While the Atheist School in accredited academia was tearing the nation apart in their attempts to define who was and who was not a human being, scholars in the Classical School opposed them directly and vociferously.  

The Ecclesiastical School encouraged and supported the Classical School, but not wholeheartedly and not consistently.  No reflection on the intellectual crisis leading to the American Civil War would be honest if it did not cite Southern churches which backed the Lost Cause.

I consider it a confession of sorts that Southern Academia and Southern churches supporting the Confederacy planted their banner in an esoteric argument over “states rights” instead of slavery.  The moral bankruptcy of starting a war over rights subordinate to the Divine Rights of Man is the moral failure which defines the Lost Cause.

Southern Academia at that time dismissed the glaring hypocrisy, indeed the heresy as moot since Africans, as science had by then proved, were a sub-species at best and a completely distinct animal at worst.  Atheists expanding on Darwin and Marx inflicted terrific damage without either man’s hypothesis being proven.  Southern “peers” in academia simply endorsed biological evolution and social evolution by popular fiat and got on with the business of the Planters.

I am convinced that this opening battle between religion and pseudoscience was won by the Atheists because religious leaders of that age felt compelled to defend, on terms dictated by science, not just their personal convictions, ageless traditions, religious rites and church doctrines, but the very existence of God Themselves.

Do note I employ the word “Themselves”.  I am not certain which Bible you read and trust, but my King James Bible describes the Plurality of the Creator in unambiguous terms.  As for my preferred pronouns, they are “Thee, Thou and Thine”.

Don’t mistake me for picking a fight which was not already picked on my behalf.  And please don’t accuse me of imposing a tangent in a retrospective to attract eyeballs to my website.  In 1861, as today in 2023, pseudo-science was deconstructing the very definition of human being, reducing it in utilitarian analyses taken to the extreme, and arriving at dangerously dehumanizing conclusions.

Utilitarian reductionism is the prelude to the kill.  Affix utilitarian reductionism firmly in mind, for we will all witness how utilitarian reductionism compounded in the early twentieth century and culminated in the National Socialist Worker’s party’s Holocaust.

It took accredited academia in the Antebellum South a number of years to reduce the human condition to a utilitarian argument.  By 1861, half of the scholars in the Antebellum South could no longer recognize Africans as humans.  I realize I am swimming against a 20^th century current which reads, “First they came for the Jews”, but the truth remains that pseudoscience first came for Africans.  And don’t believe we have put utilitarian reductionism past us either.  Today, in 2023, half of the scholars in accredited academia can no longer recognize women as females. 

In 1861 pseudo-science was doing to the family of Mankind what pseudo-science is today doing between the genders: Contorting the definitive.

I raise the comparison, first, because someone must, and, second, because accredited academia has now established a long-term tendency toward decompensation.

Decompensation I imply in the clinical sense of the term, the specifics of which define an occupational hazard of scholarship.  Scholars, like us all, risk falling victim to mass delusion.  Flawed logic which exists in the Theater of the Absurd, that sandbox in which accredited is required to postulate, takes root on campus and thrives in the perennial promise of a better tomorrow. 

Scholars who become convinced the burden of all progress falls mainly on their shoulders, feel compelled to offer some answer to a world starved for solutions.  Pick up any edition of Science today and you can witness the immediate effects on society. 

News of a hypothesis leaks from the lab, makes it to print, and gains traction in the imaginations of the public long before academic peers are even required to confirm a hypothesis.  The headlines are always the same.  Everything from nuclear fusion to a cure for cancer is just around the corner.  Headlines breed optimism and optimism breeds patronage.  No patrons, no grants.

Thus has it ever been with science since the Renaissance.

In 1861, Darwin and Marx found their first patrons among Southerners looking for absolution from the mortal sin of slavery.  If it was true, that Africans were not human after all, then it was no more a sin to harness an African than it was to harness an ox.  Southerners granted Darwin and Marx patronage before either had run the gauntlet of peer review.

If the Ecclesiastical School of accredited academia had not retreated into piecemeal apologetics, if they had not been forced onto the ropes by demands they prove God existed, they may have gone on the offensive, as Lord Oglethorpe did at the direction of the Order of the Garter.

The argument over whether Africans were the same species as Europeans would easily have been won, had only the Ecclesiastical and Classical Scholars turned the tables on the Atheists.  Instead of attempting to defeat Atheists with religious principles, and religious arguments, the only Moral Authorities of that age would have made quick work of the Nutty Professors using Atheist means and Atheist measures.  But pride got in the way.  Ecclesiastical Scholars were loath to use the tools of lesser men.

