It depends on the definition of "better". The Amish idea of better is serving God, avoiding or repenting sin, and thus attaining salvation.
Most people's idea of good life is pretty different, given the basic axioms it's built upon.
This is why attempts to build a life by imitating various highly admirable spiritual movements mostly fail. To reap the benefits of the lofty ideas and commendable ways of life one needs to consciously* adopt most of the spiritual teachings which have lead to the development of these ideas and ways of life. You either convert to them, or admit that it's too hard to follow the way.
* Amish only accept adult, conscious baptism.
First, one can look to the mid-Atlantic Quakers, whose own book of daily guidance is titled "Faith & Practice", which stresses the distinction between how one might behave in the world and what one believes about spiritual and religious matters. For (that branch of the) Quakers, you can live a "good life" without necessarily subscribing to any of their spiritual/religious beliefs.
Secondly, most people's idea of their good life is woefully lacking in self-reflection and self-knowledge. What really makes people happy? Civilizations and cultures across time and space all stress that what really makes people happy rarely involves material well being (although obviously a certain level is required to avoid that being the dominant shaper of the experience of life). Yes, we can admit that various gadgets and access to services brings us some level of joy in life, but that doesn't really negate the fundamental truth that what makes us happy tends to be purpose, not products, tends to be who we have in life, not what we have.
Well, the texts that survive those cultures stress that. But historically reading and writing were highly controlled political activities. So you should probably consider the political motivation behind those texts. The good life for a peasant farmer in the dark ages would almost certainly involve the accumulation of modest surpluses to be traded for quality of life enhancing material goods. But you can bet your cart horse on the fact that the texts which were being produced by the state - and delivered to the farmer in mandatory weekly Mass - strongly encouraged the redirection of that surplus to the state in the form of tithe or similar in exchange for ‘spiritual access’.
It's easy to see that the interests of the state (which for Christendom was often coterminal and indistinguishable with the church) would want people to accept their lot, and be accepting of whatever inequities existed at that time and place. But I think you do human philosophy a disservice to suggest that people are incapable of thinking outside of that particular sort of box.
Even with Buddhism, the tradition most easily accused of encouraging people to just accept the way things are, it's actual practitioners and believers have fairly sophisticated explanations of why that's not actually their position at all.
Quakers succeeded enough in certain ways that their values became mainstream, and they didn't differentiate enough from the surrounding culture to remain separate from it or powerful within it. Our liberal culture owes a lot to the quakers, I have incredible respect for their foundational beliefs, I used to be one, but they don't have much to offer us now.
Also, I'd slightly dispute the "indistinguishable from the evangelical mainstream of wherever they live". There are branches of the Quaker tree that are evangelical, but for the one found in (at least) the mid-Atlantic and Pacific NW, evangelical Christianity is about the last thing I'd compare them to. Protestant mainline, sure.
But anyway if you are going to do this, I don't think you should do it with religions that still do have living practitioners however few. If you value what the quakers are doing go be a quaker, see what the experience has to offer. Or at least wait until its carcass is cold before you harvest its carrion. Trying to extract value from a spiritual tradition you're not willing to live is ghoulish.
It is not picking through or over the bones of Quakerism to grapple with and/or be inspired by this idea.
As for Stoicism, I am not sure that it is required to do anything other than, maybe, bring greater peace and understanding into the lives of those considering its values.
no no no no no. some progressive protestant faiths perhaps, but the central tenet of most Christian and most Protestants faiths is faith, salvation comes through accepting Jesus Christ as your savior and repenting sin, for which you will be forgiven. It is a topic of debate among theologians as to what that says about works/acts but they don't generally depart from the idea that starting now you get a clean a slate, or as clean as anyone can.
I don't understand this sentiment at all. Identifying positive aspects in existing religions is perfectly fine (I'd even argue there is some amount of virtue to it). How is it possibly ghoulish to see good in other cultures/religions and bring that into your practice? One example that comes to mind are religions where consumption of meat is eschewed. If you find that the rationale that Jainism provides for a vegan lifestyle resonates with you, why can't you incorporate that into your life for those reasons?
Again though, and I think this is enough information to understand my position, I simply reject the notion that you can build anything worthwhile by picking and choosing bits you like from the collection of religions spread before you.
They are traditions whose fullness is only experienced as part of a community of other practitioners. By trying to extract an appealing bit and apply it to your own life outside of that context and separated from that practice, you're doing an entirely different thing and imo not what you think you're doing. I simply don't think this practice is worthwhile, valuable, or worthy of respect.
If you don't want to eat meat then don't eat meat. If a jain convinces you not to then that's as good a way to find out as any other. Does that begin to convince you that we are all part of an eternal cycle made up of different substances? Maybe you should convert to jainism!
I don't want to assume anything about you and I'm not really. But I often see this amalgamated spirituality concept coming from non-religious people. The idea that you can take the parts you like from anywhere, leaving the parts you disagree with. I simply don't think you can come out of this with anything meaningful, and in fact I think it's a trap. You'll think you've found wisdom when all you're doing is laundering your beliefs & preferences through the hard-won ancient traditions of the world.
There is courage necessary to commit to a path without possibly being able to understand it or even begin to know where it will lead. When you build your own religion you trade that in for mistaken confidence, and the feeling that you know what all the parts do and why they're there. You're not supposed to know why they're there! You're supposed to just live it.
