Today I discovered that a Facebook Group called Mission to Amish People has been discussing me. Here is the discussion;
I would like to comment on several of these posts so here goes;
One man says, “So, I see atheists can get lonely…. Lonely for what? This man just exposed an emptiness in his heart. Because he acknowledges it, and asks for something to fill it…”
It is true that I get lonely but it’s not a secret longing for faith. I feel lonely because I don’t have friends that share my beliefs. How would you feel if you were the only Christian surrounded by atheists?
Now there is another issue I have that you’ll be happy to learn about – I suffer from existential depression at times. Religion pretends to answer a lot of metaphysical questions such as ‘why are we here’ and ‘what happens after we die’. As an atheist, some of these questions are left unanswered and others are answered in ways that I don’t like. However, the truth means so much to me that I can live with the depression that comes with it.
Another person says, “I wondered too why you are exposing others to this site , I got shivers reading just a few of the blogs , decided not to comment on the blog , just pray for him …I also think we need to pray for the unstable ones who read this blog that they wouldn’t be swayed by reading it …..”
See what I mean about Christians thinking atheists are pure evil? I guess I can’t really blame them since from their point of view, we atheists are trying to get people that are on the path to being eternally happy and shoving them down the path of eternal suffering. I guess we pretty much fit the definition of “Satan” for them.
Another person says, “It takes a lot of faith to be an atheist. (yes, that is meant to be ironic). I’m sure they don’t see it as faith…but it really is. A false faith.”
This is the premise for a fairly common argument against atheism but it’s completely invalid. It is invalid because atheism is a belief based on reasoned arguments. Faith is not.
The last poster says, “…I suspect that he has received enough condemnation already…”
I could give that guy a hug. Finally, someone with the ability to look beyond their own feelings on the subject and see that I am a real person.
When I was a child, I did a lot of research. From the time I could read until I moved away from home and got my first laptop, I spent a lot of time buried in my family’s encyclopedia set.
Our encyclopedia set was outdated. It was more than 20 years since it had been printed but this 24-book set, measuring about three and a half to four feet wide when all the books were set upright beside each other, seemed to hold an almost infinite amount of knowledge for me.
I would spend hours on the floor with open encyclopedias scattered around me – taking notes in one of my many notebooks. I enjoyed how, at the end of each entry, there was always a list of related entries. Some question, such as, ‘how do radios work’ would pop into my head and I would go to our bookshelves and pull out ‘R’ from the stack of encyclopedias. After studying the lengthy entry, I would go through the list of related articles and realize excitedly that there was still more to learn about the topic. Back to the bookshelves I went to select still more encyclopedias. Due to the way these entries cross-referenced each other, I would often spend hours and hours researching a single topic. My exasperated sisters would tell Mom, “**** is up there with his encyclopedias all over the floor again!”
In this manner I learned about everything from cuttlefish to deoxyribonucleic acid. My favorite subject by far was cosmology and I spent a large chunk of my childhood research time studying this subject. The distance between the stars and the galaxies fascinated me to no end. I learned why the stars shined and I learned about the moons of Jupiter (I got mocked in school for suggesting that there is more than one moon).
I did more than studying when I was a child. Oh, yes. My first love was The Hardy Boys. Because Dad’s work would often take him through town, he would often stop at the town library, just for me, and pick up another stack of Hardy Boys. I also read classics such as Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. When my Dad deemed me mature enough, I launched into Louis L’amour’s and Zane Grey’s western thrillers. To this day, a good fiction thriller (preferably science fiction) can still be the highlight of my day.
Most Amish parents don’t read more than the Budget (Amish newspaper), Family Life (inspirational magazine for plain people), and several other such materials. They think that learning beyond that which is necessary to please God is not only a complete waste of time – but that knowledge can actually be treacherous (Well, Duh!).
Luckily for me, my parents are not your typical Amish parents. They are voracious readers and have never discouraged the gathering of knowledge through reading. On top of reading The Budget, my parents would read USA Today from cover to cover every day and weekly they would read U.S. News & World Report. After that, Mom would curl up on the couch with the latest Reader’s Digest or something similar and Dad would lay on the floor with the latest western thriller, political thriller, or even technological thriller.
