A recent STAT News opinion piece by Penn State University’s Cory Anderson focused on religious opposition to vaccines contains a very fascinating, insightful, and likely true passage. Anderson writes:
The Amish belief system privileges the notion that when individuals highly esteem certain innovations, religious purity may erode. For example, people first making a change, such as getting vaccinated, may also prefer other changes — work tools, behavioral practices, or new representations of identity in dress, transportation modes, or home styles.
Vaccines are technological innovations that merit being esteemed as tools to improve one’s life, even more so than airplanes and iPhones. Vaccines represent one of humankind’s greatest achievements and are testament to human reason’s ability to gain mastery over an inhospitable nature. When one recognizes the grand scale intellectual integrations regarding the human immune system and the germ theory of disease that were needed to develop even the idea of vaccines (let alone their concrete development), it should give one pause regarding the grandeur and potential of human thought.
It would be correct to ask oneself the question: “If a human technology such as a vaccine can make one’s life better, what other problems can the unfettered human mind solve and what other technologies can improve one’s life?”
If that puts one at odds with any culture (Amish or otherwise) that eschews human reason in favor of mysticism, supernaturalism, and conformity, so much the better.