It is certainly true that feeding at the buffet of world religions isn't the same as being a committed member of a particular religious community. But that doesn't mean that you don't get some value from it, and potentially different value than that found by the more committed members.
I personally take great inspiration from Hesse's Siddhartha, the titular character of which explores a variety of spiritual and religious traditions, finds them all lacking and ends up being most inpired by a river ferry man. But that doesn't mean that the character gained nothing from his experiences with Buddhism, Jainism, ascetism and more.
What self actualisation can one get from that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil's_Playground_(2002_film)
And also, sadly, many Amish flee physical and sexual abuse: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Amish+abuse&ia=web
What do you mean by "they?" Amish people in general? Or some specific people or group (that you have not identified)?
Consider how you'd feel about saying "they" to refer to some individual transgression by other groups.
Here is an essay that essentially address this: http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
There is indead still nothing, that beats flash in this regard.
And flash games were somewhat popular with users as well.
Most of them, yes. Because they were "programmed" by people not good in programming or UX design. But flash enabled even newbs to build awesome stuff - and it had powertools for the pros. The workflow I had back then, I never found again in any other tool. So it has nothing to do with not wanting to learn something new - there still isn't something alike. And that is quite sad, despite the flaws of the flash player and adobe.
(oh. and flash was for free for students and also easy to pirate)
— Agent Smith, The Matrix, 1999
I am fairly sure most of us can agree with: Not yet.
Is easy to brag about how you don't need technology when somewhere a team of extremely sophisticated machines are deployed pointing towards the sky to save the day in case that you would be bombed. An entirely independent Amish nation would be probably eaten by their neighbors or by the market in months. More people died in the Ukranian war in a year than the whole remaining Amish population.
And their life style proven to be very fragile acting against things like Covid. They suffer also still from occasional outbreaks of Measles and Polio [1] that were eliminated in the rest of US by the use of vaccines. Living in a different century can seem idyllic, but it has a price.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-covid-amish-idUSL2...
Well I read Lucky Luke as a kid and guess who ended up saving the settlers every single time? The cavalry. Sent by the Feds in Washington.
This happens automatically with age. The HN crowd is older now. Just look at the skepticism around AR and VR. The problem is there’s no actual exploration and experimentation paired with the skepticism.
Job of the old: remind the young that there's little new under the sun, and a cost to everything.
The end result is “get off my lawn” and “new things annoy me”
I feel like HN has a healthy skepticism about IoT at least. We seem to generally agree that fewer devices should have internet access.
> Child Sexual Abuse in the Amish Community: A Hidden Epidemic
Turns out, a closed-off, hierarchical community isn't something to emulate.
Doesn't help that a lot of them only get an eighth grade education:
https://home.dartmouth.edu/news/2012/03/professor-william-fi...
> The Amish community’s adherence to a lifestyle more typical of the 19th century, which includes driving horse-drawn buggies and living in homes with no electricity, is driven by religious beliefs. But the Amish’s adherence to educating their children in one-room schoolhouses, and then only through the eighth grade, is largely the result of a 1972 Supreme Court decision, Yoder v. Wisconsin. This 40-year-old ruling has “frozen them in place” and threatens the younger generation’s ability to earn a living in an increasingly complex society, argues Professor of Economics William A. Fischel in a recent paper.
https://www.amishheritage.org/services/education/
> In 1972, the United States Supreme Court decided in Wisconsin v. Yoder that Amish children do not have the right to any future other than one inside the Amish Church.
https://lancasteronline.com/features/former-amish-want-to-ov...
So it seems their "thorough consideration of technology" is in the context of a culture that's not going to change because it would threaten the established hierarchy. That's the threat, here: Something like this might start out well-intentioned, but once the institution is in place, well, any excuse will serve a tyrant, eh? Any excuse will serve the organization.
So I think it’s unfair to dismiss them because they have sexual abuse in their communities and have values other than education. They don’t want to change much but it’s not a conspiracy to maintain the hierarchy. It’s to maintain their way of life that they’ve found creates meaningful, stable, happy lives with authentic connections to each other. We lack this as a society so much that we have multi-billion dollar industries trying to bottle it up and sell it to our desperate people.
They don’t do everything right but they get a lot right.
It's fair to dismiss them because they have an institutional habit of covering it up.
> and have values other than education.
This is wrong. Not educating someone keeps them under your control. That's abusive.
Well, they take care of it themselves and don't get the legal system involved. They have their own ways of dealing with it. They don't support it and it's not like they're actively facilitating it. You may agree or disagree with this but there are many different communities in the USA that prefer to act this way.
> This is wrong. Not educating someone keeps them under your control. That's abusive.
They get enough education. I'd wager most of them are better educated than the majority of public school attendees, most which graduate with a < 8th grade level of reading and match ability. I think we should look at our own broken system more before criticizing them and holding them to a different standard.
They allow it to run rampant. That's explicitly called out in the article I linked to.
> They get enough education.
They don't. Again, that's explicitly called out in the articles I linked to.
At this point I can only conclude you're posting in bad faith.
Very true. There is a quote, often misattributed, about how power corrupts. To lazy to google it, sorry.
> Doesn't help that a lot of them only get an eighth grade education:
That is 5 years more than some ultraorthodox jews get, check out link [1] here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35336142
Proof that happy religious communities are all different, but ugly, controlling, abusive groups share many of the same characteristics.
The Church/elders always go for information control.