At first it starts with a nagging question – an inconsistency or a contradiction that you notice in your belief system.
Then you rationalize. It’s usually not that difficult to rationalize – to invent something that makes sense with the rest of your belief system. Your religious beliefs will survive this rationalization – they’ll just have to endure a minor tweak.
Then you have more nagging questions. You realize that even your tweaked belief system is not sufficient to withstand the inquiry of an intelligent mind. Frantically you make more rationalizations and for a time, everything makes sense again.
And then of course you hit upon a new idea and a new question pops up. Once again you rationalize. This process keeps going on for several years. Your belief system gains some patches and a whole lot of little tweaks. Your rationalizations have become quite complex.
At some point you suddenly realize that your beliefs about God are way different from that of everyone else around you. But this is fine, you’re comfortable with this because it makes you feel good to have calmed the cognitive dissonance with your rationalizations.
The questions don’t stop there. In fact, the more you learn about science and philosophy, the more questions you get and the harder they become. You start redefining your beliefs even more. Your God starts becoming smaller and smaller. What you’re doing is learning more and more about the universe and relegating God to the gaps in your knowledge. If you’re lucky, you will have started learning about logic and you will suddenly realize that your beliefs about God are based not on evidence but on arguments from ignorance.
Eventually, you realize that your belief system is the definition of “agnostic”. You don’t tell your friends about your new label but you don’t feel awfully guilty about your beliefs either. After all, what could be the harm in admitting that you don’t know?
Then you start playing devil’s advocate. You debate against your religious acquaintances hoping that they can prove to you that God really exists. They fail miserably.
Mentally you start scoffing at your friends’ beliefs whenever the subject of religion comes up. It is around this time that you realize what you’ve become. An atheist! Surprisingly, it doesn’t feel all that evil. You don’t suddenly have the urge to rape and to kill. Actually, you start feeling better about yourself once you realize that your morality is real and not just a fear of eternal torture.
Becoming an atheist is not a single decision that a person makes nor is it a single point in time. Becoming an atheist is a long journey that often happens over the course of many years. For me it was about 10-12 years from the first serious question I had to when I was first comfortable considering myself an atheist.
Water divination (or water witching or dowsing) was taught to me at a fairly young age by my Father. I turned out to be a natural at it. I’d simply take two heavy-gauge wires about two feet long and bend both into an ‘L’ shape. I would hold a wire in each hand – the short portion of the ‘L’ in my hand. I would hold my closed fists about a foot apart with the wires sticking out in front of me.
I should note here that many Amish don’t like the idea of water witching because they fear that it is a gift from the devil (just like magic supposedly is). My Father apparently didn’t share that view.
To find water I would start with the wires pointing away from me and parallel to each other. Then I would simply walk around slowly. If I crossed an underground water stream, the wires would slowly swing toward each other until they crossed.
I was quite good at divining for water. If I’d test myself by walking toward a jug of water that I had placed on the ground for exactly that purpose, the wires would cross when they went over the jug. The same held true when I divined near our well or above known underground water pipes.
I went as far as to walk around our property with pen and paper and map all the underground waterways beneath our property. I was so good at it that I even demonstrated my skill at school. Some of my fellow students were skeptical at first but they all believed me when half of them discovered that they too had the gift. Excitedly, we took turns with the wires – walking over bottles of water and proving ourselves over and over again.
Nobody knew exactly how water divination worked but it was my older brother’s notion that it had something to do with the Earth’s magnetic fields and how it flowed through water, metal, and the human body. To my mind, it seemed like a plausible explanation and so I ascribed to his “theory”.
It wasn’t until years later (I was probably around 20 years old) when I decided to look into the scientific research in the field of water divination. What I found troubled me greatly. For such a useful physical phenomenon I expected considerable and positive research being done on it. What I found instead, was that researchers consistently, statistically proved that there was no such thing (or at least they proved that “skilled” water diviners did no better than chance on average).
By this point in my life, I had grown quite fond of mathematics – even the rather indefinite field of statistics. It troubled me to think that mathematics didn’t agree with me.
