They aren’t open to medicine. Also most adult men have cell phones and hide them.
Every Individual in their community I’ve met has been super nice, but it’s still a cult and they still do fucked up shit.
Comment on They were right all along...
Mikina@programming.dev 11 hours agoThe only exposure I have with how Amish work is from Newport’s Digital Mininalism book, and it sounded pretty reasonable. (Don’t know how correct it is, though)
The way he put it, they don’t outright ban and refuse all technology. Every time a new tech comes out, they have a few people give it a try and then decide as a community if/how to best use it without sacrificing their core values.
For example - a telephone? We don’t want that, because then it would break the sense of community if you could just call anyone, without having to call on them/meet then for dinner, etc. But, we’ll have one phone in a village in casr we need to call for outside help in an emergency.
Assuming that’s true, I would suspect that especially in regards to medicine, they would be pretty open. But yeah, I guess it absolutely depends on the community, and how cultish/reasonable are the people making these calls.
somehacker@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 11 hours ago
To be fair, every christianity is a cult. And most religions are divided into various cults. Cults are the local unit of any religion. In ancient Greece, each city would have a cult dedicated to its patron god, and maybe a few cults to other deities if it’s a big city. These days, we’ve got the methodists, pentecostals, orthodox, baptists, lutherans… People always have and always will organise their religion into cults. Larger groups just have weaker cohesion than smaller groups, so people want to be in a smaller group of some kind.
cattywampas@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
Regardless of its etymology, that is not how the word “cult” is used today.
Grail@multiverse.soulism.net 8 hours ago
Broke: “I’m a prescriptivist, and I think the best language is what I learned in school as a child"
Woke: “I’m a descriptivist, and I think anything goes, I’ll respect anything that I can understand"
Bespoke: “I’m a prescriptivist, and I think we should be engineering new language to shift our culture in alignment with our ethical values”When you’re looking at the validity of a linguistic shift, I don’t think it behooves us to uncritically accept whatever the current culture is. That’s centrism and it makes us weak to fascist manipulation of our language. Which is exactly what the Christians did to the word “cult”.
The Christians noticed that other religions are more likely to use the word “cult” than they are, because the word has a stronger history in paganism, and because these other religions didn’t have big connective organisations like the Vatican. So the Christians created a link between cults, Satanism, and religious abuse. And to be fair, there was a lot of religious abuse happening at the time. Still is. And most of it is Christian. But mainstream scientists could be fooled into thinking pagan religious abuse is somehow different from Christian religious abuse, and thus creating a field of study around so-called “cultic” abuse. And that legitimisation of the Satanic Panic, via epistemic vandalism of mainstream science, is why people think cult means abuse.
I’m a pagan, and lately I’ve been hanging out with some Christians and taking mental notes. They’ve got love bombing. They pressure members to give testimony about how Jesus helped them. They encourage people to give them money, so they can go set up missions in Africa. They use music and AI generated sermons to hype people up on endorphins so they become malleable. They induce seizure-like states as a form of religious experience. I see what the people in charge are doing to them. So no, I’m not going to buy any Satanic Panic propaganda that cults are uniquely pagan and inherently abusive. This shit is epidemic and systemic.
We need to fight back against these powerful and bigoted organisations changing our very means of communication to indoctrinate us.
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Does seem remotely related to what was said.
ztwhixsemhwldvka@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Some individuals being hypocrites doesn’t invalidate their way of life. I admittedly don’t know much about them but I remember watching a documentary where the teen members of the community explore the outside world.
One girl comments on the public school education system that the students were focused on passing exams and not on actually learning anything. Always stuck with me.
I would be hesitant to call them a cult, since there seems to be a diverse range of communities and practices. Maga is a cult.
baggachipz@sh.itjust.works 11 hours ago
What they allow is entirely the whim of the local Bishop. Some are super conservative. Others not so. I’ve seen Amish people on e-bikes, while others don’t allow rubber tires on their buggies. Then whenever a new Bishop rotates in, a new toss-up in the rules. One common theme is that they hoard shit tons of money.
TranscendentalEmpire@lemmy.today 8 hours ago
Yep, In my experience a community of Amish people an hour away from each other can be radically different. The more laid back communities tend to be filled with hardworking and nice people. While the conservative ones can be pretty dystopian.
Mikina@programming.dev 10 hours ago
Yeah, I kind of assumed that would probably be the case, and while this kind of reasonable approach to technology, that was highlighted in the book, sounds pretty nice in theory, it does put a lot of power into few hands, which historically (and unfortunately) never works very well.