they are not amish!
when you are formally baptised into the quaker cult, you go into a room full of people, and you talk about ethical issues. some guy, with out any particular godly blessing, will ask what the whole group thinks about abortion. why do we think abortion is wrong why do we think abortion is not so bad. and you may or may not contribute your own thoughts. can you believe that? can you believe this is referred to as a religion?
i worked at the quaker information center and people would call my boss, the director, all the time, asking ‘what is the official quaker stance on abortion’ among other moral quandaries. the one and only answer? ‘talk to your local meeting’
get in a group of people, listen to their advice, and figure it the hell out for your stupid self.
do not listen to some stupid book if you dont want to, or hey go ahead and listen to some stupid book, whatever the crap you feel like.
its not a real religion. it is a group of people who call themselves religion and AT THE SAME TIME are completely devoted to logic save for a few simple, logic loving rules:
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dont lie, ever. quakers are known for refusing to say the pledge of allegiance and hand on the bible oaths in court or even say ‘i swear to god’ because when you pledge in that way, you are saying “right now i am definetely telling the truth, but if i dont swear or oath like i am now, hey hey you never know wink wink i just might be lying because i am a scumbag”
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no hurting, ever. even if hitler is busting down your door to euthanise you, you just fly up to heaven like he wants. i pretty much disagree with abstaining from ww2, because thats just crazy.
but i wouldnt have killed afghani citizens, no matter what the fuck we think about the taliban and what they are doing. i would have conducted some seriously effective diplomacy. and it would have been hard, and americans would have probably died as a result of our lenient position on terrorism.
but one thing is for sure if we refrained from killing afghanis in response to the taliban, a smaller number of earthlings would have died. think about it folks, if we approached afghanistan with pure diplomacy, how many afghanis would have died? none? how many americans? 10,000?
did we cause the innocent deaths of 10,000 innocent afghani civilians when invading them? has the disruption of the centralized govt caused more or less happiness for the overwhelming majority of afghanis who live outside of khartoum?
oh right, i forgot, americans view american lives as fundamentally more valuable and precious than dirty god damn arabs. so if they die, fuck them who the fuck will ever know in america? nobody!
wait but thats not what quakers think, they think that all humans are… whats that word… all humans are EQUAL! they all have a little piece of god inserted into them at birth (no its not called original sin, its just regular nice old holiness) and that is why they all must be treated equally. seems logical. tell that to jingos. do we still have jingos in this 21st century? i sure hope not. thirst4metal, im looking at you.
as for iraq…
anyway, thats it, 2 rules. dont lie and dont hurt. i think jesus reffered to it as the golden rule. ‘respect god and treat your neighbor like yourself’
you respect god BY treating your neighbor like yourself. and when you go to church, GET THIS, you dont listen to a bunch of jibberish that might as well be in latin as our new pope has thought it just might ought to be, as it was pre-1963 (YEAH the mass was in latin pre-1963).
the quaker meeting is actually a place where you can learn actual spiritual information and use it to make actual moral decisions. you can get advice from your PEERS instead of some whacko who decided to give up sex and learn a bunch of bible crap in his early twenties.
i mean, priests are who christians go to for advice. in the middle ages, priests belonged to a small elite group of people who, because of their amazing and admirable devotion, were capable of reading, and who had access to huge libraries that the general public was incapable of comprehending.
today, priests are just like you and me. any regular white man can read, and we all have access to the books that priests are capable of reading. we dont need this separate class of intellectual super-eunuchs to educate and guide us because we are perfectly capable of guiding ourselves. and george fox, some fucking Dude in 17th century england realized this. and he said that smart people should just get together and talk about stuff like rational human beings who contain knowledge. and any idiot can show up and learn from the smart people who feel like talking at the meeting.
the learning is not limited to listening to the type of person who drops out of regular learning in his twenties in order to pursue a life of no sex and devotion to dogmas. the learning is devoted to people who live normal lives and feel that they are capable of educating others, in addition to what they are Normally capable of.
its kind of like christianity, except it is connected to what we call the real dynamic world. not the bible world of two thousand years ago. you dont splash water on infant initiates, you dont eat crackers, you dont even chant prayers, you SAY prayers. if you feel like it.
if you made a religion from scratch, right now, of PURE LOGIC, it would be quakerism or it wouldnt be perfect. and george fox did it hundreds of years ago. respect him as if he were jesus, without the miracles. theyre pretty much the same.