This is what made Lord Oglethorpe such an extraordinary man.  While others were desperately scrying ancient texts for a silver bullet, Lord Oglethorpe was merely proving the Agnostics and Atheists wrong.  Oglethorpe enlisted Africans and Native Americans as witnesses in their own defense, then ferried them across the Atlantic for tea with the King.

Once any reasonable man had any conversation with a Native American or an African, he could no longer deny their humanity.  One wonders if the leading minds of the 17^th and 18^th centuries even had a single conversation with those subject to their “research”.

Had church fathers of that age only arranged informal introductions of Africans and Native Americans following every sermon, Socialism may have never gained a toehold in history.   Instead, Ecclesiastical Scholars retreated to their offices and offered prayer for the salvation of society’s soul.

If I am not mistaken, they remain faithful to their offices to this very day.

Mind you, I am not knocking prayer, but when prayer is your defense, and not just a bulwark thereof, expect the Liar to be knocking at every door in your parish.  But enough clerics openly challenged the fallacy of racism, and the heresy of slavery, to gradually grow the ranks of abolitionists. 

The tragedy is that Atheists and Agonistics in accredited academia were spreading the words of Darwin and Marx faster than clerics were spreading the word of God.  The number of believers outnumbered the number of scholars in ratios of thousands to one, but believers were a passive flock, penned into denominations and tethered safely to their pews.  Agnostic and Atheist scholars were men on a mission to save the world with science!

Even so, not all believers were passively praying in the pews. One believer deserving special note was Mary Baker Eddy.  In fact, no single individual better illustrates the struggle the Ecclesiastical School was having in maintaining their relevance.  Most church fathers scoffed at the desire to remain relevant, for science, at least as it was being practiced in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, was surely a passing fad. 

Would not the church look foolish in news clothes the moment intellectual fashion changed?  Indeed it would. 

Church fathers the world over agreed there was nothing new under the sun and, given enough time, the Agnostics, at least, would come to discover the truth of God for themselves.  Divine Truth, after all, was there waiting to be discovered.  Church fathers bolstered their courage in their commitment to have all church traditions in order when the Agnostics came to their senses.

Mary Baker Eddy disagreed. 

Mary Baker Eddy recognized the scientific revolution underway was not merely rhetorical, it was minting an entirely new coin of the Realm, one which valued proof over faith.  Mary Baker Eddy realized the very word science, if ceded to the Agnostics and Atheists, would be religion’s undoing.  For, if God were truth, if Creation was founded on Divine Laws, empirical method could not fail to prove this as fact.

Mary Baker Eddy went further.  Mary Baker Eddy, and thousands like her, insisted the Creator created all things seen and unseen through scientific processes.  We may not understand them, yet, but, as Christ Himself instructed, we’d one day accomplish all of His miracles and more.  How, if not by scientific enlightenment?

Mary Baker Eddy decided the way to cope with an aspirant, Atheist insurgency in accredited academia, was to claim the scientific ground in the name of the Creator.  If God’s miracles all had a scientific explanation, then prayer too was scientific.

The amount of ground Mary Baker Eddy reclaimed was astounding, not just for a woman, but for anyone.  Mary Baker Eddy was swimming against all currents.  But enough believers recognized the wisdom in her tact that the Church of Christ Scientists was eventually formed.

Historians and psychologists alike love to take Mary Baker Eddy apart, a signal to me, at least, that Mary Baker Eddy deserves to be considered.  I recall Galileo every time zealots on both flanks attack anyone taking a stand toward the center.  Fringe though the denomination she started now is, Mary Baker Eddy’s life story is more than worth telling.  Mary Baker Eddy will be the first witness I will call to the stand in the case of Pseudo-Science vs. The People.

The Wiki will confirm Mary Baker was the dutiful daughter of “a tiger of a man” who bullied and berated everyone, from his daughter to his neighbors, in the years leading to the Civil War.  An open supporter of slavery, despite being quite removed from the practice in New Hampshire, Mark Baker was likely aware of arguments emerging from the Theater of the Absurd.

In Mark Baker’s mind, Africans were indeed a species distinct from human beings.  To men like Mark Baker, all talk of freeing the slaves and making them citizens was like suggesting the same for cows.  Take off your self-righteous thinking cap for a moment and just listen to the proposal: Free the cows and give them the vote!

