The Amish

saa

Princess Peach wrote: »

I've had so many issues with self confidence and my looks and my weight. The Amish girls just really didn't care.

I've seen some documentaries that show the contrary but its hard to tell with tv but my theory is that..

Amish women definitely care about their weight not ridiculously but still they do put in effort to maintain their weight this might be more of an issue in certain Amish areas over others, they care about their hair and fashion a lot they want to look and I believe many of them have confidence issues but it just isn't talked about but yes in our world that level of body issue/confidence and self doubt sky rockets.

I love the idea of living modestly, being close to your family helping each other out

The funny thing is I'd love the life of a nun or amish person but without the restrictions or rules if I had enough money I would set up a healing centre and let people come no matter if they cannot fund it and live peacefully :rolleyes: yeah thats my pipe dream

Now I'm slightly concerned I saw a case of sexual abuse within the Amish community and it got me thinking as great as 'country insulated from the evils of the world living' is I'm just hoping that there isn't serious problems within that community like the ones that came out about the church because the same conditions exist for this to happen.

philologos

^^ Evil exists everywhere, and in every person. It is just manifested to greater or lesser degrees in different places and in different people. No grouping or person in society is exempted from it really.

marty1985

I've visited them before. They do depend a lot on tourism these days. It was an interesting trip. What struck me most is that it was just after an incident where a guy walked into an Amish schoolhouse and shot dead some young children, but the Amish reaction was extraordinary, that the cycle of violence should be broken straight away by them only offering forgiveness.

Lots of people are curious to watch them and rightly so. They started as a branch of the Anabaptists after the Reformation, but a lot of them succumbed to persecution, assimilation and discrimination (the last community in Germany expired in 1937) but others had found refuge in the US.

They refrained from slavery, they wouldn't take political oaths, rejected conscription and usually never accept converts either. They have no political power, and they never formed a hierarchy within themselves, they just have a strong community and shared sense of tradition. Importantly, they kept birth rates very high while fertility rates in surrounding societies plummeted. Hence their current population expansion.

Young Amish are allowed a few years of messing around out in the world, to experiment, join the mainstream society. Individual choice is important to them - baptism happens as an adult. If you choose not to baptised, it doesn't result in banishment. But, 80% choose to stay and be baptised.

Why? Probably because of the huge social capital they have. The strong community structure, the social networks. A lot of us would also find it preferable to stay there rather than join the fringes of mainstream competitive society.