I was brought up a Christian Science and am now a Buddhist, let us not confuse putting down someone else's religion as humor.

There's no humor in the amount of suffering and casualties she's caused.

what she taught was an ideal as an example, most of the CS I know will use a doctor if they or there children needed one, many believe that the mind has great power to cure or cause sickness. You will find fundamentalists in all beliefs and yes they can do great harm but I do not believe that is the fault of the teacher that the student did harm. I find the amount of intolerance on this site hart breaking at times.

I am enraged

go to doctors a lot for various illnesses. They would never agree to blood transfusions, but they've all had surgeries of various kinds.

CSs are a different breed altogether. When I was in high school in the early 60s, a neighbor of my family's who was CS died from a benign stomach tumor. She'd tried to pray it away, but that didn't work. After she died, an autopsy was performed because she died at home, with no doctor present. Her husband, who wasn't CS, was all for it and made sure everyone knew that, as he put it, "Mary Baker Eddy killed Gracie."

because Mama was CS and thought her prayer group was praying it away. She decided to move in with my coworker at the end. My coworker's words for CS, the church she was brought up in, were not reverential.

One thing about today's ruling that most people are missing is that civil rights have now been stripped from human beings and awarded to corporations. People have no right to their individual religious consciences. Those now belong to the corporations.

I understand of the story, it may be today's 1984.

"In the world of the near future, who will control women's bodies?"

The Handmaid's Tale (1985) - Margaret Atwood

http://www.amazon.com/The-Handmaids-Tale-Margaret-Atwood/dp/038549081X

By no means does this have to be the christan science folk.
This is an open invitation to anyone having sufficient greed to turn their privet bent of christanity into a money grubbing cult will hop on the bandwagon.

With apologizes to those with honest religious beliefs.

The court has already decided to call corporations "persons" for purposes of free speech. Although it's a reach, corporations can issue official statements and policies through their boards and while I disagree with the idea they should have free speech as an entity it's easier for me to see a argument that corporations speak than it is to see how they can be religious as a "person". An even bigger stretch now is that corporations as persons have first amendment freedom of religion rights. How does a corporation "believe"? How do they pray? How do they expect an afterlife and have a soul? How does a corporation go to church?

As I understand Amish religious belief, they consider any kind of insurance to be disrespectful to God. When Social Security coverage was expanded to agricultural workers, some Amish refused to pay FICA taxes, because they considered (with some justice) that it was an insurance program. The upshot was a statutory amendment, exempting the Amish from Social Security and Medicare. (Of course, one reason for the exemption is that the Amish, through their strong sense of community, take care of each other in ways that largely meet the goals of those government programs.)

Under the Hobby Lobby decision, owners of closely held corporations who become Amish would presumably be able to argue that their entire companies should not have to pay into Social Security or Medicare on behalf of employees, along with not having to pay for the employees' health insurance. That would be a nice little boost to the bottom line.

My mother-in-law was Christian Scientist and there's nothing in their religion that finds seeing a doctor morally objectionable. Thus, a business with Christian Scientist owners would have no standing to deny employees access to health care.

It really is something that operates on a personal/family level. My mother-in-law arguably died because she did not seek medical care for the heart failure that eventually claimed her life (in her late 80s, mind you), but it was always a case-by-case thing - she did consider doctors for some conditions, generally vision-related, though usually in the end she stuck with Christian Science healing. On a certain level, it is relentlessly pragmatic - the problem they have with medicine is not that it is wrong morally, it is that they consider it fundamentally in error. They think theirs is simply the better way.

I can see objecting to the tough cases, like not seeking medical treatment for children, but for adult Christian Scientists it's a matter for an individual making his or her own choices.