Rating: 
Summary: Gnosticism Revived
Review: This book is nothing more than Gnosticism revived by Mary Baker
Eddy. The early church fathers spoke out often against this
heresy. It twists the Holy Scriptures words and takes away the
personality of mankind. I found the book blasphemous, to say the
very least and contemptous of God. I think that to deny medical care to innocent children who can
not speak for themselves, but are at the mercy of one's parents
practicing such a belief system is dangerous. Mrs. Eddy blames the parent's thinking if a child is sick. This is hogwash! The early Gnostics beleived that matter was evil, we had no material body, there was no sin, Jesus didn't really die on the
cross, etc. Mrs. Eddy has not founded a new "religious belief."
She merely tapped into the ancient cult of the Gnostics. I would
advise anyone not to even buy this book. It is opening a door
to neglect, abuse and denying your very existence. Not healthy!
Rating: 
Summary: The Metaphysics of the Future
Review: "To Those Leaning on The Sustaining Infinite, Today is Big with Blessings... The Time for Thinkers has Come" Mary Baker Eddy (Discoverer and founder of Christian Science) This 700 pages volume can become a light in the dark to anyone facing life's adversities, and its many challenges. Science and Health is the indisputable champion of ideas, inspiration and guidance written by one author only. This logical, intelligent, unique, and important book can deeply and positively influence anyone. Millions have been protected, restored to health, reassured, comforted, inspired, changed, sheltered, fed, improved, and transformed by reading, and living its consistent spiritual suggestions. Science and Health, the masterwork of Mary Baker Eddy, has sold more than 10 million copies in more than 17 languages, and Braille in English. This best seller is already a classic; a must for anyone interested in spiritual liberation.
Rating:
Summary: Help for people who are hurting...
Review: When I was a teen, I decided that if God in heaven couldn't help me with my problems here on earth, I wanted nothing to do with Him (or Her). This book made God's love PRACTICAL in my day-to-day life. If God is Love, as the Bible says, then God's love must have the power to heal any messy situation humans can find themselves mired in. Science and Health explains more about God and how to use His (or Her) power to address and correct and heal those human problems. I started really studying this book about 15 years ago and I've learned how to use prayer to heal deep depressions, physical problems and even relationship issues. This is not a self-improvement book per se. More like a "self-improvement through leaning on God's grace and love" kind of book. It's a good book.
Rating:
Summary: A Great New Discovery
Review: A few years ago, I was given this book by a friend. Before that time, I had never heard of Mary Baker Eddy or of Christian Science. I started to read the book, mostly out of respect for the friend that had given it to me. Within two weeks, I had read it from cover to cover. Since then, my life has improved dramatically. I would recommend this book to anyone. It may become a basis for the way you live your life, or it may simply provide you with another way of thinking about religion and health. For me, it has been the most wonderful discovery I've made, and I hope that others will be able to experience that same joy.
Rating:
Summary: Has Something for Everyone
Review: I feel impelled to add to these thoughtful reviews. After the sincere efforts of doctors who could not find a cure for me I was healed in Christian Science as taught in full in this book. This non-denominational, essentially universal truth is fully explained in this book and when read with a critical but sincere effort will help the reader on many levels. As the author has explained, the religions of our age have dropped the effectiveness of God to heal sickness, retaining the traditional view of God's power to reduce only sin. Do we wish to worship and adore a God that is powerful in one instance yet powerless in the other? Healing in Christian Science is not based on blind faith, but rather on a new, enlightened way of seeing the world. Though many come to this book seeking physical healing, this book's primary purpose is to enable the reader to open up to a higher ideal of God and man's relationship to his Heavenly Father-Mother God. I realize that if one desires one can pick out isolated cases where an individual under the care of Christian Science died and therefore judge it unsafe. But in all fairness how many people die annually under the care of the medical facilities? How many illnesses and diseases are termed incurable by the medical institution? Things valuable come with a great price. The author, Mary Baker Eddy, in other writings, speaks of the price she paid to give this book to the world. If the reader needs comfort in what others have thought of this teaching/book one should seek out what Einstein, Bronson Alcott, Walt Whitman, and later in his life, Mark Twain, said about Mrs. Eddy, her discovery and her book.