So, I decided to take the matter into my own hands and test it myself. I found a jug, filled it with water, and placed it in the backyard. Then I found some wires, bent them into the appropriate shape, and started witching.
What I discovered was astounding. I had completely lost my talent. The simply wires refused to cooperate. They wouldn’t cross over the jug unless I really really willed them to.
My mind went back to rebuttals I had heard other water deviners make when questioned. “It doesn’t work unless you believe in it.” Still, why would it not work for believers who try it in front of scientists?
I was getting really suspicious now. I found a piece of wood and drilled holes so that I could place the wires into the piece of wood and in that way I could divine for water without touching the wires. What I discovered was quite interesting.
Since I had drilled the “holder” holes straight down into the wood (the holes were vertical and almost perfectly parallel), the wires could not cross. They would both swing one way or both swing the other way, but they would not cross.
I took them out of the piece of wood and held them in my hands once again. This time I was interested in the mechanics involved in getting the wires to cross. After playing around with them for a bit, I realized that when I held the wires and they crossed, it was not because they were swiveling due to some attraction between the long tips of the wires, they were crossing because the top of my fists tilted almost imperceptibly toward each other causing the tips of the wires to slowly fell toward each other by gravity’s force alone. In retrospect, this is all blindingly obvious but if you really believe in something it almost requires a punch in the face to accept the opposite.
At this point I started seriously considering the possibility that I had fooled myself all those years. Could it really be that it was only my will causing my fists to tilt imperceptibly and cause the wires to cross?
Back to the computer I went and to the Wikipedia article about water divination. After reading carefully the possible explanations, I learned about the ideomotor effect. The ideomotor effect described exactly what I had been starting to suspect – that the whole thing was my will causing my fists to tilt imperceptibly and the wires to cross.
It was at this point that I started seriously studying the ideas related to skepticism. What I learned about the placebo effect and the other myriad ways that the human mind fools itself, had even more of an effect on me than learning about the ideomotor effect. Within weeks my well rationalized belief system was crumbling and my mind kept going to the Weird Al song, Everything You Know is Wrong.
All Amish kids of my generation know Weird Al’s songs because of Amish Paradise. Check it out, I think it’s quite hilarious…
Update (Jan. 20, 2013). I deleted a sentence of this post that referred to my fundamentalist friends. Apparently, I meant what I said when I wrote that (otherwise I wouldn’t have written it), but it did not convey what I currently feel about my fundamentalist friends. I love my friends and I greatly enjoy their company–even the ones that I’m not convinced would remain my friends if they knew what I believed.
Thus far, I’ve truly “come out” about my atheistic beliefs to only one person – my very Christian girlfriend of four years. We’ve discussed our differing beliefs at length and both agreed that we want and can make our relationship work for the long term.
We’ve agreed that the practical course of action would be for me to eventually join a Mennonite church so that she could remain close to her Amish family. I don’t see much of my Amish family so I don’t care that much what they think of me anymore.
If not for her, there is a good chance that I would eventually work up the courage to tell everyone I that I am an atheist.
Several of my friends probably wonder about my beliefs since I am completely silent when they’re discussing religion. The closest I’ve come to actually telling any of them is when I asked one of my friends if he could be friends with a person of another religion. He replied that yes, he thought he could. Then I asked him if he could be friends with an atheist – someone with no religion whatsoever. After considering the question he replied that yes he could given that the atheist doesn’t try to force his belief system onto him. I told him that his sounds like a reasonable position to take.
So maybe there’s hope after all. Maybe I can eventually come out about my beliefs without losing all of my friends. I will not do it for the time being, however, because I could completely lose my family as would my girlfriend lose hers.
It’s extremely lonely, however, to have no friends that share your beliefs. I think I understand, to an extent, what it’s like to be gay in our society. Sometimes I get the urge to run around giddily, screaming, “I’m an atheist! I’m an atheist!” but I don’t dare, I just keep it bottled away on the inside.
The Amish, in general, oppose the death penalty. This is not because they bear some grand humanistic values, but quite simply because the Bible tells us, “Thou shalt not kill.”
