Letters - 23 May 2025
From killer instinct to 'is it that simple?'
Killer instinct
My recent article (25 April) didn’t emphasise quite how awesome the 1660 Peace Testimony is. Far from being unworldly, it’s vastly more real than any other currently available prison theory, as my Parkhurst Prison work showed.
Violence is not genetic, instinctive, nor incurable – but requires a revolution in thinking. As James Nayler told us – if we can once forgo vengeance, then instead of the world disintegrating into war, as today – peace prevails. But it does require confidence that there is a divine spark within everyone, even serial killers. If you can once deliver on this, then every determined killer, including warmongers, will blossom – but, tragically for us all, not until.
Bob Johnson
Truth and testament
As a young person, I was misled about the Old Testament. I was taught that it was the history of a God of war leading his chosen nation to victory in battle. In contrast the New Testament was a record of how a good Christian should live as Jesus lived, and not be misled by the miracles or the rising from the dead, as these were just symbols of Jesus’ teaching, like all parables.
I now realise that that was why I ceased to believe in God and going to church. I met agnostics who lived more like Jesus than churchgoers. But after fifty-plus years among Friends, I now understand that the theme of the Old Testament is human failure to trust and worship God. Human loss of faith led to decadence, bad behaviour, lack of work and defeat by other powers. Again and again God forgives humans when they return to faith and their lives are transformed and this brings happiness.
The story is of God’s mercy, and this is the same story in the New Testament. Faith brings miracles and eternal life. Without this faith humans fail. We are made in the image of God, in the sense that we are able to be merciful, loving, forgiving and faithful to our agreement with God.
An all-powerful single God gives humans the choice between obedience and self-will, and supports and forgives them even when they make the wrong choice, over and over again. This God relents from allowing humans to destroy themselves in the flood, protects the first murderer, and allows four people to escape the destruction of Sodom, even though they all fail his mercy. He gives us power so we can choose mercy as he does. The promise to Abraham is the promise to Adam and Eve, to Noah and later to Israel under Moses and to other priests, prophets and kings; but after a few generations the people fail, and the recurrent cycle is brought to an end by Jesus.
John Myhill
VE Day
During Afterwords on the Sunday after VE Day, Friends at Rugby Meeting ministered about ‘remembrance’ and ‘giving thanks’, and struggled with ‘victory’. I’m writing to share one Friend’s ‘huge reminder of peace and reconciliation in Moscow’.
This Friend had watched on television the 9 May parade in Red Square, which was attended by Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.
There were seventy-three million deaths in world war two. Over half of all deaths were Chinese and Russian people. Russia’s death toll was twenty-seven million. Our Friend thought how ‘truthful’ this was, this remembrance and thanksgiving held in Moscow, and hoped that one day soon representatives of all nations might remember the end of world war two together with China and with Russia on a future 9 May.
For me, this hope is peace and reconciliation writ large. ‘Lest we forget.’ Thank you Friend.
David Fish
The Jung one
I have recently become interested in the work of Carl Jung and the integration of the ‘shadow’. I am now reading Jung and the Quaker Way by Jack H Wallis (1988). I would be interested to hear from any Friends with expertise or interest in this topic as I consider how this approach can be applied to our Society. Please correspond through quakerology@gmail.com if you’re interested.
Emma Roberts
Pop: the answer
I’d like to add further reply to Roger Plenty’s question (2 May) ‘Do Friends consider that a population of 8.2 billion, continuing to grow rapidly, is sustainable?’
Well, no, it isn’t, if those are the facts. According to a report in UN News of 11 July 2024, ‘As of 2024, population size has peaked in 63 countries and areas, including China, Germany, Japan and the Russian Federation, and the total population of this group is projected to decline by 14 per cent over the next thirty years.’ Population levels fluctuate and the statistics that are used in forecasts produce different results depending on what you measure. So the facts, when scrutinised, have many aspects.
I can think of many science fiction-adjacent ways to reduce the population, all violent and unjust. A population crash would jeopardise the survival of those who remained. Culling every first-born child would be monstrous. Mind control to ensure that all women of child-bearing age use contraception willingly and in full knowledge of their actions would be similarly catastrophic: a dearth of children destroys societies.
I don’t think a sustainable population is a priority for Quakers right now. Peace and social justice would be better goals, and perhaps, if achieved, they will help to sort out the problem of too many people on an overburdened planet.
Kate Macdonald
Meeting house history
Thirty-eight Elmbank Crescent, Glasgow, was built between 1850 and 1860. During that same period two million people died in Ireland when the potato harvest failed. Britain was then the richest country in the world, and this tragedy should never have been allowed to happen. Quakers in Ireland did what they could to help people during this unwarranted catastrophe.
As the building neared completion, the US civil war began, and it eventually cost the lives of 700,000 men over the issue of whether one person had the right to own another. Quakers have always been at the cutting edge of the struggle against slavery.
Robert E Lee, the general who had more than 200 enslaved people in his household, said, ‘The greatest mistake I ever made was in choosing a military career.’ Lee ended his days as a school teacher, and his estate at Arlington is now a military cemetery where the nearly 60,000 young Americans who died in an illegal war in Vietnam are commemorated. Robert McNamara, who was the secretary of defence during that conflict, later went to speak to the Vietnamese leaders after the war. They told him, ‘We were fighting for our freedom, we have been fighting the Chinese for a thousand years.’
In 2003 George W Bush claimed that God told him to attack Iraq. No God that I am aware of would tell any president to attack anyone. It seems to me that if the Christ teaches us to love our enemies, then dropping bombs on innocent people is simply not included in this manifesto. Quakers have consistently seen warfare as a complete violation of the Laws of God, and are ‘convinced’ about the validity of the central message of the New Testament. The Romans who drove their iron nails into the flesh of rabbi Yeshua failed to realise that with every blow of the hammer they were beginning a process that would ultimately destroy the brutal empire of which they and their caesars were a part.
Glasgow Meeting House was, for a time, occupied by the Royal Artillery Club until it was purchased in 1991 by the peace-promoting Quakers of ‘No Mean City’.
Bill Bingham
Is it that simple?
A Friend said to me that Quakers are on the decline numerically because they blend in too well with, and share the same affluence as, wider society. This Friend said for Quakers to grow again we need to adopt Quaker simplicity once more.
Gerard Bane