Rating:
Summary: A comment
Review: (...) Using words on a page in a book to describe completely un-material ideas about spiritual existence to you and me is a difficult thing for anyone to do. Couple that with the fact that the book's author is trying to essentially show the reader how to wake up to an unseen reality--to show, in the context of primitive Christianity (and not what might be called centuries of classical churchy dogma), that spiritual existence is real, and the material is not, and what that really means to you and me right now and always--and you begin to see how difficult writing a book like Science And Health must have been, or would be for anybody. It's quite a Big topic requiring much thought to understand and "use". A seeming repetition (with intelligent variations) in this book is vital. If you're trying to say "God, good, is All, and man and universe reflect him completely", and you're trying to teach this and show this to the matter-bound reader, you're gonna need more than that one sentence to make that challenging point. I'd say you'd need as many thought-provoking ways as possible, so if your eyes slide off some of the statements, others will perhaps be more understandable to you, and as you read you start to GET it. (...) read Science And Health for yourself and make up your own mind; read it on its own terms, because it has many things to say that you won't find anywhere else, and it says them quite articulately. If you find yourself glued to Dr. Dave on Oprah and reading Deepak, you might want to go deeper to the book that is acknowledged as starting the whole "healing" movement of the twentieth century that we are only now in the last few years seeing bubble up on TV. This one is the real deal and is here to stay.
Rating:
Summary: don't follow this blindly
Review: A word of caution to those of you considering adopting this book and the beliefs it advocates-- be sure you keep your own faith in perspective. I have no problem with people choosing Christian Science as a religion and I certainly don't condemn anyone for their beliefs. I will just say that this book and that way of thinking can cause people to put off seeking help when they need it. Had it not been for these things, my mother would be alive today. Just be careful, readers.
Rating:
Summary: God does heal!
Review: I like what Mrs. Eddy says in Science and Health, "The lonely precincts of the tomb gave Jesus a refuge from his foes, a place in which to solve the great problem of being. His three days' work in the sepulchre set the seal of eternity on time. He proved Life to be deathless and Love to be the master of hate. He met and mastered on the basis of Christian Science, the power of Mind over matter, all the claims of medicine, surgery, and hygiene."
"He took no drugs to allay inflammation. He did not depend upon food or pure air to resuscitate wasted energies. He did not require the skill of a surgeon to heal the torn palms and bind up the wounded side and lacerated feet, that he might use those hands to remove the napkin and winding-sheet, and that he might employ his feet as before."
"Could it be called supernatural for the God of nature to sustain Jesus in his proof of man's truly derived power? It was a method of surgery beyond material art, but it was not a supernatural act. On the contrary, it was a divinely natural act, whereby divinity brought to humanity the understanding of the Christ-healing and revealed a method infinitely above that of human invention."
"His disciples believed Jesus to be dead while he was hidden in the sepulchre, whereas he was alive, demonstrating within the narrow tomb the power of Spirit to overrule mortal, material sense. There were rock-ribbed walls in the way, and a great stone must be rolled from the cave's mouth; but Jesus vanquished every material obstacle, overcame every law of matter, and stepped forth from his gloomy resting-place, crowned with the glory of a sublime success, an everlasting victory."
"Glory be to God, and peace to the struggling hearts! Christ hath rolled away the stone from the door of human hope and faith, and through the revelation and demonstration of life in God, hath elevated them to possible at-one-ment with the spiritual idea of man and his divine Principle, Love." "They who earliest saw Jesus after the resurrection and beheld the final proof of all that he had taught, misconstrued that event. Even his disciples at first called him a spirit, ghost, or spectre, for they believed his body to be dead. His reply was: 'Spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.'
The reappearing of Jesus was not the return of a spirit. He presented the same body that he had before his crucifixion, and so glorified the supremacy of Mind over matter."
Mrs. Eddy's comments in The First Church of Christ, Scientist and Miscellany expound upon the points previously made,
"Most thinkers concede that Science is the law of God; that matter is not a law-maker; that man is not the author of Science, and that a phenomenon is chimerical, unless it be the manifestation of a fixed Principle whose noumenon is God and whose phenomenon is Science."
"My discovery that mankind is absolutely healed of so-called disease and injuries by other than drugs, surgery, hygiene, electricity, magnetism, or will-power, induced a deep research, which proved conclusively that all effect must be the offspring of a universal cause. I sought this cause, not within but ab extra, and I found it was God made manifest in the flesh, and understood through divine Science. Then I was healed, and the greatest of all questions was solved sufficiently to give a reason for the hope that was within me."
"The religious departure from divine Science sprang from the belief that the man Jesus, rather than his divine Principle, God, saves man, and that materia medica heals him. The writer's departure from such a religion was based upon her discovery that neither man nor materia medica, but God, heals and saves mankind."