As ridiculous as that sounds it gets you halfway to where slavery’s supporters were in 1861.  Obviously, that place is lost, but the parallel I make with cows is not unfair.  Laws written prohibiting physical intimacy between “whites” and “blacks” were duplicates of laws prohibiting bestiality.  In Antebellum New Hampshire, Mark Baker was lonely and, as 1861 approached, growing lonelier still.

Psychologists take to the field where reports of Mary Baker Eddy’s chronic health problems enter the record.  That is early.  It is reported, and likely unfairly, that Mary Baker Eddy was prone to sudden ailments with a bewildering resemblance to temper tantrums.  Mary was reportedly prone to sudden fits which witnessed her writhing on the ground screaming in pain, and at other times laying motionless for hours, apparently unconscious.

There are no shortage of “experts” who unanimously diagnose Mary Baker Eddy as suffering from psychosomatic illness, a desperate need for attention, hypochondria or histrionics.  The last, being a malady attributed in particular to the fairer sex, appears to have resonated among Mary Baker Eddy’s critics in accredited academia.

Scholars today feel obligated to kick Mary Baker Eddy when she is down because she dared to codify in church doctrine a heresy against science.  By the time Mary Baker Eddy had been born, the Agnostics and Atheists had extended the laboratory prohibition against bias, even and especially Divine bias, to a prohibition against the divine anywhere and everywhere.  In the eyes of the Agnostic School and Atheistic School, science was the un-religion.  Marx had elevated that prejudice into a scientific maxim.

Mary Baker Eddy threatened and nearly managed to irrevocably equate religion to science.  Any unbiased evaluation of the two positions will have to rule in favor of Mary Baker Eddy, for if God, by definition, is the Eternal Truth underlying all phenomena in the universe, then there was no denying God, above all other things, was about as “scientific” as anything could be.

You have to admit it.  The woman had a point.

Mary Baker Eddy also had parasites.  In fact, I am 100% convinced Mary Baker Eddy had contracted a tropical parasite called Strongyloides, likely from pork products imported from the Caribbean.  While most parasitic infections resolve after the animal fulfills its life cycle, Strongyloidiasis is especially dangerous, and deadly owing to the mechanics of autoinfection characterizing the species.  When the parasite reaches the end of the trail, to borrow a metaphor, it reinfects the victim.

The symptoms of strongyloidiasis are mild and diverse, at first, but build in their severity over the years.  Through the insidious mechanism of autoinfection, one quickly becomes a hundred, a hundred compounds into thousands and thousands into millions.  Each individual parasite is small enough to wiggle between spaces between cells, where they lie in wait for their prey, bacteria primarily.

One would anticipate that humans might benefit from Stongyloides like whales benefit from lamprey, but large populations wreak havoc on the human body.  Eventually, neurological symptoms, including drop attacks and migraines, increase in frequency and intensity.  Drop attacks are especially dangerous since these involve the sudden loss of vestibular control, and vertigo so intense and painful as to induce screaming.  During a drop attack the victim’s own body literally throws the victim to the floor. 

That seems unlikely to anyone reading this, even today, but trust me, you don’t want to ever experience a drop attack.  The body’s vestibular system is so finely tuned that we all reflexively adjust to minor disturbances in our balance so rapidly we take for granted just how delicate our balance truly is.  When our vestibular system is disrupted suddenly, the brain receives signals that we are falling, or about to fall, so engages reflexes to compensate for the sudden disturbance of balance. 

Of course, since there is no sudden loss of balance, just a perturbation of the inputs our brain is receiving, the reflexive adjustments made by the brain throw us off balance and to the floor.  The physical response is not dissimilar to a seizure, without the attendant neurological consequences.  Still, in the advanced stages of Strongyloidiasis, which takes decades to reach, neurological damage is inevitable.  But these are not the only effects of this parasite.

Chronic illnesses of the digestive system become dangerous during bouts of dysentery, and damage done to intestinal walls can lead to ulcerations, infection, sepsis and cancer.  Of course, no one could plausibly have known about this tropical parasite until the mid-twentieth century, but humans have been suffering from its effects, which are lethal in the long term, for millennia. 

Physicians who failed to make a diagnosis in Mary Baker Eddy’s youth can be forgiven.  Physicians and biologists who today diagnose Mary Baker Eddy, both from afar and from beyond the grave, are absurdities who should be ignored.

