I think we receive a great deal what we expect in this world. -Laura Ingalls Wilder
As a teenager, I had been growing away from the beliefs of the church, but one of the main things that caused me to question Christian Science was that the year that I left home to go to college, a boy who I knew in my Sunday School, whose name was Michael Schram, who was 12 years old, died at home of a ruptured appendix.
Christian Scientists not only don't like to acknowledge illness; they don't like to see it. On occasion, I was sent to my room from the dinner table for sneezing or coughing; I now know that I was allergic to our cat.
Christian Science has been enormously influential in our religious history, and the church is very powerful. It has won an extraordinary number of legal battles in this country. It has succeeded in passing a number of what are called 'religious exemption laws.'
My father was a particularly zealous Christian Scientist, but young Christian Science children, who have little choice but to believe what their parents are telling them, are taught that illness originates in errors in their parents' and, eventually, their own thinking.
