Always nice to see a population that prides itself on self sufficiency and old ways doing well. The Amish are growing.

We are fortunate to live near Amish country in Ohio and visit them at least once a year.
The PA area they are not so independant, nearly every amish family sells to Hershey so if anything would ever happen to Hershey they are all out of a customer. There were a lot of activities around there that were not authentic amish, for example buggy rides with an amish driver but hired and paid for trhough the resturaunt/gift shop/motel there.
In Ohio when you want a buggy ride you look on a side street for an older Amish man who can;t work in the fields anymore with a handamde sign saying amish buggy rides by donation and you get more of the real thing.
Its interesting, all the houses will look the same during the day so you have to wait until night then you can spot the amish homes because you can see a lantern hanging in the center of the living room and its usually a LED battery powered one. The one room school had an old laser printer/copier/scanner/fax that was plugged into an inverter connected to a battery under the table charged by a solar panel on the roof, they would turn it on and copy their school papers then turn it off. As high tech as us but still self sufficient.

Wait, so it's a self-sufficiency thing not an anti-technology thing? I thought they shunned technology that made life to "fast".

-Blast

I used to live near Amish country in PA. You can find every shade of Amish just as you can find every shade of any other faith. Some Amish drive cars, others are "cultural amish", and still others are devout. The devout ones are the ones the rest of us typically see the least of.

the electric thing has to do with being connected to the grid that everyone else uses..they have some hi tech milling machines making parts for air powered kitchen gizmos,food choppers and such--

Some subgroups have electric tools run by a generator outside the barn, others may have air powered tools and others may have a very old fashioned water wheel running belts to run the tools, it depends on the particular sect.
But yes the main reason it to be not dependent or connected to the outside world partly for self sufficiency and partly to keep out corruption
I fall somewhere in the middle, I'm connected to the outside world because there is good stuff to be found (such as this forum) but I don't follow the hollywood/pop culture or sports or non christian music, etc.

Here is a documentary about the Amish way of life. They certainly seem to be the Worlds squarest teenagers.

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/amish-worlds-squarest-teenagers/4od

There was a feature some time back in a woodworking magazine about an Amish cabinetmaker's shop. The shop had all the modern power tools. But all of them were run using hydraulic lines, fed by a central diesel engine, instead of electricity. The Amish have made some interesting compromises and drawn off-limit lines around modernity.

Like they can't have a telephone in the house, but many are allowed one at the end of a long driveway. And they are allowed to use their non-Amish neighbor's phone.

Also, while Amish teenagers are typically staid, and about as square as they come, they are allowed to cut loose before deciding to stay in the Amish community as adults. During this time of experimentation they can be some of the most off-the-hook partiers around. After seventeen years of repression some of them make up for lost time in a very big way.

The Amish - and I live not too far from Lancaster - are curious.

They don't pay social security tax. Legally.

Many beat the puss out of their kids and their animals.

They (usually) won't use technology - but they will hire people to use modern technology for them. It's not uncommon to see an Amish farmer being driven to the tractor supply by his hired help.

Roller blades are OK, but hooking into the electric grid isn't. They will run a generator to power a table saw.

They are NOT in any way "self-sufficient" - quite the opposite. They are communal - in most senses of the word - within their community.

Many use pesticides, genetically modified crops and so on.

There are gradations of Amish, and yes, the ones "you don't see much" sort of "live off the land" but they are not as common as the more "worldly" types.

Thats what I was saying about the ones in Lancaster, they are all very dependant upon Hershey and therefore not very self sufficuent or disconnected from the world. Other areas are a little more 'pure'.

As far as I can tell, the Amish are not Luddites. They don't reject technology per se.

It is more of a form of voluntary (/community imposed) self denial. Thus the flexibility.

Ferinstance, Roman Catholics in the US are bound to abstain from eating meat on the Fridays in Lent. Its not that we think there's something evil about eating meat - its just an arbitrary sacrifice, an exercise in mortification.

