Today's discussion question

[alice wellintown]

Yeah, Ok...whatever...
On 8/17/13, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> 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.
>
>