Science and religion don't mix. I've seen a lot of people try to put these two together, and it doesn't match. One is one, the other is the other. I don't get why people try to mix the two.

For me, I'm gonna stick to tried and true mainline churches. It's just the right thing to do. You can't go wrong if there is a long history and a lot of folks there. I recommend you all try that.

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corboy
This article is especially good: The author speaks of bridging the chasm
between rational/scientific thinking and New Age. She ended up changing careers
as a result.

[www.csicop.org]

Karla McLaren, who wrote an actually decent and famous book about Chakras, was always a skeptical New Ager. From my perspective, from reading her New Age book, she had already gotten herself in way deep with New Agers who went off the deep end.

But that doesn't mean all New Age is bunk.

Some people have to tip to one side or the other. She, obviously, has been unable to bridge the gap.

Personally, I don't think it's either/or but both.

As for the Church of Religious Science, I am officially a "member" of Agape (www.agapelive.com) but I don't go to services that regularly. I find them to be extremely benign and open-minded...there's not a lot of dogma being pushed there. You can attend Agape services no matter what religion you are.

Is there focus on positive thinking? Sure. But science has shown that people who think positively live longer and are happier (duh - who is happy who thinks negatively all the time)?

I don't agree with all of the philosophy, but they don't force anything on you.

And compared to "safe" and traditional "mainline churches," no-one is telling you that you are going to go to Hell if you don't believe in Jesus and repent your sins.

This is one of those cases where it seems wierd to you because it is unfamiliar. If you were to learn about Christianity for the first time, and all the strange talk of Revelations etc., it might also seem a bit strange.

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magnumpi
It's hard to explain to people how utterly devastating it is when you get hooked into psuedoscience and fanciful thinking too heavy. It literally destroyed my life.

And yet, there are so many people who have found this stuff works for them and they find it uplifting and helpful.

So why did it "destroy" your life, but for many others, it is a source of comfort and meaning to them?

I suspect that this could be a prime example of where the gap needs to be bridged for some people - the gap between mysticism and realism. You said you got "hooked" into pseudoscience and fanciful thinking "too heavy."

I believe getting into a LOT of things "too heavy" will hurt you. Things that might otherwise be benign.

Let's just look at traditional church. For many people it is very benign and beneficial. But some folks will get too involved with it. Perhaps join a more fundamentalist organization - push away family and friends - lose contact with scientific thinking - spend their days preaching fire and brimstone to everyone they meet...and then later on feel religion has destroyed their life.

Does this mean that Jesus is bad, or church is all bad?

Likewise, it is not fair to say that all positive thinking or new thought movement is inherently dangerous. It is no more so than any standard religious paradigm.

The problem is when people embrace it to the point of pushing common sense out of the way.

Positive thinking is helpful. Meditation is helpful. And yes, there have been scientific studies proving this. There have even been scientific studies showing that prayer has positive healing effect on the prayee.

But, if you only think positively and meditate all day, and you don't take action in your life, your life will fall apart very quickly. If you only pray all day and never feed yourself, you'll starve.

To me, the key is balance.

Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

I don't believe it for one, but have at times been labelled negative, and I've tried to state that I believe it is good to criticise or appraise something on merit in it's entirety both good and bad.

Anyone that tries to shove part of my awareness into the gutter for a more clouded viewpoint be damned I say. Legitimate ideas should hold up to a little throttling from me, and if the one voicing said ideas does not understand it well enough then perhaps they shouldn't be championing it, and if they think they're risking disaster because they had a nasty thought well I pity them then, ... NOBODY EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUISITION! 8P

AAL be damned as well ...

Now if only i could use proper logical arguments, I have some work to do, but i offer up my meager thougts again.

my whole post is not ... posted, drat i lost some of it because I could not type it quickly enough before having to relog in ...

Every time I read a post in which someone claims to have been "hurt" by Religious Science, Unity, or a similar group, I find myself thinking, "Let's place the blame where it belongs."

