Tag Archives: amish

Evil Amish Bishops Drunk with Power

03 Sunday Jun 2012

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You have probably heard of the Amish beard-cutting incidents that took place in Ohio recently. If you haven’t, simply Google “Sam Mullet”. Sam Mullet is the bishop of an Amish splinter group in Ohio, members of which have been accused of religious hate crimes. Sam Mullet is the alleged ringleader of the hair-cutting attacks against other Ohio Amish.

The bishop holds the highest office in an Amish church. He is generally the leader of a single Amish church and presides over, on average, 20 to 30 Amish families.

Evil bishops that are drunk with power are uncommon but not unheard of among the Amish. Sam Mullet is a notable example. I also had a personal experience with such a bishop. In the community where I grew up there were a small group of us Amish kids (several boys and several girls) that were friends with each other and hung out together as often as possible. After I left the Amish, my house became a popular place for us to gather because we could watch television and drink alcohol whenever we could get our hands on it.

One of the girls in our group was a daughter of the community’s bishop. Of course he tried to keep her away from my house with threats and all manner of punishments but she was a rebellious girl and continued hanging out with us.

Then one day when I was alone at home this bishop came to my house and threatened me with physical harm if his daughter continued hanging out with us at my house. She was not yet eighteen but it wasn’t like I was forcing her to come to my house. Anyway, I decided if that bishop was going to heaven then heaven was no place that I ever wanted to be. I moved hundreds of miles away from that community not long after that.

Signs and Tests from God

30 Wednesday May 2012

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Probably all Christians view events in their life through the colored glasses of their faith. They tend to award undue significance to certain events because they think the event might be a sign from God. This behavior is particularly prolific among the Amish, who believe that God coordinates all events large and small. They believe that God causes specific events as signs to help guide you down the right path or as tests of your faith.

For example, if an Amish man started a new business and his buildings promptly burned down, many of the Amish would consider the possibility that the fire was a sign from God that starting a business was not the right thing for that man to do. On the other hand, if the aspiring businessman really wanted to succeed at the business he would be more likely to view the fire as a test – a test from God to see how much he wants to succeed at his business.

I remember when the 2010 Haiti earthquake occurred, several of my Amish friends suggested that the inhabitants of Haiti must be pretty evil for God to punish them like that. I suspect that this kind of shallow reasoning is a result of the flood story in the Bible.

On the other hand, don’t you think that faithful Christians living in Haiti at the time of the earthquake had quite a different interpretation of the event? Don’t you think they would have been more likely to view the quake as a test of their faith?

Every time there is a natural disaster there are Christians who have just lost their homes talking on television about how this test from God has only strengthened their faith. Elsewhere, there are Christians shaking their heads and wondering what evil these people did in their lives to be punished by God like that.

If something bad happens to anyone, the Amish that like the person interpret the event as a test of faith. The others interpret the event as a punishment from God. Nobody seems to notice how ridiculously subjective and judgmental these interpretations are.

The Arbitrariness of the Amish Ordnung

06 Sunday May 2012

Posted by in The Amish, The Questioning

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Back when I was still an Amish kid, I was often frustrated with the arbitrariness of the Amish Ordnung (their set of rules). For example, our church banned the smoking of cigarettes because the body is supposedly a temple of God and should be treated that way. On the other hand, eating potato chips was perfectly fine. Shouldn’t obese people be punished if smokers are?

You can’t live life without subjecting your body to harmful substances and situations. Even hard physical labor can be harmful to the body. Where do you draw the line, I wondered. How about leaving it up to the individuals to self-impose arbitrary rules? Anything else just causes discontent due to the restriction of personal freedom.

The Amish focus on the bad possibilities of technology (e.g. Oh no! You can watch porn on computers – computers must be banned!) while completely disregarding the vast good that technology can bring. With technology, the Amish mentality is to blame the gun instead of the person that pulled the trigger.

On the other hand, they are arbitrary even with that mentality – they don’t apply it to everything. When Amish church members are caught having sex with farm animals, no one blames it on the cow. No one says the cows are being too flirtatious – no one advocates banning cows.

Am I Unstable?

04 Friday May 2012

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During my 10-year transition from Christian to atheist, my belief system has undergone a number of significant changes. At first, I believed the Bible to be the inerrant and literal word of God. After discovering that some of the “facts” therein are just plain incompatible with reality as we know it, I transitioned to believing the Bible to be the metaphorical but divinely inspired word of God. Eventually I decided that the Bible is of little use and that God couldn’t possibly be like he is described therein. I started believing in a form of pantheism. Later I dropped that and became an agnostic – believing that there is not enough information to know whether God exists or not. Recently, I became an atheist – believing the complete lack of evidence for the existence of God does not justify being open to his existence any more than we should be open to the existence of Santa Claus – despite the possibility of the actual existence of God and Santa Claus.

Most Amish people would consider me unstable for changing my belief system so often. They’d use the word “unstable” in a manner that makes you think of a person with no mind of their own – extremely gullible and easily fooled by evil people. They use the word degradingly – as if speaking of an inferior person.

They warn people away from sites like this one in the fear that an “unstable” Christian reads it and becomes convinced that there is no God.

What the Amish call “unstable” is actually the result of “learning” and not of arbitrariness. Learning involves the acquisition of new information and the continual modification of one’s belief system based on the new information that is assimilated. To call a person “unstable” simply because they changed their belief system, is the equivalent of saying “learning is dumb”.

