Yes, yes that's exactly what he's saying. Their personal lifestyle choices are fine, but their ethics are absolutely not fine. To choose to live a simple life of manual labour and teach the same to your children is fine, but to bind their spirit by breaking their bodies is something I can't stand for. It's cruel and inhumane.

> to bind their spirit by breaking their bodies is something I can't stand for. It's cruel and inhumane.

I agree. That said, I think it's worth reminding ourselves that there are a lot of cruel and inhumane things that we do to ourselves, too.

We shouldn't compare the worst of humanity against the worst of humanity. That gets us nowhere. Instead we should be comparing the worst against the best and looking to see how those issues can be rectified.

They are set in their ways. To turn them onto the One True Path of Least Resistance we'll probably need a feet on the ground intervention, in the interests of unbound spirits and fleshy bodies.

> Perhaps you mean their morality does not agree with that of the wider culture surrounding them.

Absolutely. The Western civilization is ignorantly missing things like the incredible cultural value of sexual abuse ( http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=316371 , http://legalaffairs.org/issues/January-February-2005/feature... ) or the beautiful parenting experience of raising children with nephropathic cystinosis (not to mention the happy lives of the children!) with that feeling of inner peace brought to you by knowledge that God wanted it like that. Open those closed, narrow minds of yours, people!

I like how you managed to slip in 'the cultural value of', and then simply list alleged instances of sexual abuse within the Amish community neither of which implies that the practice is condoned or 'culturally valued'; because it's permissible, as long as we don't value it as a culture. The Amish aren't to be contrasted to 'Western civilisation'; they live in the West, they come from another part of the West, they practice Protestantism, an especially Western variety of a schism with a religion domiciled in the West. "But they're not civilised! They draw a line in the sand and reject technology beyond that line. They probably don't approve of genome editing. They've probably even banned it. All those happy children, never to be born."

If you read the articles closely, you'll see that they're anything but "alleged". The "morality" dasil003 mentions, which "does not agree with that of the wider culture surrounding them", disagrees with the "wider culture" of the West on many topics, including the way that sexual abuse should be dealt with or how access to healthcare should be regulated.