SOCIAL DELEMMAS

The Amish don't benefit from literature and film in the way the rest of society does because their issues are not examined. Example..... Witness was about the problems of a big city cop. The Amish were just props. Sure, the Amish were portrayed well, but what if Peter Maas' only tried to portray NYC well when he wrote Serpico. I'm not suggesting that there is corruption among the Amish in need of an expose. But that there's a lack of awareness about the consequences of exempting oneself from the evolution of thought that has occurred in western culture as a whole. Their position on tobacco and the havoc created by it, is an example of their inability to resolve a moral dilemma with an intellectual competence equivalent to the contemporary thought, most of us take for granted.
Today's medical science leaves no wiggle room on whether tobacco is a benign substance. The Amish church's failure to define their doctrine to respect that fact is a grotesque error suggestive of centuries old thought. It's the formal position that's important for the argument I'm making, ie; failure of members to conform to church doctrine isn't as damaging as an indefensible doctrine. It's this Dark Age mentality that contributes to the ugly turf wars that frequently plague Amish society. It also leaves Amish adherents vulnerable to proselytizing that is little more than what could be expected from Dark Age barbarians.

As a child I watched my older brother dramatically withdraw from our family, in large part because of an encounter he had with a neighbor, who managed to persuade him of the inferiority of our family's faith and way of life. ( How, "four centuries ago." )The irony is, we were Amish. The same people who are currently revered world wide for how they dealt with a horrible tragedy in one of their schools. And yet, it is very likely my thirteen year old brother was told that if he doesn't reject and Dis-associate from most of what my family was and did, he would burn in hell for all eternity.