Mary Baker Eddy’s ultimate course lay in her investigation of the power of prayer, of the role mindfulness plays in the disease and healing process. 

If Mary Baker Eddy did, as I suggest, have Strongyloidiasis, the sudden onset, progressive intensity, progressive frequency and equally sudden resolution of symptoms would incline the patient to perceive miraculous cures.  In an age when the only viable medical treatment for most diseases was prayer, Mary Baker Eddy dedicated herself to a considered investigation of the power of prayer. 

Today, Agnostic Scholars attribute the power of prayer to a placebo effect, and Classical Scholars are receptive to more than just a placebo effect of prayer.  The most recent research by psychologists confirms that patients with similar diagnoses and similar prognoses exhibit more than just a placebo-like outcome in the healing process as a direct, predictable benefit of their attitude. 

Convince a patient they will be healed, and in cases where they are healed, it is more likely that they will heal quicker.  Modern psychology will readily accept the Noble Prize for this astounding research, just be aware Mary Baker Eddy proposed the efficacy of the phenomenon first.

Before Mary Baker Eddy becomes an albatross around my neck, allow me to state for the record I would not turn to the Church of Christ Scientists for medical advice, especially if I were critically ill.  Nor would I turn to the Church of Christ Scientists for spiritual guidance.  But that is now, not then.

In the late 19^th century, in that ambiguous interval between the American Civil War and 1905, I would not have had much choice.  Traditional medicine and “emerging medicine” were both a game of roulette in their own right, so what harm could a little prayer healing do?

But I insist, even in retrospect, and perhaps especially in retrospect, we regard Mary Baker Eddy in more forgiving light.  Mary Baker Eddy, though willing to explore the teachings of contemporaries in the metaphysical arts, séance leaders, mystics and other such charlatans, Mark Baker Eddy considered and refuted each, and on no emotional grounds.

In the final analysis Mary Baker Eddy’s downfall, if indeed she has fallen, will be found in her apparently miraculous “cure” following a visit to a mesmerist named Quimby.  Quimby practiced his arcane art in New England just before the Civil War.  Mesmerists, like Quimby, were convinced the resolution, if not the cause of disease processes, were largely determined in the mind. 

Remember, we are talking about an age when it was confirmed by scientific observation, observations nobody refuted, that human beings, all beings, were just a collection of tiny life forms called “cells”.  The human body was immediately suspected as a battleground in the eternal struggle between good and evil, with cellular life being the suspected culprit of disease.  That perception left the soul, which was then indistinct from the mind, as the only true battleground.

Mary Baker Eddy was open-minded to the point she was willing to try anything to gain an understanding of the linkage between mind and wellness.  Critics and opponents alike, many of whom originate from within the Church of Christ Scientists itself, accuse Mary Baker Eddy of being a mystic or a spiritualist.  But I rest my defense of an intriguing, independent thinker with a quote from Mary Baker Eddy on the subject of Mr. Quimby.

“P. Quimby of Portland has the spiritual truth of diseases. You must imbibe it to be healed. Go to him again and lean on no material or spiritual medium.”

Mary Baker Eddy’s acquittal is found in the words “lean on no material or spiritual medium”.  Case closed.  But, like her acquittal, a conviction of Mary Baker Eddy is found in “the spiritual truth of diseases”.  On that matter, Mary Baker Eddy was categorically proven incorrect. 

Mary Baker Eddy, despite being open to independent investigation, and despite having identified efficacious constructs of psychology in defiance of established doctrines on good and evil, still adhered to the church doctrine of diseases being a spiritual imbalance, a product of sin.

One can only mourn for believers like Mary Baker Eddy who, afflicted with chronic disease throughout their lives, lived daily in the conviction their faith or their behavior was inadequate in God’s eyes.

Mary Baker Eddy’s rejection of “mentalists” and “hypnotists”, as she called them, were always for cause, for lack of efficacy. 

Again and again, Mary Baker Eddy returned to her original investigation of the efficacy of prayer.  That Mary Baker Eddy remains subject to attack by psychologists and clergy to this very day is perhaps the best measure of her worth.  For what does it profit a psychologist today to denigrate a fringe, religious sect if Mary Baker Eddy were truly mad?

No.  Atheists in accredited academia like to kick Mary Baker Eddy when she is down because she came closer to an effective model of psychology than many psychoanalysts of her day.  Granted, the “mumbo-jumbo” adopted by Mary Baker Eddy in trying to express religious rites in scientific terms offends both religious and scientific sensibilities, but she had extraordinary courage to try. 

