u/keithb

Lead roofs weigh a bit less than slate roofs and a lot less than flagstone roofs.

A male goat is a buck or a billy, a ram is a(n intact) male sheep. And that animal is no sheep.

Trilateration, kind of. No angles are measured.

You wait. Possibly for a long time.

For me, it matters more what others do. The times when I’ve seen the golden glow and had the sense of transcendent immanence have been when a Friend has risen to speak about their vulnerabilities and what’s comforted them, and that’s promoted another Friend to rise and speak about their fear and what’s reassured them, and another Friend has risen to speak about their anxiety and what’s reassured them, and the meeting becomes like the gain medium of a laser built to amplify the nature of love, and then the beam hits you between the eyes.

All I have to do there is be ready to play my part as and when. Until then: I wait.

Thanks. It’s an interesting list.

A thread that I would maybe pull on is that we became interested in prison reform in part because Friends had seen the insides of a lot of prisons. And one of the reasons that early Friends went to prison was for declining to take part in what they were sure was the empty ceremonial of the Anglican Church. Declining that stuff used to be seen as very important to Friends. Just a thought.

It might be, but I'm not doing that.

So, I wonder, not a 'gotcha' but a genuine question: what do you find particularly or uniquely valuable about the Quaker faith?

I’m sad to see Friends giving up on the idea that our tradition has found truths which have evaded others. That even Quakers don’t find anything particularly valuable in our traditions.

Ok. Consider this: both the Anglican Church and the Roman Catholic Church (in which I too was raised, but unusually, as you say, I was paying attention) withhold the rest of their spiritual apparatus from someone who is unbaptised. No baptism, no communion, and no salvation.

This is so important to them that both have a doctrine that in an emergency, if an ordained priest or even a deacon cannot be found, anyone at all may perform a valid baptism. But what is a valid baptism to these churches? It requires a sincere motivation on the part of the baptiser, it requires a very specific form of words, and it requires water. No water, or the wrong words: no baptism.

There have been some spectacular cases where it turns out that someone’s baptism was invalid because the words used had been slightly wrong. And that person went on to become a priest - but since their baptism was invalid so was their “ordination” and thus so were all the “sacraments” that they appeared to have administered while working as a priest.

So what we see there is a ceremonial magic initiation.

The traditional Quaker position is that such things are unnecessary, ineffective, a distraction, and based on a misunderstanding of the very scripture used to justify them.

It’s a puzzle to me that Friends have lost track of this position.

No. The point I’m making is the one I’ve made: I’m puzzled that anyone would be part both of a tradition which has found by experiment that the liturgical practices of the mainstream churches are empty and also still take an active part in those practices.

There was a time when most Friends would be able to outline the long list of reasons why we don’t do Eucharistic services, even in the low Protestant sense, ie without any hint of a “real presence”. Most of them based on a well-founded view that the mainstream churches have misunderstood their own scripture, and also a view that those churches have misunderstood the relationship between humans and God.

Where did that go? It’s puzzling to me that Friends have lost this.

Did she take an active part in their Eucharist? Receiving communion by wine and wafer?

Lacks the jaunty hat-wearers of Switzerland and Berlin.

You’re welcome.

I mean, the there was that period when Friends would attend services at other denominations’ steeplehouses…in order to denounce their errors and condemn their priesters for leading the people astray.

Frowned upon? Probably not, or maybe an Evangelical meting might object to a Friend also attending Mass?

It’s a puzzle to me why anyone would double-dip, though. There are Friends in my meeting who also attend Anglican or Methodist churches…and that puzzles me.

Quaker doctrine, confirmed again and again by experience, is that anyone who wants it can have direct, unmediated experience of the divine: so why go to a church where an ordained priest stands between you and divinity? Similarly, Quakers have found that liturgical theatrics are at best no use in making that connection and might be a harmful distraction. So, why go take part in them? We’ve found that the only sacraments which mean anything are baptism and communion and we have found that the effective way to do both involves no third party and no props. We’ve found (until the pastoral turn, anyway) that Spirit is best heard in silence, and that anyone may be moved to minister. We’ve found that what the mainstream churches teach is necessary…isn’t.