Spiritual Mind Treatment, for example, is simply a method of prayer. That's all it is. It's not taught as magical thinking, and it's not intended to be a substitute for personal responsibility. Jesus taught, allegedly, that whatsoever one asks for in prayer believing that one has received it, one will have. Spiritual Mind Treatment is simply a way of praying in a way that promotes the belief that one has received what one is asking for.

Religious Science is not "Pseudo-science." It is a philosophy of life, and that's it. It isn't even something that can appropriately be compared to the actual scientific method, which involves the experimental testing of hypotheses based on observed data.

With all due respect, I think it very unfair to blame a group for "damaging" one when one could have simply walked away from that group at any time, just as one can walk away from Unity at any time. :roll:

And, as far as medicine is concerned, Religious Science in no way discourages anyone from availing him- or herself of the services of medical science.

I find statements critical of a group for its adherence to "magical thinking" ironic when the critic is blaming the group for having caused harm by discouraging personal responsibility, then accuse the group of having held him or her back, which is, after all, a failure to assume personal responsibility. :wink:

In a society that grants 'religion' a free pass, common liberty and then held above the average citizen in a tax free status I find the notion that it's buyer beware providing for the average citizen to be a cavalier attitude. As you see the slow decay on the wall between church and state, or rather the rapid toppeling of that wall in the case of the US where in Cincinati there's a 27million dollar monument to stupidity in the Creation Museum, evangelists running law schools, republican presidential candidates denying evolution, dobson advising the president on Iran, Oprah peddling 'the secret' as some sort of salvation ... well how does the average consumer taken up in the spirit of the day respond. Buyer beware as a response is the catchism of a government and media that has not done it's duty.

As to magical thinking lets chew on a bit of sage advice from Holmes.

pg 234 from the Science of Mind by Ernest Holmes, a chapter devoted to the idea of Physical Perfection

False Growths (Tumors, Cancer, Gallstones)

We must think of the subjective state of our thought as our atmosphere in the Universal Mind, for we cannot separate ourselves from the Universe. There is but One Mind and we are in It. We are in It as intelligence. It accepts our thought and acts upon It. Destructive emotions, desires or ideas, unless neutralized, will grow into some bodily condition, and may produce disease. Disease without thought could not manifest, no matter what the disease may be. We are surrounded by a Receptive Intelligence, which receives the impress of our thoughts and acts upon it.
If the thought of false growths can be erased, the manifestation can be healed. Declare: "Every plant which my Heavenly Father hath not planted, shall be rooted up." The Heavenly Father is the Reality of man and is Eternal Presence and Perfection. Dissolve the of idea of false growths by knowing that there is nothing for them to feed upon. Erase the belief, in your own mentality, and you will remove it from the mentality of the patient, and thereby project healing power to his body.
In treating cancers and tumors, there should be a harmonizing of the consciousness that will cleanse the blood. Declare: "Dive Love within me, removes from my consciousness every thought unlike God (Good). In my physical body there is only room for perfection, because that thought which is sustaining and nourishing my body is aware only of perfection, nothing can come into being except from the One Creative Mind, and nothing can flourish unless there is something to nourish it. Accordingly, I know that my thought does not sustain any false growths, either consciously or unconsciously originated.
"The depression, the misunderstanding, the maladjustment, the frustration which may have taken place in my life, is now eradicated. God is the One Causation back of all manifestation, and there could not be cause for a development of any kind contrary or superflous to the divine order. Therefore, there cannot remain within my body anything which does not express perfection. God-Life, in and through me, forever cleanses, heals, and renews every organ, and every atom in my body, after the pattern of perfection."
False mental causes are removed by a freshness of thought, sustained by an affirmative outlook of faith and trust in the perfection of life. The only accretion which takes place in the body is that produced by the activity of Perfect Principle, and what the body cannot use is passed freely on.
We have learned that there is only One Substance, out of which everything is made ... cabbages and kings, hands and houses, money and men ... consequently, any wrong condition in the human body is made from exaxtly the same substance from which the most perfect form is created. The pure and perfect light of Spirit dissipates and dispels every discordant form, for those things which are not implanted by Divine Spirit have no law to support them.
Whether it be cancer, fibroid tumor, a wen, a cyst, or gallstones, the practitioner must know that the Spirit indwelling his patient is perfectly and completely manifested, and that every shadow of erroneous conclusion is wiped out. False growth is neither person, place nor thing: it has no life to sustain it, cannot take root in Truth; it has no validity, no substance and no power, and cannot be fed nor nurtured by Truth.


