Andrew Barss wrote:
J. Clarke wrote:

I was in an Amish home and it was explained that they won't use
electricity from the power company but they had refrigerators and
freezers supplied by gasoline generators.

If the point of avoiding grid electricity is to not share a system
used by English (outsiders), how do they justify making use of
a gas distribution system used by English? Or, for that matter, roads
made and used by them? is there any internal logic here?

If you google "Amish electricity" you'll find a lot of weirdness and a
few sites that actually address this seriously. It seems to be one of
those deals where they decided that the tradeoff between utility and
effect on the community was unfavorable.

It doesn't seem to be a matter of objecting to "sharing a system used by
the English", it seems to be more a matter of not wanting to be at the
mercy of the power company and of concern over sociological side
effects.

With regard to the roads, they pay taxes too--there's no downside to the
roads other than the risk of getting rearended (at least none that I
know of--is walking on pavement harmful to horses?), they've already
paid their share of the construction and upkeep costs, and building
their own system of parallel roads would, I'm sure, be viewed as
prideful, so I don't see why they would want to avoid using the public
roads.

When considering the Amish, first make up your mind that they are _not_
crazies. They have reasons for what they do that make sense within
their value system, but their value system is not that of mainstream
society, and one of their priorities seems to be keeping it that way.

http://www.uwec.edu/geography/Ivogel...pian/amish.htm has
links near the top to some fascinating charts about Amish use of
technology.



Fascinating, and hard to fathom.

Seems to show that there are some universals--note what technology 95
percent of Amish have adopted--mechanically powered washing machines.
And one wonders how many elders' wives' headaches suddenly vanished when
_that_ decision was made.

--
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--John
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(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)