It’s all very strange to me that someone would both be a Quaker and seek out the erroneous ways of the churches which punished us for discovering, and abandoning, their errors. Errors which they maintain.

I wonder how much influence paintings like these had on the “aztecing” technique used to give model ships more of a sense of scale.

I'm a software engineer with 30 years of experience. The industry goes through these waves of over-exited stupidity about a thing that's going to "make programmers obsolete" periodically. This one is unusually severe and and unusually fast, but thus far I see no reasons not to expect that 1) Jevons' Paradox will kick in and demand for software developers will increase, 2) after a few years of pushing really hard on the LLM approach we will once again have to deal with realising that writing code isn't the seat of value, 3) as before, the nature of the job will change dramatically. But it was going to anyway.

It will also continue to be true that most software is garbage that has no value and should never have been written - there's just going to be much, much more of that.

In a couple of years we'll know what LLMs are actually good for, and what not. Surplus over-purchased graphics cards will be very cheap, so there's that.

Our testimony is of being peaceable ourselves and helping others to be peaceable. To help create the conditions under which peace can break out. See This Light That Pushes Me for powerful accounts of Quakers doing that in sub-Saharan Africa. See the work done behind the scenes by Quakers in Northern Ireland. There have been many cases where Quakers have helped to de-escalate conflicts, which WeChat’s been able to do because every side in a conflict can be confident that we aren’t secretly acting for another side. See Dining with Diplomats, Praying with Gunmen for a survey.

In societies saturated by war, advocating for “peace” often sounds like advocating for “defeat”. And in fact during the Cold War, many western “peace activists” actually were in favour of the defeat of what they called capitalism, and if that took liberal democracy down with it, they thought it was a price worth paying. Even some Quakers thought that way, I’m sad to say.

But our testimony, in truth, is to be peaceable ourselves and to remind everyone that peace is always an option.

Not because of theology. It’s because we don’t partner with empires. The big denominations, and not only of Christianity, got that way by aligning with empires.

We are no respecters of social hierarchies, we won’t provide moral support for military action (we reject the idea of there being any “just war”…as if!), we won’t indulge in using creeds to identify and persecute members of out-groups, we won’t let our church be used as an instrument of social conformity and control.

The big denominations are comfortable with all of that.

It’s a bank. Banks are very happy to “invest” millions in trying out some executive’s whimsical notion. This pays off now and again, at a sufficient rate that they keep on doing it. But, they are equally happy to scrap a product that’s had millions spent on it, too. Even an apparently successful one.

You might well think that this is “really wrong”.

I’ve done work for banks but I’d never be employed by one. Those higher salaries are psychological danger money.

Here’s some things that are not obvious from outside the book trade itself: books are not intrinsically valuable, most books are bad; a book being old, rare, precious, or worth preserving are all different things; there are a great many books that no one reads any more or will never read again, and often with good reason.

Training AI might be the best use for much of the stock of many second-hand bookshops.

Early Friends, such as Fox, and all Friends up until the Rufus Jones-inspired liberal turn of the early 20th century, and probably the great Christian majority of Friends today, were, are, very clear that creator and creation are separate.

When Fox wrote about "that of God in every one" he did not mean that we all have an inherent divine aspect. He meant that Christ Jesus chooses to manifest within us. Later developments of Quaker theology added the possibility that Christ might choose to stop doing so if an individual persisted in paying no attention to that manifestation.

You're welcome.

