Note: If you are a follower of the Christian Science Church, you are not going to like my post.
So, there's a local book festival at my town, and I decided to go and wander. Speaking to all the independent publishers and other author's sitting at stands is always fun, even if I didn't have any money with me (I went straight from SAT testing this morning). Anyways, I am walking with a couple friends, and this chick asks if we would like to pick out a "Thought of the Day" from her bucket of papers. She then gives us a list of "75 Books by Women that Changed the World".
I look through it, absentmindedly, and then she starts telling us about the book (which all the "thoughts" happened to be from) called "Science and Health with Key to the Scripture". She claimed that this Eddy lady has risen the dead, and done pretty much everything up to that, too. ("Although, I don't think she ever met a leper! But the rest of this stuff on the cover she has done!") Lady proceeds to tell me that if I know somebody who is dying and whom the Doctor's can't help, I need to buy her book so that I can heal whomever.
Now, my family has had some pretty terrible crap happen, become more religious from it, and then had a practical repeat of the same catastrophe happen again. It just makes me angry when people are like this lady, claiming that people die because they don't pray enough, or things like that. I didn't say anything to her, since I was with a couple religious friends of mine whom I didn't want to upset, but I was pretty upset about it. And I mean, I know there are tons of people like that (a whole church, actually), but being confronted with those ideas just made me angry.
FAKEEDIT: Researching this lady, Wikipedia is making me want to cry:
In 1872 Eddy had an argument with her first student Richard Kennedy and he was expelled from Christian Science. Later she came to believe out of revenge that he was using mental powers to destroy her so Eddy ordered her students to "mobilize all their mental energy to combat him".
Eddy believed that former students actually had the power to commit “mental assassination". After a breakup with one of her early protégés, Daniel H. Spofford, she thought he was using mental malpractice to undermine her Christian Science practice and ordered her students to stand outside her bedroom door to mentally ward off any attacks by Spofford. In a celebrated case (1878) that earned her much negative publicity, she took part in a lawsuit against Spofford, claiming that he deliberately practiced malicious mesmerism on one of her unhealed patients, Lucretia Brown. Irreverently dubbed "The Second Salem Witch Trial", the suit was eventually thrown out of court.