A comment on Richard Dawkins and the Amish

I often, in my writing, do not use the plural "you" when writing to a single person. I hope my readers who are not familiar with this Quaker convention towards honesty will not be put off by this. We dropped "Thou" a long time ago, I think, perhaps, as in one structure, thou takes a form of the verb "to be" which is close to the plural "are" "thou art." "Thee" and "thy" take the singular form "is." As part of our belief in honesty and equality we do not use "you" traditionally, as it implies more of the individual to whom we are speaking than honesty is there.

I like Richard Dawkins. I am humbled by his academic credentials. But, I sense in his writing a bit of anger and defensiveness which others have seen as stridency and I hope this blog helps to send him the message that not all religious people are out to deny him rights, tell him he is wrong, or oppress him ... that we can be friends.

I might begin with the premise that the great destroyers of the human spirit, the tyranny over the minds of humanity (to paraphrase Jefferson) is not the notion of God, but rather the existence of orthodoxy's of any kind, political or religious. In order to promote an orthodoxy one must declare one set of truths, one road to truths and that all other roads and truths are false.

Those who know me will tell thee that I often repeat the story of Hillel and the Roman soldier. The great rebbi Shammai was asked if he could explain the entire Jewish faith to a Roman soldier while that fellow stood on one foot. If he could the soldier would convert. Shammai said, "Of course not! You must know the entire Torah, know the commentary on it ... it would take years." Hillel told the soldier, "Stand on one foot." He did. "Do nothing to another that which thee finds to be abhorrent to thyself. That is the Torah and all the rest is commentary."
This, to me is the pitfall of orthodoxy. Like Shammai, a brilliant and good man, some believe that one must learn the laws, stories behind the laws, believe the image as much as the message behind that image and if there is a single element that thee disputes, than the whole of the message is lost. In short, orthodoxies argue the commentary and overlook the real meaning.
So the assumption that a scientific orthodoxy is less dangerous to freedom of though than a religious orthodoxy is lost on me.

I turn to our friend Richard Dawkins. Friend Richard, if thee reads this, Richard... thee states that there are not Amish Children, Catholic Children, etc., in thy comments on Wisconsin v. Yoder contained in the book "The God Delusion." It is thy contention that Amish children should not have a right to a few years less education.

Well, what thee sees as ownership of children, I see as membership in a community or family. If thee saw a stranger take thy child by the hand, when she was very young, thee would likely stop them and ask what was that person's intention. For good or ill, thee would want to oversee that interaction, not out of chattel ownership, I presume, from thy writing, but from one of the closest memberships in human life, the parent and child relationship as family. The framework of what is best for that child, as a right of individual autonomy has two faces, the right of autonomy of the child as an individual, and the right of autonomy as a member of thy family. The first is limited as to many choices, as the child does not have the weight of experience and other mental development.

In the case of the Amish there is a great deal of individual respect for the autonomy of the child. The initial rearing, in the context of the Amish family life, which includes religious education. I believe may Amish friends would agree that part of this education is to learn the value separation from the perceived harm of a world driven by consumerist values and values which, to the Amish deny the value of doing good to each other.However, then comes Rumsprina. It is a time, at sixteen, when Amish children are expected to go out into the world beyond the peaceful world of an Amish community. If thee has ANY quaint stereotypes about this time see the film, "The Devil's Playground."

Often they go out, away from their families, find their way into all the trouble a teen mind thinks is what is really missing in his or her life ... then most come home to the Amish faith as young adults.

The value of Amish tradition, the moral virtue stripped of the commentary, as Hillel puts it, can be seen in two recent events. The first, and most painful were the killings at Nickel Mines. In a one room Amish school, a neighbor shot and killed a number of Amish children and then killed himself. That same evening, Amish neighbors came to pray with and comfort the family man who did this terrible thing. They then rebuilt the school and rebuilt their lives, as Amish people.

Unlike the United States after the destruction of the World Trade Center, these people did not hire guards, put locks on their doors, put security cameras around, did not sew distrust of others among their community. Their faith gave them the strength to be who they are in spite of the worst the world threw at them.We can argue about the rightness or wrongness of the commentary which leads them to this strength of love, but I think the proof that the commentary works for them is seen in their ability to be happy and loving people in the face of such horror.

I hope I am not too prideful to say of our own Quaker community, that it is similar faith which led Friend Tom Fox to go to Iraq to seek peace, to help expose the horrors of Abu Greb, and when captured by unknown people, asked that no military rescue be attempted. That he gave his life for peace was not a defeat, but like faith the Amish of Nickel Mines, was a victory over violence.

To assume that the children of Amish families, or Quaker families, would abandon our faith for thy scientific commentary if they were only schooled in a scientific environment is not born out by recent history. In the USSR, for over seventy years, religion was suppressed, and all education was done through the state in purely scientific principles. Remarkably, with the fall of the Soviet Union, there was a sudden blossoming of religion, and in fact, our own, rare little faith, Quakerism turned out to have survived underground in Russia all through the years of collectivism.

Frankly, I am not against scientific education. We Quakers were at the forefront of that process in the United States. We were asked, in the early 19th century, to design and help form the New York Public School System. But, it is not the language, the commentary of education which makes for a good and freethinking soul, but the message of love and tolerance behind that education which makes it valuable.I don't present the Amish or Quaker communities as a utopia, by the way. Both our communities are human, and one will find as bad people among us as among any other community. The lesson of pluralism is that we are all capable of teach love or neglect, bravery or fear -- and that when we create an orthodoxy of our commentary we often embark on a slippery slope towards oppression over the freedom of another's mind.