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X Amish Atheist

~ fighting dogma from behind the lines…

X Amish Atheist

Tag Archives: education

The Genius Kid in Amish School

02 Sunday Sep 2012

Posted by xamishatheist in Early Life, The Amish

≈ 28 Comments

Tags

amish, astronomy, education, genius, intelligence, IQ, parochial schools


My first eight years of education, and so far, my only “formal” education has been in an Amish parochial school. How quaint to have been educated in a small one-room Amish schoolhouse with about a dozen other students, you might effuse excitedly. Well screw you! Amish parochial school stunted my intellectual growth and that pisses me off.

When I was a young Amish boy, perhaps eight or nine years old, I was fascinated with the night sky. I looked to the stars and I marveled when comet Hale-Bopp appeared in 1997. I dreamed of becoming an astronomer or an astronaut but of course I knew that I would never become either of those–I was Amish. Sometimes I wished my parents were normal so that my dreams would have a fighting chance of becoming reality.

My Dad, who was a great father despite all the religious crap, gave me one of those little rotating star charts one Christmas. With a cheap pair of binoculars and that star chart, I spent many enjoyable evenings outside, identifying constellations and writing notes about individual stars and planets. I read many astronomy books and taught myself ‘stargazing’ until I was able to find most specific visible stars, several of the brighter nebulas, and of course the Andromeda galaxy and the visible planets.

Academically, I did well in the Amish parochial school compared to the other students. I found the work easy and would work ahead on my material because I found it fun. My Amish teacher didn’t find that amusing and warned me several times not to work ahead of the other students. One day she had enough of it and spanked my offending hand with a ruler. That day I learned that it was important not to take initiative and not to do more than is asked of me.

I was always the nerd in school. As soon as I had an individual lesson finished I would go to the small library along one wall and grab several books to read. Often during my schoolwork I would think of some subject (e.g. radio astronomy) that fascinated me and upon completion of my schoolwork, I would go to the bookshelf and select the “R” encyclopedia. After reading the entry I would go back and select several more encyclopedias so I could read related subjects or more in-depth entries. This behavior was of course not normal and the other Amish students, many of whom had nothing but religious books at home and didn’t particularly like reading, would mock me for it. I became used to the word “bookworm” being used like most people would use “child rapist”.

Many of the Amish in our community liked to hunt. The men were quite competitive about it and always bragged about who shot the deer with the biggest antlers. I felt compassion for the helpless animals and told my fellow classmates that I would never harm an animal. I quickly became used to the word “environmentalist” being used like most people would use “child rapist”. Of course I didn’t like being mocked and after many hours of heart-wrenching rumination, I decided that I would show them and would become a better hunter than any of them. Years later, I actually did.

One day while reading through our encyclopedia set at home, I learned that Jupiter had quite a few moons. I was amazed by this knowledge as I had only been aware of one moon up to that point. Some weeks later I mentioned this fact in passing to my fellow classmates. They informed me none too politely that there is only one moon. It didn’t take long for me to get used to “stargazer” being used like most people would use “child rapist”.

That evening I told my Dad what had happened when I tried to enlighten my classmates. My Dad told me gently that he believed me that Jupiter had more moons and told me that the other students just didn’t know any better. It wasn’t very consoling, I wanted my friends to like me, not my Dad. To me, the concept of intellectual superiority was alien. I was told that I was “good at school” and “good with numbers”. Nobody told me that I was smart. Nobody helped me understand why I was so different or how my weirdness would help me later in life.

I stopped gazing up at the night sky and I put away my star charts and astronomy books, thinking wrongly that it was something that only weird people do. I stopped reading so much, tried harder to fit in, and withdrew into myself, intellectually. To this day I would rather sit silent than correct, even a friend, a factual error that he or she has made. It is a tactic I learned in Amish school to appear normal.

I can’t help but think that if my parents had been a normal family and had provided me with the education that I needed and desired, I would be doing great things by now. I like the idea of freedom when it comes to the educational system. I fear that if primary education is restricted to only state-run or heavily regulated schools, we could end up with a propaganda problem down the road. But Christ! Being intellectually stunted in a religious school just doesn’t feel fair to me.

Many years after leaving the Amish, I discovered a webpage with an experimental high-range I.Q. test designed by a psychologist and research scientist. I decided to try the test and after working through the number sequence problems, I submitted my answers. A day or so later, I received my score report. According to the associated statistical report for that test my score equates (at least theoretically) to an I.Q. a little higher than 160 (s.d. 16). To the ***holes who mocked me in Amish school–take that! Now if only I could get over it.

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The Obduracy of Religious Belief

19 Thursday Apr 2012

Posted by xamishatheist in My Philosophy, Religion

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

atheism, belief systems, Bible, children, education, indoctrination, metaphysics, religion, religious belief, Santa Claus, skepticism


The Christian belief in the Bible is quite unlike, for example, my current belief in “The Blind Watchmaker” by Richard Dawkins. Back when I believed in the Bible, I thought of it as “truth”. I also believed other books but I would think of them as good stories or as helpful information.

Why the big difference? Why did I consider one ancient text as pure truth and all other ancient texts as just stories? Why did I consider the Bible to be pure truth but other books, that I also believed to be nonfiction, were just informationally helpful?