This may not be your conundrum, but it looks to me as if many Friends struggle to reconcile a person's reprehensible behaviour with a notion that there being a "that of God" in any given person means that the person is "a little bit godly" – so why are they behaving so badly? But if we return to Fox's words we see that our kinship with those people is that we too are capable of reprehensible action (yes, we are) but we do much less of it (I hope!) than a Trump does, because we pay attention to the "that of God" in us. A related problem is when Friends struggle to be well-disposed towards a bad actor on the assumption that the "that of God" in others is supposed to pull love, when it's really that the "that of God" in us is meant to push it.

Notwithstanding anything else, remember that Carroll was a photographic pioneer. The medium was new and very primitive. Alice would have had to hold that pose, and in particular keep her eyes still for a long time, certainly several tends of seconds, to make that shot.

No, he doesn't sound like a jealous god. He sounds like a vain, narcissistic, corrupt, greedy, cruel, delusional person. And he's not a dictator. He might try (arguably: again) to become one.

With all that, do I, as a Quaker, believe that there is "that of God" in him? Yes.

Not that I have to find it, it's a tenet of my church that it is there. And I accept that.

You say that you struggle to find that of God in Trump. For what do you search? That's not a rhetorical question: Query: if you were to find that of God in Trump, how do you think you would recognise it?

Fox instructed Friends in the ministry to "answer" that of God in every one, and to do so in a way that would encourage it in them. He seems to say this in emulation of Paul.

And he gave that instruction while also being very sure that all bar a very few people were fallen, mired in sin. Perhaps they were vain, narcissistic, corrupt, greedy, cruel, even delusional. And yet, Fox thought, they still had that of God in them, somewhere, maybe deep buried. Maybe they had become very used to ignoring its promptings. Maybe they had become very practiced at rejecting what it showed them. The job of ministry then is to encourage them to do otherwise; to attend to it.

What might that mean in the case of a Trump? What would Fox's instruction to cheer on that of God in Trump look like?

I recommend that you take a look at Lewis Benson, That of God in Every Man: What Did George Fox Mean by It?, Quaker Religious Thought, vol. 12, no. 2 (1970)

Edit: and, for what it's worth, Fox wrote that instruction to ministers while he was imprisoned by the regime of an actual dictator.

It…isn’t, though? For example, the Dervish seeks mystical union with the impersonal, unitary, Allah of the Quran. My Roman Catholic Maltese in-laws seek communion with the Allah (it’s the same word) of the Bible in the person of the crucified and resurrected Christ Jesus and those two positions are completely incompatible conceptions of God, religion, and faith. Each of them has teachings which explain in detail how wrong the other is.

Yes: there is that of God in every one. Every one.

There is that of God in Benjamin Netanyahu. There is that of God in Donald Trump. There is that of God in Itamar Ben-Gvir. There is that of God in Vladimir Putin. And so on. A lot of liberal Friends would like to be righteously angry at those men. To condemn them. To oppose them. To campaign against them. To build an identity around being the opposite of them. But is that a Quaker response?

Every one has a conscience, and every one has, in Quaker teaching, something behind that conscience, something divine, trying to show them their sin and trying to show them how to move away from sin.

When George Fox wrote of the “that of God in every one” he set for Quaker ministers the task of encouraging in others this capability to be guided by the divine away from sin and towards virtue.

And almost all Quakers have always identified as the thing behind our conscience as Christ Jesus choosing to be present in a person. But you might like to think of it as the Ruach HaKodesh.

This is very different from what you will read and hear in a lot of English-language material by and for theologically liberal Friends. For about 100 years, those Friends have developed a new idea that everyone is a little bit God. Which is a puzzle. Benjamin Netanyahu…is a little bit God? He is a little bit the God of infinite love and truth and justice? Really? Now what? What does that do to the identity that’s built around loudly and publicly condemning and opposing Netanyahu?

But if we follow the traditional Quaker teaching that God is paying attention to him and he has the capacity to pay attention to God, but might choose to do otherwise, and that the Quakerkly response – of any of us ever got anywhere near him – would be to try to get him to pay attention to God, we might be in a more fruitful position.