...

This book was copyrighted in 1938, and the passage i quote from i expect to be removed perhaps in futility but I think this kind of appeal to wishful thiking, childlike omnipotence in supposedly understanding the vast workings of reality and recommending it in turn as a way to treat disease as something that should have vanished as soon as it appeared. Oh but here it is 2007, Oprah and the Republicans and the general public have dissapointed me greatly.

These groups won't go away, things are laizez faire or buyer beware simply because cults and magical thinking go in and out of style endlessly. I will not stop criticizing it, I will never endorse it, those who do do not garner my respect. I do not refer to it with respect to my mother or brother, church members or anyone who asks. I'm to be afforded that at least, my freedom of expression.

This new agey trash thinking, book sales campaigns in tow, affinity leveraging, are twisting my sanity fairly hard. It's hard to accept the baseness that permeates a even a small amount of the populace. Even for one second thinking that anyone believes this crap is startling to me.

Oh yeah, and note in those passages it's all about if you only just believe hard enough and purely your problems will vanish you will be perfection. Or at least i do believe that is what is implied. If you were made to believe that I think you will be meeting with disaster as life is not that simple, nor does one's mind leverage anything beyond what your physical limbs can reatch.

Even noting psycho somatic effects, one must admit it's not entirely understood. How can one speak to perfection, to treating tumors and cancer with your thoughts? Buyer beware indeed, people get an oncologist if you want to live already.

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Kastlefeer
In a society that grants 'religion' a free pass, common liberty and then held above the average citizen in a tax free status I find the notion that it's buyer beware providing for the average citizen to be a cavalier attitude. As you see the slow decay on the wall between church and state, or rather the rapid toppeling of that wall in the case of the US where in Cincinati there's a 27million dollar monument to stupidity in the Creation Museum, evangelists running law schools, republican presidential candidates denying evolution, dobson advising the president on Iran, Oprah peddling 'the secret' as some sort of salvation ... well how does the average consumer taken up in the spirit of the day respond. Buyer beware as a response is the catchism of a government and media that has not done it's duty.

You have every right to believe that.

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Kastlefeer
As to magical thinking lets chew on a bit of sage advice from Holmes.

pg 234 from the Science of Mind by Ernest Holmes, a chapter devoted to the idea of Physical Perfection

False Growths (Tumors, Cancer, Gallstones)

