By an anonymous Ex-Christian Scientist Group Contributor.
Heaven was a big deal to the actual Christians that we knew when I was growing up, so I always thought it was a bit odd that it was rarely mentioned as part of my Christian Science learning. Christian Scientists themselves seemed to have little to no expectations of life after death at all.
It began to dawn on me that if you follow Christian Science, then you kind of have to accept that you have attained heaven here on earth. When I grew to be a teenager, I began wanting to ask questions. My mother’s chief tormentor, aka her best friend, was a ‘qualified’ (I seem to use a lot of quote marks when talking about Christian Science) practitioner, and I was told that I had been given permission to pass questions on to her with my mother as an intermediary. I believe I was meant to understand that I had been afforded a great privilege.
Q. Are there grass and trees in heaven, because isn’t everything down here that isn’t a person or a pet meant to be an illusion of mortal mind?
A. Nothing useful can be lost to God.
Q. If someone is bald on earth do they get their hair back in heaven?
A. If hair is useful to them as a reflection of God, then their divine personification will have hair.
(Why would hair be ‘useful’? No one needs hair, it just looks nice. Is heaven cold?)
The church I went to as a kid was one of those where the people in their sixties were considered young. The oldest members could barely walk, or see, and were obviously afflicted with any number of age-related ailments. They waited like human pennies in those shove ha’penny machines to be randomly shunted off their precipice and never seen or spoken of—or to—again in the church; presumably when they either died or were too frail or embarrassed to make the journey in.
Q. Why is everyone I know who does Christian Science so old and doddery?
A. They only appear like that; in fact they are radiant with health and full of energy on the inside.
Considering what an enormous amount of claptrap Mary Baker Eddy fabricated about basically every other subject, it is curious that she never got around to proscribing anything about the afterlife or lack thereof. I always found it a curious omission. Hadn’t Mary Baker Eddy known everything? I asked another practitioner once, who looked shocked and then muttered something about that being covered in the Bible.
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