The Amish believe the death penalty is murder. They also believe that murder is one of the worst sins (despite believing all sins are equally bad) because when you kill someone, you remove that person’s chance of repentance and redemption.
Visualizing the Amish God as evil – as something I never wanted to associate with, was helpful in my transition from a questioner to a full-blown atheist.
Here is an appropriate little graphic that I put together from a variety of images I found online.
Growing up Amish I was taught that God was omnipotent (all-powerful). I was taught that God had the power to make anything happen and that he did – everything from making a leaf fall from a tree to deciding that it was time for someone to die. I grew up believing that God did not start the universe and then sit back as it unfolded, but rather, that he fully controlled every event.
But as I became an older child, things didn’t make quite as much sense anymore. If God made everything happen then why did I sometimes do bad things? I knew that God didn’t want me to do bad things but still I believed that he controlled it. Also, when somebody died, everyone in the community would say “Well, it was his time to go.” Everyone believed that God had chosen that day as the day for that person to die. Then we heard about a suicide in some other community. Everyone was so sad. Everyone knew that the person would go to hell – suicide was the worst possible thing to do because it was defying God’s will of when you must die, and it leaves no time to repent afterwards.
Wait a minute!
This might have been the very first time that I recognized a logical contradiction. On the one hand, God was omnipotent but on the other hand God didn’t seem able to control the desires of man.
So I asked my Dad about it and I talked to my Mom about it. Their consensus was that God is omnipotent except when it comes to the free will of man. Of course they didn’t use the term “free will”. Either they had never heard about it or they wanted to simplify things for me.
After a lot of thinking, this made sense to me. After all, God made us in his image. It made perfect sense that he “made” us but that he couldn’t fully control us. We were left to decide some things for ourselves and to pay the consequences for any bad choices that we made.
It didn’t take long for the nagging thoughts to return. If God was omnipotent why did he choose to give us free will when he made us? Wouldn’t it be more fair if he made us like the animals – with no free will? Why did he choose to give us a characteristic that would end up causing so much pain when he could just as well have done everything but give us free will?
This time when I asked for help with my questions, I couldn’t find anyone to help. For my parents, and even for the Amish preacher I asked, my questions were apparently too deep for them.
So of course they defaulted to an explanation that goes something like this; “I don’t know the answer to that but you know, the Bible tells us that God’s ways are so mysterious. Maybe we’re not meant to understand all these things.”
That wasn’t good enough for me. If God didn’t want me to understand things, he wouldn’t have given me a questioning mind.
So of course, I developed elaborate rationalizations. I had always believed that the purpose of life was to get to heaven. Upon wondering why God even made a heaven and why he wants humans in it, I decided that he probably got very lonely and just wants some company. At this point I decided that God had free will and that he wanted to socialize with other minds that have free will and by giving us free will, he had to relinquish some of his omnipotence. Therefore, we have choices and we have pain and suffering.
Sometimes I suspected that we were an experiment orchestrated by God. I imagined him up there in heaven taking notes as he watched his experiment unfold. I even went as far as imagining that it would be like me looking curiously down upon an anthill and watching the ignorant ants go about their lives. Whenever I couldn’t understand some facet of God I would imagine once again the ants on that anthill. I imagined that God’s intellectual superiority was like the difference in intelligence between humans and ants. Of course the ants had no hope of understanding even the smallest fact about us humans. In much the same way it made sense that we humans don’t have a hope of fully understanding the smallest fact about God.
In retrospect, I still suffer a little from a variation of the question, “Is there free will or is God omnipotent?” This variation is, “Is there free will or is there determinism?” But that’s a question to tackle on some other day.
I am a formerly Amish atheist. Life can get a little lonely when there’s no other person that you know of that shares your background and your skepticism. This post is a shout-out to ex-Amish atheists everywhere. We need to get together, socialize, and support each other.
If you’re an ex-Amish atheist or agnostic, please comment on this page so we can get to know each other. I have also started a group on Atheist Nexus for people like us. Please come and join me;
Growing up as an Old Order Amish kid, I was sheltered from worldly music of any kind. In fact, I was so sheltered from worldly music that I remember clearly the first time that I heard rock and roll music.