In the Bible, fantastical stories such as a person living briefly inside of a whale, a virgin giving birth, a snake talking to people, were perfectly acceptable. Why were those fanciful stories acceptable but similar stories in other books were dismissed as myths? If I had read a story in The Blind Watchmaker that claimed a person had lived and survived inside of a dinosaur for three days, I would have been extremely skeptical. I would have asked for some serious evidence to back up this extraordinary claim. Why then, was it perfectly alright for a similar story to be in the Bible?

Some atheists will arrogantly state that they became atheist as a child when they first read the Bible. These people relate the story of how upon reading fantastical stories about talking snakes and virgin births that of course they had to discard the whole thing as mythical… as if the rest of us are just too stupid to get it.

I have a brain capable of critical analysis and I made full use of this skill when reading all but one book. Why did it take so long for me to become skeptical of the Bible? The answer to this can soon be reached once we understand that the Bible is a very significant part of a huge set of beliefs called “Christianity”.

The answers to all of these questions, I believe, can be answered by understanding what religion is and understanding how and when it is taught to a person. But first, check out this post I wrote about belief systems because I’ll be talking a lot about beliefs and belief systems for the rest of this post.

Religion is a set of beliefs that is pretty comprehensive – it pretends to explain everything from ‘why are there mountains’ to ‘how should I live my life’. Therefore, for a religious person, the set of beliefs that is his religion is almost inextricably meshed with the rest of the person’s belief system. Even changing one little belief is difficult to do because it would have ramifications for many of the other beliefs that it is intertwined with. A religion generally forms a large fraction of a person’s belief system.

Secondly, religion includes metaphysical beliefs. Metaphysical beliefs are beliefs that have to do with being and existence, and concepts such as cause and effect. Religion provides answers to such metaphysical questions as ‘why is there something rather than nothing’, ‘what was the first cause’, ‘where did we come from’, and ‘why are we here’. As such, religious beliefs become foundational to the person’s overall belief system. Individual religious beliefs become the axioms upon which the rest of the person’s belief system happily rests. To change these beliefs is almost as hard as tearing the foundation of a house out from underneath the house without disturbing the rest of the house.

The religious person suffers less from existential angst than the non-religious person because his metaphysical questions are answered. If a religious person starts questioning his own beliefs these metaphysical questions pop up and he wonders ‘well, why are we here then’. The existential angst that would be caused by unanswering these metaphysical questions is often on its own, enough of an incentive to stay with religion.

Religion is also a self-supporting set of beliefs. When questioned on one belief, the religious person can always bring out another belief that supports the first one. In this way, everything backs itself up. In logic, this is known as “circular reasoning” and it is a fallacy. In a small syllogism, circular reasoning is easy to identify and to recognize as fallacious but in a very large set of beliefs like religion, it is so easy to miss it.

Children will happily believe in Santa Claus but after learning that Santa doesn’t really exist, it is much easier for them to accept it and move on than it is for anybody to accept that their religion may not be true. Why is there such a difference? I believe it is because of the reasons I listed above. Believing in Santa is only a small set of beliefs, and it answers only one metaphysical question – ‘why should I be good’, whereas a religion is a huge set of beliefs and it answers pretty much all of the metaphysical questions.

It could also be that a child finds it easier to revise beliefs and possibly even to completely rebuild their belief system. After all, their brains are still developing and they are in the perfect stage to absorb massive amounts of information and to incorporate a massive number of beliefs.

In the previous paragraphs I explored several of the qualities of religious belief which have a direct effect on its obduracy. Now it is time to examine the methods that are used to deliver these beliefs to a person’s mind and how these methods also have an effect on its obduracy.

A baby starts off with basically an empty mind when it comes to beliefs about the nature of things. If you start with an essentially empty mind, the mind will accept the first thing that comes to it because there are no pre-existing beliefs to contradict the incoming information. For that reason, it is easy instill any kind of belief system in a child.

It is generally easier to dismiss new information than it is to revise existing beliefs so once a belief system has been established, it is very difficult to remove it even if it blatantly contradicts reality.

Most religious parents teach their children the religion starting at the youngest possible age. Long before the child learns that different people have different ideas about how things really are, long before the child learns that there are many different religions, and long before the child learns anything about critical thinking, the child is taught that its parents’ religion is the only possible truth.

Can you blame a child for rejecting other viewpoints? As the child matures, and if the parents continue to reinforce the same belief system, the belief system becomes more and more difficult to change.

The installation of a religious belief system is quite different from the installation of a secular belief system. With religion, the child is taught that not only is the religion pure truth – it is unquestionable truth. Any question that the child has that could undermine their belief system is quickly rebutted by the parents with reproachful assertions that it is evil to ask those questions. The child is admonished and sometimes physically abused simply for asking the unwanted questions.

Can you blame the person when years later he is still unable to honestly question his belief system when the mere occurrence of such a question feels treasonous and blasphemous?

To educate someone is to provide information, to provide explanations, to provide instruction. To indoctrinate someone is to provide information, to provide explanations, to provide instruction. The difference is, when someone is indoctrinated they are not expected to question what they are learning and in many cases they are not allowed to question or to critically examine what they are being taught. Someone who is being indoctrinated is not given the choice to believe or disbelieve.

Religious parents do not educate their children about religion – they indoctrinate them.

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