Comment by rkagerer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rkagerer | Hacker News Reader

My dad spends his summers near an Amish settlement. By settlement, I mean vast tracts of land with several farms. He buys most of his eggs, fruits, vegetables, etc. from them. They sell goods at a local farmers market, and when "organic" and "free range" became a fad, these guys put a giant photo in front of their stall of their chickens frolicking in huge paddocks with the words "FREE RANGE" below it - doesn't get more authentic than that.

He's gotten pretty friendly with them over the years. When we bring friends along to their farms to pick up goods, they're always shocked how contemporary these guys are.

One of them has a pretty sophisticated machine shop, with tools like drill presses, saws, sanding belts, etc. all driven by a series of axles forming a mechanical drivetrain that snakes throughout the barn (eventually to a very old diesel motor).

A couple of the young men came out to frame a house he's building. Once on a day off, they arrived by carriage and brought a pair of young Amish ladies with them to hang out at the beach. The next day, my dad found one of the girl's leggings left behind. He was discreet enough to return it to the girl's younger brother, instead of her dad.

All the kids know how to use iPhones - they sometimes ask to borrow his so they can make a call.

One of the more technically inclined gentleman even showed up one day with a cutting-edge drone, and had a blast flying it around with my dad. He made it very clear his wife isn't allowed to know he owns it! Last I heard that same guy is helping plan a solar array my dad wants to install to go off-grid.

Maybe the wife isn’t allowed to know about the drone because she’s currently cleaning his dirty underwear by hand?

Good point, I wonder if they are also slow to adopt social trends. If they're 50 years behind in technology, does that mean they're also just starting to consider women's liberation? The author seemed to interact only with men. Are the bishops who decide what technology to adopt also all men?

Great points, it's virtually guaranteed that as in many other religious groups there is a notion of "protecting" women by taking such decisions away from them or restricting them from various roles. The southern baptist church in the us remains inordinately focused on limiting women's roles. Women shouldn't be priests, in some places they allow them, other places look askance at that.

That is just a matter of basic theological fidelity; the matter is spelled out very clearly in the Bible[0]. You can't just pick and mix which parts of it you'd like to selectively ignore and claim it's 'up to interpretation'.

[0] Timothy 2:11-12

And yet I dont know of a single Christian that follows the rules against wearing blended material garments laid out in Leviticus 19:19.

My parents are Deacons in their local church, and believe you me, they pick and choose which parts to interpret as allegory and which parts to interpret literally all the time.

That is part of the ritual law, something a follower/disciple of Jesus is not required to do. In fact as a follower of Jesus there are no rules other than 2. Love God and love others. Everything else flows from that as far as the instruction gave like Jesus did in his Sermon on the Mount.

Someone who has said, hey I declare that Jesus is my Lord and Savior, and truly believes it will of course do things. Not because they have to, but because they want to.

Oh please, then how do we have different sects of Christianity?

Some of the rules are rather vague, to the point where two reasonable-minded people could reach two different conclusions. The parts about female ordination are, to put it bluntly, not.

Then Ephesians 6:5-8 and Colossians 3:22 telling slaves to obey their masters is going to be a doozie to implement and defend.

Slavery as practiced in the ancient world was not the same institution as the chattel slavery in the European colonies, which is an entirely different moral gray area. It was more akin to our modern employment relationships if anything. And the following sounds like a reasonable expression of Christian morality, does it not?:

> 22 Employees, in all things obey those who are your employers on earth [lit. according to the flesh], not with external service [lit. eyeservice], as those who merely please men, but with sincerity of heart, fearing the Lord.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_antiquity

Please don't take HN threads into religious flamewar. We don't need to go to that hell here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If so, it is the parent who ought to be flagged, not my comment.

I have not introduced a flamewar topic, nor was it an unrelated controversy or a generic tangent. The Christian concern over female priests common in the American South is not "inordinate," that was what I was responding to.

Our local community of Amish have on-farm stores for tourists and locals. They were run almost exclusively by the women.

Slandering an entire group of people out of ignorance is a habit we should work to break away from, not reinforce.

I don't take the point as slander. It's that, while the husband goes against Amish convention by using modern technology to have fun, the wife is stuck at home using dated technology to expend time and energy cleaning up after him.

In other words, it's easy for the husband to sneak a drone among his belongings to have fun. It's impossible for his wife to sneak a washing machine among hers to make her life less difficult.

You're making a ton of assumptions about a guy and his wife. The whole point of the Amish life style is to make life a bit more difficult. The trade-off is that everyone in the community feels more needed and is bound closer together by sharing work load. Sneaking in occasional uses of modern technology doesn't defeat the purpose.

I'm upvoting your comment because I think it's important, and in fact I mostly agree with it. The shared commitment to Amish principles is obviously central to the project of maintaining and continuing an Amish way of life.

Having said that, what we see in the example above is a classic example of game theory. The husband is the defector and benefits as a result.

Is this an assumption? Of course! Perhaps his wife is playing Smash Bros on a secret Nintendo Switch while her husband is piloting his drone. But the fact remains that there's a lot of technology--specifically washing machines, dishwashers and the like--forbidden by Amish rules that could make her household chores (which she is obligated to do by her gender) much easier.

Well sure, and a John Deere tractor would make farming a lot easier. A power saw would make wood working much easier. That's true across the spectrum of work that the Amish do.

You're missing the point of OP. Traditionally, it is easier for men to be independent in the Amish community. Therefore, it is easier for the man to have something like a drone he can hide than it is for the wife to have anything at all similar.

And like it or don't, much of the outcome of the Amish lifestyle, regardless of the point of it, is an absolutely awful power dynamic based on gender.

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