The worst sins good people commit are not the things they do, but the things they do not do. This is why I am one of the few people on earth who can say, “I have all the money I WANT.” If you are truly wealthy, have few needs, and you are burdened with a Northern European conscience that won’t let you use a priest or a book to make your choices for you, lots of money is a true burden.

Lots of money means you can do many good things. That means lots of decisions and lots of regrets. If you really don’t want much, that makes it worse. That means all the money above your few wants is free to be used to do good, but not to make you happy. It is nothing but decisions, it is nothing but a burden.

So I have all the money I WANT.

If I had a billion dollars, I could use what I call The Amish Approach. I could just pretend that billion dollars wasn’t there. I could just stick it all in a mutual fund picked at random and go home and live the old-fashioned way.

The Amish just act like modern technology doesn’t exist. They say they only use technology that was in the Bible. That, of course, is nonsense. Biblical people would have given anything for the spring shock absorbers and paved highways the Amish have for their buggies.

Not to mention the lack of a thousand diseases and the intestinal worms and malnutrition every PHARAOH suffered from.

But, nonsense aside, everybody thinks the Amish are just wonderful. The Amish are charming and perfect innocents because they refuse to take any responsibility for the power man now has through technology.

Mahatma Ghandi had the Amish Charm. When Mahatma Ghandi went to visit the homes of the rich and famous, he would sit in the middle of the floor and spin cloth with his famous old-fashioned spinning-wheel.

Every “Christian” leader said that was just wonderful.

It’s not.

As with the Amish, it’s not only silly, it’s sinful.

Ghandi had every right to starve himself or sit on the floor spinning. Ghandi had every right to keep his dozen or so women to “take care” of him. The Amish can play eighteenth century with my blessings. It’s cute.

But meanwhile the rest of us have real decisions to make because we are part of a society that has real power. Nobody on either side would care to answer my question of whether the power to keep someone alive – whether you call it “life support” or not – is the responsibility BOTH of the person who turns it ON and of the person who turns it OFF.

We have the power to extend human life. We are getting the power to manipulate genes. The modern Amish say God will be happy with us if we just abdicate responsibility for all that and follow some good old rules that never imagined such situations.

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Too many people forget that that also means, “Do unto yourself as you would do unto others.” The pope could have extended his infinitely precious life on this earth for a few days if he had gone to the hospital. He chose not to do so.

I respect the pope for that, but I also note that what he did was contrary to the official doctrine of the Church that keeping one’s heart beating for one second more is the number one priority. If that were true, there would be no martyrs.

Every time you use power, you are going to use it wrong. That’s human. But acting as if it does not exist is the greatest sin of all. “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing.”

The Amish Sin, not making the decision, leaves that decision to evil people. In a world where humanity is obtaining greater power every day, the Amish Sin is the greatest sin of all.