Today's discussion question

[alice wellintown]

http://www.quaker.org/pamphlets/ward1956a.html



On 8/17/13, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>>
>>
>