Here's a concern that I'm going to be doing prayerful work about. Regarding the call for a 30-day period of prayer for our nation, posting the Ten Commandments in classrooms, and teaching the Bible, what really worries me is that the people who are calling for these may be the ones who would inculcate the belief in heaven as a locale that sinful mortals reach only through ritual, material sacraments, and blind faith in an unknowable, manlike God (to whom, also, women are lesser beings). This may well be the "God" that many of these churches pray to, and this is the God whom children would be told they must put before all other gods. But this time, they'd have on their side the power of not only the religious right and its concept of God that is more manlike than otherwise, but such backups as big-pharma lobbying, anti-women's-rights lobbying, and the takeover of material medicine as a societal deity (which has been slowly growing over the past decades until the medicalization of everyday life is now the norm). The world desperately needs, not outward symbols, but a better sense of God. Those whom we're praising now for their idea about prayer and Christianity in schools, and posting the Ten Commandments, might well turn on Christian Science in an instant, tooth and nail. It seems possible that error, appearing benignly, yet leaving clues, will again revile Christian Science as "pantheism" and "paganism" and Mrs. Eddy as being "the prayerless Mary Baker Eddy." I'm wary of feeling happy about these (seemingly) God-oriented developments, but divine Mind, Love, God can reach everyone concerned, and I have to know this.
