This prominent building, in Boston's downtown, is probably the city's largest monument to foolishness. Although its supporters make extravagant health claims, these are not supported by evidence. Nevertheless, the group's political power has helped pass laws in dozens of states to allow it to avoid prosecution.
What building is it?
8 comments:
Christian Science?
It is the big Mary Baker Eddy Library. An an absolutely beautiful building but dedicated to complete idiocy.
By the way, how are you licensing that photo? I've been meaning to get a picture of this for Wikipedia for a while now but haven't gotten around to it. If that photo were released under a nice creative commons then it could get added to the Wikipedia article on the Library
Maparium / Christian Science Center.
/It would have been more difficult if the image wasn't named cs-church.jpg.
Ah-- a building I used to pass by occasionally in my undergrad days. I hadn't realized before then just how much money that group has.
25 years ago I shot a movie in which we used the great fountain adjacent the building as the backdrop. As we showed up unannounced on an early Sunday morning, we managed to get some nice footage before being asked to leave by a serious looking man in a green blazer with a walkie-talkie.
Mary Baker Eddy on the denial of drugs, hygiene, and medicine to the sick and their replacement by spiritual healing, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, pp. 143:5, 155:15.:
"It is plain that God does not employ drugs or hygiene, nor provide them for human use; else Jesus would have recommended and employed them in his healing. The sick are more deplorably lost than the sinning, if the sick cannot rely on God for help and the sinning can. … The universal belief in physics weighs against the high and mighty truths of Christian metaphysics. This erroneous general belief, which sustains medicine and produces all medical results, works against Christian Science[.] … If we would heal by the Spirit, we must not hide the talent of spiritual healing under the napkin of its form[.] … The tender word and Christian encouragement of an invalid, pitiful patience with his fears and the removal of them, are better than hecatombs of gushing theories, stereotyped borrowed speeches, and the doling of arguments, which are but so many parodies on legitimate Christian Science, aflame with divine Love."
While you're in Boston, take time to see Eddy's extravagant funeral marker beside a pond at the Mount Auburn Cemetery. Founding a religion is good work if you can get it.
Joshua:
It's a crappy picture taken on a camera phone - but you're welcome to use it as you like.
That picture is not actually a picture of the Mary Baker Eddy Library. That library is in another building next door to the building in this picture. The picture itself is of a Christian Science church known as The Mother Church, which is the "headquarters" Christian Science church, of which all the other Christian Science churches around the world are members (except for a few that have broken off and won the right in a lawsuit to use the name "Christian Science.") I used to be a member so I'm familiar with this. The Mary Baker Eddy library is in the building next door (not shown in this picture) called "The Christian Science Publishing Society."
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