Thats what I was saying, its not about technology, its about being negatively influenced by the outside world. Each group the church leaders will get together and approve or disprove a new technology. So say and Amish craftsman wants to sell to the outside world and asks the church to allow him to have a phone to take orders, they may allow it in a business or shared location but not direct in the home.

Here's my Amish experience. I lived in Iowa City for many years, and around 1977 or so became very good friends with an Amish family who lived on a farm near Kalona, a big Amish and Mennonite community. I met them through an Iowa City friend who hired the Amish mom as a housekeeper. Veeeerrrrrrryyyy interesting experience, to say the least. In a nutshell:

I learned how to make homemade grape nuts cereal from them.

They gave us piles of black raspberry bushes, and I transplanted
them to my own farmhouse yard.

The little boy had a goat cart that was a gas to ride.

They moved all the furniture out of their living room and filled
it with benches once a month for their mobile church service.

They only used horse and buggy for traveling, except if their
Mennonite neighbors were going to the same place, in which
case they also road along in the Mennonite's car.

They also didn't hesitate to use the Mennonite neighbor's phone.

They had a gas powered tractor, but it had steel wheels (they
couldn't have rubber tires).

They had no electricity, but they had Coleman and kerosene lan-
terns for light, and a propane refrigerator.

The 12 year old daughter tried to defrost the fridge one time by
putting a lit Coleman lantern inside and closing the door. Of
course when the oxygen got burned up, the lantern went out,
but continued to spew out lots of pressurized Coleman fuel
vapors. She later opened the door and, seeing the lantern was
out, she struck a match to relight it and...BOOOOMMM!! The gas
blew up in her face. Her face and hands were badly burned but
her hair and part of her forehead were under her bonnet and
were fine. The doc who saw her initially was astounded about
a week later when he saw her for follow-up. He said, "My God,
your skin looks just like a baby's, like you never got burned
at all!" He asked her mom, "What have you been doing to treat
her?" Mom said, "Oh, just lots of fresh aloe vera juice." ;-)

There is a lot of hypocrisy within the Amish Mennonites (Old Order and New Order), just as there is in other religions. There are families of the New Order around here, nice enough people, who own farms and car repair shops and a shed-building operation. I must say they take better care of their farms than most of the other farmers do. In the local cafe, some of the regular farmers grouse that "the Amish have all the best land", but the Mennonites (as they call themselves) are also just about the only ones that make a point of improving their soil, which fact tends to escape the other farmers.

In the Midwest many of them have gotten into the puppymill business, unfortunately.

I knew a woman in San Jose who had escaped an Old Order upbringing, and she said there is a lot of sexual abuse there. She's the first one I've met who used the word 'hypocrisy' with this religion. They won't own cars, but they can pester neighbors to drive them somewhere, or to use their phones.

Oh, well, they still don't keep knocking on my door like the LDS and the Jehovah's Witnesses.

Sue

My contacts with the Amish come from annual visits to Amish country in Minnesota and Wisconsin. My wife and I visit their farms (the ones that have little white signs) and puchase baked goods and other things from them. It is a fascinating lifestyle, and it borders on being a community that is self-sufficient.

No one in the US can escape modern technology: when an Amish person gets sick, they go to a modern hospital on modern roads and get high tech meds. They ride busses and cars when they must, and have modern dental procedures and lenses for their glasses. They benefit from the sheriff's modern transportation and communication equipment, and the county's road plows. They just try to keep it all at a distance to minimize the influences.

That said, I admire their attempts to live and worship in a quieter and friendlier community reminiscient of earlier times.

I like their idea of not being dependant upon the outside world but I think with their disallowing of owning technology they become dependant upon someone else. As pointed out, many have to accept rides with neighbors, I'd rather own a plain pickup truck that I could use myself rather than asking for a ride from someone else. Only problem is that makes me dependant upon the gasoline infrastructure (though they could easily go biodeisel) and the .gov's licensing system. Where I live now I can easily walk to anything I need/want so I don't need a vehicle but have one bacause it does save time and keps me from being depenat upon a neighbor.