I was probably about 11 or 12 years old and riding my bicycle to school. As I pedaled my way around a corner in the road, I heard the beautiful clash of drums (any music with drum beats, we called ‘rock and roll’). Some non-Amish person had their home stereo system cranked so that I could clearly hear the music from the road. I stopped pedaling and just listened for a bit. The music washed over me and it was an intensely pleasurable and naughty experience. I knew that if I were a good little Amish boy, I would’ve kept pedaling and would’ve tried to block the music from my awareness.
In our young sheltered lives, we Amish children rarely had the opportunity to listen to worldly music. When picking a local taxi to drive us to town every couple months or so, my Dad would take into account the music that the driver was known to play. We would hire a rock and roll taxi only if it was an emergency. Such was the completeness with which we were sheltered from music.
I’m not exactly sure why the Amish frown on worldly music so much. I guess they fear that it has a corrupting influence on young minds. I suspect that a lot of the frowning stems from the Bible’s proclamation that music should be for God’s enjoyment.
In Amish church services and Sunday evening singings, there would be no bands and no instruments of any kind – there would only be a capella singing. The singing was nice but I would’ve preferred the head-bouncing rhythms of rock and roll.
One of my Amish friends, whom apparently had heard way more rock and roll than I ever had, was pretty good at beatboxing. Every time I heard him do it, I would mentally compare it with the music that I had heard on the way to school that day long ago. Using only his lungs and his mouth, he could belt out rhythms and drumbeats that sounded exactly like rock and roll music to me. It sounded so good to me that I would often encourage him to do it again, and again.
One day, my Amish friend, who was quite the rebellious kid, took me to some English person’s barn. The barn had electricity – the perfect place to hide and listen to a stereo if one had the balls to do it. We were trespassing of course – the owner of the barn had no idea what my friend’s older brother had hidden in his barn. We slipped into the barn, dusted the older brother’s stereo off, plugged it in, and for the first time ever, I heard “Way down yonder on the Chattahootchie”. It was the best ‘rock and roll’ that I had ever heard.
For years after that, I loved country music because of the experience I had listening to Alan Jackson songs in that old barn.
When I was about 14 years old or so, our community had another one of its annual school benefit auctions. This auction drew thousands of Amish and non-Amish from around the nation to buy and sell stuff. A portion of the proceeds went to supporting the local Amish parochial school.
In this auction there were always a lot of vendors selling products from booths (rather than on the auction). These vendors were often non-Amish and not limited by Amish beliefs in what they could sell. Luckily for me, one of these vendors was selling a bunch of little radio sets for about $10 a piece.
I checked around to make sure that no Amish people were watching me and with the encouragement of my two like-minded Amish buddies, I got up the nerve to buy a little radio. After procuring batteries for it, we spent the rest of the afternoon listening to the awesome quantity of rock and roll music that was being broadcast over the airwaves. It was my first big step into the larger universe.
Several days later my little radio found itself in Dad’s possession. I’m not sure how he had gotten hold of it. Perhaps my mom had discovered the radio in one of her periodic checks for contraband in my bedroom. He called me into the shop for a “talk” and there it was – sitting on the desk.
Surprisingly, he was very understanding of my “bad” behavior. He didn’t rebuke me very strongly but he did tell me that he had to destroy it. Having an interest in how things work I decided to give him an alternate course of action. I told him that rather than destroy it, I wanted to take it apart to see how it worked. I promised that after I was finished with it I would no longer be able to listen to music with it. To my surprise, he agreed to it. In this way, he was a very good Amish Dad. Most Amish Dads would have destroyed the radio, preached to the boy about the dangers of worldly music, whipped the boy severely, and then grounded him for several months.
While that was my first radio, it was by no means my last. Over the next several years I acquired quite a few more “boomboxes”. Some of them were destroyed by Dad, and others he never found.
My enjoyment of music hasn’t waned to this day although my preferred genres have changed. I have gone from country music to classic rock to contemporary rock and now I enjoy listening to pretty much everything but country music.
X Amish Atheist 