Today's discussion question

[Joseph Tracy]

Your take on Fox is typical of your willingness to take probably some opinion you approve of and without serious research to cast as truth what is a rather feeble bit of argumentation. 
In fact Fox was arguing for what several posts here are describing- a direct spiritual and transformative experience not hinged to doctrine as the Puritans emphasized or to the practices of the Church of England. What emerged was a distinctly non-heirarchichal community which for 300 years has refused to embrace a creedal statement and been consistently ant-war and for human rights. . As far as describing its historic course or the reasons it grew, you are simply unqualified to have a serious opinion and what you offer is blatherous nonsense.
On Aug 16, 2013, at 11:42 AM, alice wellintown wrote:

> So we return to H.L. Mencken's Book of Prefaces and his scathing,
> witty,  and famous definition of Puritanism.
> 
> I don't know what Friends or Catholics or Presbyterians or Baptists or
> Lutherans know about the history of Christain idea, doctrines, dogmas,
> let alone the particular and seperate squables that formed, and often
> dismembered these (and the Quakers or Froiends declined in number
> because they were so open to the ideas of others, though we see the
> Readings Out in M&D....), and I imagine that Quakers or Friends,
> though in my experience very knowledgable about history, know less
> than their counterparts who attend sermons on a Sunday and are
> subjected to the history of the churches at least a few times in the
> year.
> 
> The Reformation needed, in the minds and hearts of "puritans",
> reform. Puritan, term, long before Mencken abused it,  was a term of
> derision. Often, as is the case with Shakers and Quakers, co-opted,
> but still, as the government continued to hang, jail, and punish, and
> as religious toleration was only something prayed for, the number of
> Puritans ever increased as the violence visited up their covered heads
> increased (How's that for the want of violence?). War, and the fear of
> Rome, or anything Papist, and the attempt to force everyone under one
> tent only increased the anarchy, as more and more, strange
> manifestations of the religion sprang up from the bloody fields. Sects
> multiplied  and then multiplied, some died, some split, some gave
> birth to children they didn't recognize or disowned, cast into the
> river or upon the devil's door. Why Fox's madness spread is hard to
> say. I doubt it has anything to do with what you list in your post,
> Joseph. Fox was, in modern psychological terms, morbid, melancholic,
> over the rainbow, crazy. But the hysterical history that engulfed this
> poor suffering soul was, as fortune's wheel turned, grace. Had the
> madness of history not met the madness of Fox, he would have died,
> probably at his own hand, a Cobbler's hammer to the skull.