One must also note that a keystone concept advanced by Mary Baker Eddy, “animal magnetism”, replaces the religious superstition of demon possession. Instead of demons, Mary Baker Eddy offers a flaw in the organic mind of every individual, a faculty of cognition which great minds like Freud, Jung and Adler were later to co-opt in their own theses in 1910.

But Mary Baker Eddy’s denial of an unembodied evil in the universe clashed so vividly with long standing church doctrines that Mary Baker Eddy doomed herself and her church in that proposal.  Mary Baker Eddy dared to propose a heaven without a hell, a Creator without a devil.  In rejecting Mary Baker Eddy’s concept of “animal magnetism” and “malicious animal magnetism”, the Church effectively declared there could be no Good without Evil. 

I find that an extraordinary contrast, the implications of which resolve in Mary Baker Eddy’s favor.  Mary Baker Eddy drove the final nail in her own ecclesiastical coffin when she insisted that men and women preachers lead congregations in her newly found church.

After going her own way religiously, Mary Baker Eddy continued to insist there is no evil in the world which we do not personally choose to manifest ourselves.  In advancing the mechanisms of “animal magnetism” and “malicious animal magnetism”, Mary Baker Eddy deprived the established religions a time-tested Bogeyman.  At the same time Mary Baker Eddy was making threatening inroads in the behavioral sciences. 

Regardless of the source of Mary Baker Eddy’s lifelong maladies, I just insist we do not forget Mary Baker Eddy never turned her back on the Creator, on the truth of Christ, on the validity of religion or the efficacy of prayer.

Mary Baker Eddy stands out among all the historical figures we’ve discussed in my sidebars on accredited academia.  Mary Baker Eddy lived to witness her lifelong hypotheses undone with a single discovery.  We are all still waiting for Darwin and marx to come to their senses.

Once again, it was Ibn Sahl’s lens which did the undoing: In 1905 it was proven that bacteria, not “malicious animal magnetism” was responsible for most diseases in humans.

Mary Baker Eddy died of pneumonia just five years after that discovery.  At least that is what the record informs us.  But pneumonia was, at that point in scientific history, a category of symptoms into which Strongyloidiasis fell unambiguously. 

Because the parasite in its larval form lives in the lungs, its repetitious infection of its host eventually catches up with its victim when they reach advanced age.  Mary Baker Eddy’s immune system could no longer keep up with the cycle of infection.  Her immune system in response, filled her lungs with eosinophils and, just like COVID does to its victims, Mark Baker Eddy literally drowned in her own immune response.

But the books say pneumonia, so I will be regarded as the armchair physician.  Just note that, in the year of Mary Baker Eddy’s death, the pathogens which are now known to cause true pneumonia, and not just similar symptoms, had not then been identified.  All diagnoses of Mary Baker Eddy are “armchair” diagnoses.

Louis Pasteur’s earlier research would not be revisited in time for Mary Baker Eddy to witness the discovery of antibiotics, but she lived long enough to see her lifelong convictions undone.  One is left wondering if Mary Baker Eddy lived long enough to register the significance of the 1905 confirmation. 

The true discovery that bacteria caused disease processes was made in 1883 by German biologist, Robert Koch.  Koch’s research on anthrax and tuberculosis was just rejected by colleagues, despite replicable results.

Full stop. 

Although “peer review” has ever and always been the singular pillar on which the scientific process rests, flaws in its function are predictably catastrophic.  Peers can advance a hypothesis, like Darwin’s and Marx’s, without fulfilling any objective, investigative criteria.  In contrast, documentable results like Koch’s are suppressed due to professional jealousies.

Clearly, accredited academia needs to be reformed.  My discovery just makes reforms immediately necessary.

In 1910, at Mary Baker Eddy’s side, we can’t be sure if she had even received the news that Koch had already identified cholera and postulated that it secreted a poison which killed human cells in the lignin of the intestine.  In the case of cholera and its verifiable causes, the gap between “I think” and “I know” is 75 years.  For 75 years, Koch’s hypothesis about cholera’s mechanism of action remained just that, a hypothesis.  Koch, therefore, was just first across the finish in proposing the link between bacteria and diseases.

So, who was the first scientist to prove one of Van Leeuwenhoek’s “animalcules” were causing diseases?

Erwin Frink Smith, a farm boy from Michigan.