We must think of the subjective state of our thought as our atmosphere in the Universal Mind, for we cannot separate ourselves from the Universe. There is but One Mind and we are in It. We are in It as intelligence. It accepts our thought and acts upon It. Destructive emotions, desires or ideas, unless neutralized, will grow into some bodily condition, and may produce disease. Disease without thought could not manifest, no matter what the disease may be. We are surrounded by a Receptive Intelligence, which receives the impress of our thoughts and acts upon it.
If the thought of false growths can be erased, the manifestation can be healed. Declare: "Every plant which my Heavenly Father hath not planted, shall be rooted up." The Heavenly Father is the Reality of man and is Eternal Presence and Perfection. Dissolve the of idea of false growths by knowing that there is nothing for them to feed upon. Erase the belief, in your own mentality, and you will remove it from the mentality of the patient, and thereby project healing power to his body.
In treating cancers and tumors, there should be a harmonizing of the consciousness that will cleanse the blood. Declare: "Dive Love within me, removes from my consciousness every thought unlike God (Good). In my physical body there is only room for perfection, because that thought which is sustaining and nourishing my body is aware only of perfection, nothing can come into being except from the One Creative Mind, and nothing can flourish unless there is something to nourish it. Accordingly, I know that my thought does not sustain any false growths, either consciously or unconsciously originated.
"The depression, the misunderstanding, the maladjustment, the frustration which may have taken place in my life, is now eradicated. God is the One Causation back of all manifestation, and there could not be cause for a development of any kind contrary or superflous to the divine order. Therefore, there cannot remain within my body anything which does not express perfection. God-Life, in and through me, forever cleanses, heals, and renews every organ, and every atom in my body, after the pattern of perfection."
False mental causes are removed by a freshness of thought, sustained by an affirmative outlook of faith and trust in the perfection of life. The only accretion which takes place in the body is that produced by the activity of Perfect Principle, and what the body cannot use is passed freely on.
We have learned that there is only One Substance, out of which everything is made ... cabbages and kings, hands and houses, money and men ... consequently, any wrong condition in the human body is made from exaxtly the same substance from which the most perfect form is created. The pure and perfect light of Spirit dissipates and dispels every discordant form, for those things which are not implanted by Divine Spirit have no law to support them.
Whether it be cancer, fibroid tumor, a wen, a cyst, or gallstones, the practitioner must know that the Spirit indwelling his patient is perfectly and completely manifested, and that every shadow of erroneous conclusion is wiped out. False growth is neither person, place nor thing: it has no life to sustain it, cannot take root in Truth; it has no validity, no substance and no power, and cannot be fed nor nurtured by Truth.

That's a great book. The above process does not describe magical thinking; it describes spiritual mind treatment, which must be done to an exhaustive and intense degree over a long time to work. In addition, Holmes did not, nor does the USRS, advocate forgoing standard medical treatment. The Spiritual Mind Treatment is recommended to be done in addition to medical treatment.

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Kastlefeer
This book was copyrighted in 1938, and the passage i quote from i expect to be removed perhaps in futility but I think this kind of appeal to wishful thiking, childlike omnipotence in supposedly understanding the vast workings of reality and recommending it in turn as a way to treat disease as something that should have vanished as soon as it appeared. Oh but here it is 2007, Oprah and the Republicans and the general public have dissapointed me greatly.

You speak, in my opinion, from a standpoint of misapprehension.

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Kastlefeer
These groups won't go away, things are laizez faire or buyer beware simply because cults and magical thinking go in and out of style endlessly.

It's not "buyer beware" if no one is selling anything USRS does not constrain anyone. It does not revolve around a personality. It is not a cult.

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Kastlefeer
I will not stop criticizing it, I will never endorse it, those who do do not garner my respect.

Perhaps they're not trying to.

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Kastlefeer
I do not refer to it with respect to my mother or brother, church members or anyone who asks. I'm to be afforded that at least, my freedom of expression.

Indeed.

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Kastlefeer
This new agey trash thinking, book sales campaigns in tow, affinity leveraging, are twisting my sanity fairly hard. It's hard to accept the baseness that permeates a even a small amount of the populace. Even for one second thinking that anyone believes this crap is startling to me.

That is a subjective judgment. The fact remains that the United Church of Religious Science is not a cult.

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Kastlefeer
Oh yeah, and note in those passages it's all about if you only just believe hard enough and purely your problems will vanish you will be perfection. Or at least i do believe that is what is implied. If you were made to believe that I think you will be meeting with disaster as life is not that simple, nor does one's mind leverage anything beyond what your physical limbs can reatch.

Even noting psycho somatic effects, one must admit it's not entirely understood. How can one speak to perfection, to treating tumors and cancer with your thoughts? Buyer beware indeed, people get an oncologist if you want to live already.

At least you admit you don't understand it. You still haven't made the case that Religious Science is a cult.