"Here, however, was no stopping-place, since Science demanded a rational proof that the divine Mind heals the sick and saves the sinner. God unfolded the way, the demonstration thereof was made, and the certainty of its value to the race firmly established. I had found unmistakably an actual, unfailing causation, enshrined in the divine Principle and in the laws of man and the universe, which, never producing an opposite effect, demonstrated Christianity and proved itself Science, for it healed the sick and reformed the sinner on a demonstrable Principle and given rule. The human demonstrator of this Science may mistake, but the Science remains the law of God - infallible, eternal. Divine Life, Truth, Love is the basic Principle of all Science, it solves the problem of being; and nothing that worketh ill can enter into the solution of God's problems."
"God is Mind, and divine Mind was first chronologically, is first potentially, and is the healer to whom all things are possible. A scientific state of health is a consciousness of health, holiness, immortality - a consciousness gained through Christ, Truth; while disease is a mental state or error that Truth destroys. It is self-evident that matter, or the body, cannot cause disease, since disease is in a sense susceptible of both ease and dis-ease, and matter is not sensible. Kant, Locke, Berkeley, Tyndall, and Spencer afford little aid in understanding divine metaphysics or its therapeutics. Christian Science is a divine largess, a gift of God - understood by and divinely natural to him who sits at the feet of Jesus clothed in truth, who is putting off the hypothesis of matter because he is conscious of the allness of God - 'looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith.' Thus the great Way-shower, invested with glory, is understood, and his words and works illustrate "the way, the truth, and the life."
In addition she says, "Christian Scientists are not concerned with philosophy; divine Science is all they need, or can have in reality."
Mary Baker Eddy provided the topics for the Bible Lessons read and studied by Christian Scientists. A Bible Lesson Committee chooses the passages to be read from the Holy Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures for the Sunday service. At the Wednesday service readings from the Bible and Science and Health are chosen by a lay first reader of each of the churches. Christian Scientists are free to give testimonies of healing after the readings.
This is definitely a book for thinking people!
Rating:
Summary: not what i thought it would be
Review: This book was not at all what I thought it would be in substance. The title is misleading, especially "with key to the scriptures." It is almost impossible to believe the woman, Mary Baker Eddy believed what she wrote. Maybe in the context of her day it might have made a little more sense, but not in this day and age. A friend of mine whose parents were Christian Scientists, said there is very good evidence that her ideas were taken from a man named Quimby and that she had lots of help with wording, grammar, punctuation from a very well educated man of that time and that she rewrote it lots of times. So how can she claim that it was divinely inspired? I think much of the book is blasphemous. Also, I think there are lots of vulnerable people out there that could be hurt by this book if they fall for its ideas and quackery.
Rating:
Summary: Gaudy quackery with some good moments
Review: "The time for thinkers has come," said Mary Baker Eddy. What she meant was, "the time for the Thinker has come, and the Thinker is me. The rest of you do not have to think, I have done that for you." The book has its moments, but the fatal flaw with Christian Science is that it entirely neglects the entire tradition of Christianity which preceded it, and relies instead on the absolute authority of this one person Mary Baker Eddy. Ask a Christian Scientist if they have heard of The Confessions of St. Augustine and they will say no, because it wasn't written by Mary Baker Eddy. This book has some interesting points about not relying on the body, or matter, to solve what are fundamentally spiritual problems. But Eddy and her cultish followers decided that if you were a true Christian Scientist you would not use medicine or traditional health care at all (but even she realized that if you had broken bones or teeth you better go to the doctor because "Science" can't seem to heal those right away--this exception alone proves the absurdity of her "religion"; that is, God can dissolve a big tumor but he can't seem to crown a tooth or set a broken finger) Because of this, Christitan Scientists all get nailed when any type of flu epidemic breaks out, and they drop like flies from cancer and heart attacks when the rest of society enjoys the benefits of modern health care. But they don't talk about their deaths, instead they tend to ignore them. Do you know that in the Christian Science church service not a single spontaneous word is spoken? The entire service is scripted by the church authorities. In other words, no one is allowed to "think" because they might say something in conflict with Eddy or the Church. Keep that in mind when you read this book, that it was the start of something truly warped in the world, Christian Science. Read Confessions instead, or The Practice of The Love of Jesus Christ by Liguori, or The Imitation of Christ by Kempis, or countless other works that have withstood the test of time, and leave aside this quacky thing that was big in the early 1900s but has been slowly dying ever since, as all falsehood must eventually.
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