God. In its most fundamental form, the faithful are supposed to believe that matter is not real and, therefore, all illness is impossible.
You can imagine, my childhood was full of contradictions. My parents were raised in Christian Science, but they weren’t fanatic fundamentalists. When I was sick they took me to doctors. I just wasn’t supposed to tell anyone at church about it. My mother kept the medicines hidden in a brown paper bag in the kitchen and took me for de-sensitization shots for my allergies. I hated the injections and told myself that they were a false conception and couldn’t heal me. And they didn’t. I still have allergies.
My father once told me that one of the men on the board of our church secretly went to the hospital for some surgery. The rest of the board found out and visited him in his hospital room. They told him that he could no longer be on the board because he had succumbed to the false belief that surgery could heal him. they couldn’t have designed that visit to give him a bigger slap in the face.
That same man was once a substitute Sunday school teacher for the class I was in. He asked us, if we had the believe of a heart problem, how we would change our thinking to reflect God better? I don’t remember what we said, but it must have been along the lines that God made us perfect because we were his image and likeness. Therefore someone thinking he had a bad heart was not real and was the result of some corrupted thoughts. That person had to let that belief go and affirm God’s perfection. His change in thought would eliminate the problem. At the time I had no idea that he might be referring to himself. The man loved to play golf. He died from a heart attack on the course. “That is exactly the way he would want to go,” my mother said. In those days a heart condition was a death sentence. Given that he couldn’t cure himself through faith, was dying while doing what he loved a kind of perfection?
My father once helped me gain perspective on the religion. It was invented by Mary Baker Eddy in the late eighteen-hundreds and was enormously popular in the early 1900s. My father asked me a question about those times. Would you have been better off to try to heal yourself then, or to go to a hospital?
My mother was eighty-nine when she died. We’re not sure from what. She had skin cancer and probably breast cancer at that point. She also had some kind of internal stomach problem. But she wouldn’t consider having a doctor investigate those possibilities. Sometimes she had pain but it was very sporadic. One day she told a friend that she wasn’t going to see him again. She died a few days later with my sister, my dad and me around her. Was it a healing that she died so peacefully with hardly any pain?
See, I still have Christian Science thoughts.