“Pulling” Bellyaches: An Amish Medical Superstition

22 Sunday Apr 2012

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There is a notion among some Amish that bellyaches (abdominal pain) can be “pulled” from another person. The notion is that, coming into physical contact with a person suffering from a bellyache will cause the bellyache to transfer to the new person.

In a show of empathy and altruism, a grown person will attempt to pull a bellyache from a suffering child or baby. Some Amish parents go so far as to judge the health of their babies by whether or not the parent gets a bellyache while holding the child.

I don’t think this medical superstition is widespread among the Amish, and it is also possible that it’s not restricted to the Amish. It’s just that on the few occasions I ever heard about it, it’s been an Amish person that has told me.

The Amish Ordnung: High and Low

20 Friday Apr 2012

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Each Amish church generally has its own Ordnung, or set of rules, which dictates the dress code, behavioral rules, and accepted technologies for that church and its members. Among the Amish, when it comes to comparing the Ordnungs of different churches, there is a concept of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’. A relatively conservative Ordnung or church is said to be “low” and a relatively liberal Ordnung or church is said to be “high”.

When it comes to accepted technologies, some Amish churches allow electricity in the home and others don’t. When it comes to dress code, some Amish churches require the ladies to wear brown and black, while other churches allow them to wear brighter colors. When it comes to behavioral rules, all Amish churches ban divorce, abortion, and military service. Most of them ban civil lawsuits, birth control, and higher education.

An Amish church that does not allow indoor hot water plumbing may decide to put that technology up to vote. If they decide to accept the technology then the church has gone ‘higher’. While it does happen that an Amish church goes ‘lower’ it is more common for them to go higher.

We can think of it as a vertical scale with a dress code on one side of the scale and the accepted technologies on the other side. We can ignore the behavioral rules in this case because they are fairly uniform among the Amish. Some technologies and dress codes are traditionally higher on this scale than others. For example, an Amish church is more likely to approve the use of cellular phones than to approve the use of computers so in this case the computer would be higher on the scale.

The line between Old Order Amish and New Order Amish, and the line between New Order Amish and Mennonite aren’t really clear cut. While the image below is not completely accurate, it gives you a reasonable idea of the technological differences between New Order and Old Order Amish, and the relative position of the various technologies on the scale.

Technology Acceptance Among the Amish

A church that bans indoor hot water plumbing is considered to be fairly ‘low’. A church that allows the women to wear bright clothing and allows church members to have electricity in the home is considered a pretty ‘high’ church. This same implicit scale is often used to distinguish Old Order Amish from New Order Amish from Conservative Mennonites. The line between Old Order and New Order is somewhere between bicycles and home phones and the line between New Order Amish and Mennonites is somewhere between electricity and cars.

Non-Amish are commonly known as the “English” but they’re also called “hoch” (high, singular) and “hoch-ee” (plural).

The Amish position on dress code and acceptance of technology is based primarily on two Biblical virtues – modesty and non-worldliness. Since the Bible does not specify exactly the dress code, or how one should be different from the world, each Amish church decides what is an acceptable dress code and which technologies are to be used and which are to be shunned. That’s why you have higher (more liberal) churches and lower (more conservative) churches among the Amish

While the higher Amish might tend to think the lower Amish are making things unnecessarily hard on themselves, and the lower Amish might tend to think the higher Amish are slipping off the right path, the terms ‘high’ and ‘low’  themselves are generally not used in a derogatory manner. Wow that was a long sentence. I added these last two sentences only because apparently a single sentence does not a paragraph make.

Thoughts on God by an ex-Amish Heathen

17 Tuesday Apr 2012

Posted by in The Conversion

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The following are some thoughts that I noted in my handheld over the past year or so. It is interesting to wonder what I was going through at the time… The most recent notes are at the top.

March 12, 2012, 7:45 PM

I wish God would stay the f*** out of my life.

November 17, 2011, 1:47 AM

Shouldn’t the Army also have chaplains for all the other religions?

September 10, 2011, 6:46 PM

Amish boy to atheist man: On the one hand, life becomes less meaningful and less serious. On the other hand, there can be no more afterlife goals.

August 3, 2011, 3:34 AM

Which is more important, truth or belief?

July 13, 2011, 12:13 AM

Very few statements make less sense than, “I wasn’t hallucinating!”

(I bet I was thinking about the religious visions that some people claim to experience.)

June 12, 2011, 10:25 PM

Conventional behavior bears no resemblance to rational behavior.

April 19, 2011, 2:53 AM

The difference between the theist and the agnostic: The agnostic accepts the unknown simply as the unknown while the theist anthropomorphizes the unknown for a variety of reasons ranging from 1) a lack of independent thought, 2) a need for companionship, and 3) a fear of the unknown… Even false hope is comforting.

Date and Time Unknown

I do not believe a supreme being would design a universe that operates according to rules of logic… and then hide from logic.

I also do not believe a good supreme being would punish someone for reaching a logically valid conclusion given the available information.

A God that punishes its subjects for a logically valid conclusion… is an evil God that I want no part of!

The Reading Habits of one Little Amish Boy

14 Saturday Apr 2012

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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.

The Amish on Capital Punishment

13 Friday Apr 2012

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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.

Free Will versus God’s Omnipotence

12 Thursday Apr 2012

Posted by in The Questioning

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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.