Summary
A father whose unvaccinated six-year-old daughter became the first U.S. measles death in 10 years remains steadfast in his anti-vaccine beliefs.
The Mennonite man from Seminole, Texas told The Atlantic, “The vaccination has stuff we don’t trust,” maintaining that measles is normal despite its near-eradication through vaccination.
His stance echoes claims by HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., who initially downplayed the current North American outbreak before changing his position under scrutiny.
Despite his daughter’s death, the father stated, “Everybody has to die.”
Haha, never heard that one, and I grew up in an area that had a lot of both. 🤣
I was always amused by some of the stuff that Amish would do - like buying a freezer for an “English” neighbor, as an example. Or sometimes borrowing/renting someone else’s tractor and then running them at night? Are you hiding these behaviors from your god, or just from other people?
Lots of crazy beliefs out there. Look into eruvs for Orthodox Jews or how they pay “gentiles” to do things for them on holy days, or the timers that are set up…I think Religulous showed this last one. Seems like if you are going to go to these lengths to supposedly stay within compliance on some arbitrarily-determined rules from centuries ago, you might consider just, uh, discarding and revising some of these things? Because an omniscient being is going to see right through these clever legalisms…
There’s an expression: “build a hedge around the Torah,” referring to the web of extra strictures beyond the basic Commandments, that exist solely because they know people will finagle ways around them. The idea being that by breaking those rules they’ll still be protected from breaking the big ones. Of course it just means that more obedient people live restricted lives, and holier-than-thou people smugly keep stupid rules while still being cruel and evil to the core. And cheaters gonna cheat.
Even the first 5 commandments seem to be coming from a place of narcissism for an omnipotent being - you worship me and only me, don’t worship anything else, including idols and graven images, and don’t use my name the wrong way. Oh, and make sure you keep my special day…this has what to do with any kind of morality?
The rest are reasonable things that could be derived w/o any appeal to mythology - don’t kill, steal, lie, cheat on your spouse and covet another’s possessions.
I will never understand when someone from one of the Abrahamic religions tells me that without religion, people have no foundation in morality [1]. The very core set they most reference are about 50% irrelevant to morality, the other 50% are something every society puts in place and they don’t need Jehovah to derive these rules; they are rather obviously necessary to a functioning society - although that last one our entire system is set up to almost force people to covet things and other people all the time, so that’s rather ironic.
As for all the other stuff - the various rules and rituals - that people tend to build up around the three main Abrahamic religions…a lot of it truly does make me scratch my head.
[1] I just saw one of those magamaniacs arguing for that with Sam Seder. That video was excruciating by the way, but I did power through most of it.