Hey Sara and Blue-

There’s lots of Christian Quakers- the vast majority of people who call themselves Quakers are Christian and always have been. Generally it’s the Liberal, non-Christian, universalist Quakers who are unaware that there’s anybody else around. They are a minority.

Most Quakers can be termed “Pastoral,” and resemble Christian Protestant churches in faith and practice. You will find that they usually have typical Protestant attitudes—as a church—to social issues such as premarital sex, drugs and alcohol, and so on. They use paid priests and pre-planned worship services.

A smaller group can be termed “Liberal,” and is usually only slightly Christian, if at all, and occasionally is hostile to Christianity. They will usually express typically liberal social attitudes that reflect their close involvement with middle to left wing social, political, and environmental causes. They do not hire priests and practice waiting (or unplanned) worship.

An extremely small sub-group calls itself “Conservative,” meaning it claims to retain both the original Christianity of the early Friends (unlike the Liberals), and the original form of waiting worship (unlike the Pastorals). They have a broad mixture of social and political beliefs, and are harder to characterize as a group, perhaps, than the other two.

Quakers are very diverse, and no one group can speak for all of them, except to say that they will all be welcoming to anybody who visits or would eventually be interested in joining.

Dec 30, 2009 -- 6:46PM, Intotheblue wrote:

Thanks for the information, Kevin. Perhaps then, most of the folks who post here are more liberal? Or maybe I just haven't gotten to the more conservative/traditional threads? Dunno...

Could you explain to me a little about the differences between planned and waiting? Is waiting just like 'go with the flow', spontaneous, say whatever comes to mind when the moment arrives, type of thing?

I don't know whether the folks who post here are Liberal Friends or not, Jan, but most of the ones I read here would probably classify themselves as Liberal.  One easy way to tell is this: If the Friend attends a "Friends Meeting," they will either be Liberal or Conservative. If they attend a "Friends Church," they will be Pastoral.

The earliest Friends rejected established church rituals and ceremonies, because they saw them as corrupted imitations of what should really be going on. They substituted what is called "waiting worship," which has no pre-planned sermons, readings, or songs, and is usually mostly silent while people wait to be led to do or say something.

The Pastorals practice "programmed" or pre-planned worship, which has a structure and content chosen in advance, like most churches: prayer, songs, readings, sermon, sacraments, benediction, exit . . . The content varies.

The Liberals and the Conservatives sit down without expecting anything specific to happen. After a while, a worshipper will feel led to say something, will say it, and then stop. Maybe someone will feel led to add something to it, after a while, or maybe not. Sometimes somebody will be led to sing, or recite poetry, or a scripture verse. Or not. Sometimes nobody says or does anything except listen, which is sometimes what is supposed to happen. Sometimes too many people think they have something to say, and nothing gets the attention it deserves.

Unprogrammed Friends differ on where they think the messages they deliver come from. Some Friends believe that it is God who provides the message from outside, while others believe the message comes from somewhere inside the individual.

There are also atheist, or "non-theist" Friends, who can be pretty complicated to talk to.

I think this board is pretty easy-going on thread content. Seems so, anyway.

There's lots of theist religions or philosophies without a "personal" god. Theistic Buddhism, or orthodox Hinduism, or Western deism. God exists, but is detached from the world. Some non-theist Friends fall into that category.

I don't speak for non-theists, but in general non-theistic Quakerism seems to be a rejection of traditional views of god, up to and sometimes including atheism, while embracing the practices that theistic Quakerism created for explicitly theistic reasons. Some non-theists do believe in God, of a non-traditional nature. One reason they are difficult for me to understand is because they do not seem (to me) to have an ultimate foundation underlying their beliefs, in that little is asserted, but mostly much is denied. In other words, they might assert the existence of right and wrong or of good and evil but deny any reason that I can understand for how they can do so that isn't derived internally, and therefore is nothing more than opinion or preference (to me). Some will say that pain and suffering is bad, and to do good is to do whatever decreases pain and suffering. Some are relativists, some are not.

This is a good source of information about them, that will give better answers than I can:

www.nontheistfriends.org/

In my own opinion, non-theistic Quakers hear the same God I do, and respond to the same divine urgings that I do, and are led to the same moral system that I am, while carefully trying not to acknowledge that source. They might consider what I just wrote to be patronizing.

How do you define "agnostic?" It has unusual and very carefully-worded definitions among people who do not believe in God, many of whom call themselves "agnostic" while positively asserting that God does not exist.

Hi Jan-

Thomas Henry Huxley is one of my favorite biologists. When evolution through natural selection was explained to Huxley, his response was to say, "How stupid of me not to have thought of that." He was a very interesting man, as were Aldous and Julian.

I'm very interested in what you have to say about your beliefs. "A-gnosticism" when defined as the assertion of a lack of knowledge, or of a non-assertion of definitive knowledge, is also how I define the term. It is very different from the definition suggested by many other folks, who will say that the default position of a lack of knowledge is disbelief, in that if one cannot tell whether a glass contains contents, then the correct conclusion is that it is empty. These people will say that the lack of satisfactory evidence (to them) for the existence of God is proof that God does not exist. They carefully distinguishing themselves from atheists, who also don't believe in God but do it on the basis of faith.

Quakerism asserts that it is possible to know whether God exists, through the same methods that existence is examined anywhere else: direct experience. It was the reliance on direct experience rather than written records or church authority that originally defined Quakerism-- nothing was to be accepted until it had been personally demonstrated or experienced. To try to claim ownership of discoveries of other people was to profess to a knowledge that one didn't have, and to perhaps ignore the knowledge that one was being taught.

Because there are no written or enforced creeds in much of Quakerism, there is a great deal of flexibility in what different people consider satisfactory or correct interpretations of God. This is both good and bad: good, because we make the attempt to let God speak for himself in whatever way he considers appropriate, and bad, because it permits a great deal of shallow and murky thinking to persist for a long time.

Please excuse me if I sound obtuse. I drive a truck for a living, and I've been up now for 23 hours while the shop has tried to fix a wiring problem. I live in the truck, and can't go anywhere else until they're done with it. Too cold outside.