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.