Letters - 15 March 2024

First encounter

In this week’s Friend (1 March), Jim Norris fears that George Fox’s close connection with Elizabeth Hooton of Skegby near Mansfield is being overlooked in the centenary celebrations.

He and other readers will be glad to know that in the Quaker Arts Network film project recently featured in the Friend (news, 19 January) there is a film by Journeymen Theatre of Elizabeth and her first encounter with George Fox. It can be viewed, with the other films submitted so far, at https://quakerarts.net/projects/fox400.

Please join in with our project in this centenary and submit your videos. Lots of ideas are on the website too, including simple ones. I can help you with apps and thoughts on formatting too. Let’s make this year fantastic with our creativity.

Amanda Jones

Quakers and the Bible

I so enjoyed the letter from our Bideford Friend (1 March).

I have a Bible printed by my gggggg-grandfather Isaac Collins of Burlington New Jersey in 1792 – the first Quaker Bible ever printed in the USA as the British Empire had prohibited people there (at that time a colony) from printing Bibles.

The first pages of my 1792 Quaker Bible were filled with the names of the family that bought it – cousins of Isaac from Nantucket the island of 5,000 Quaker cousins. Some of my cousins are still Quakers after all this time.

The other pages were virgin, clearly never read in over 230 years by all those Quaker cousins.

I do like reading my virgin 1792 Bible in spite of the old weird print. Lots of good stuff.

David Hickok

Peacemakers together

Keith Braithwaite’s article ‘Hold your peace’ (23 February) has a timely message. ‘For peacemakers to be effective, no party in a conflict must get the idea that peacemakers are against them.’ This becomes difficult in social situations when you have friends/Friends who are members of opposing communities.

There is a need to recognise that peacemakers who refuse to be part of the conflict, and peacemakers who have roles to play within a conflict, can share the vision of peace and work together. Nobel Peace Prize awards are given to those who achieve in peacemaking.

One such leader of peace was 2008 Nobel Prize laureate Martti Ahtisaari, who was president of Finland, which has compulsory conscription.

His twenty lessons on mediation/peacemaking is a guide for everybody:
www.accord.org.za/publication/conversations-with-ahtisaari.

We as individuals may not get asked to play the mediation role, but we have an important role helping those in trouble, without asking questions, but sharing a vision of peace.

David D E Evans

Conflict in Gaza

Many thanks to Keith Braithwaite for his article in the Friend of 23 February. It greatly helped me to clarify my thoughts and resolve some of my own concerns.

Quakers have so much to contribute in this area. I hope we can be more united and assertive in proclaiming this message, loud and clear.

Deborah Jane

In defence of Hamas

I would like to assure Keith Braithwaite (23 February) that, despite irresponsible claims by Israeli and Palestinian extremists, Hamas remains essentially a political party, rather than a terrorist group.

The armed wing of Hamas is the Al-Qassam Brigades. These were responsible for the murderous attack on 7 October. This does not absolve Hamas itself from all responsibility, but it certainly does not mean that every Hamas supporter is a terrorist. I know one respected Hamas mayor in the West Bank (since removed by the Israelis) who had portraits of Gandhi and Martin Luther King on his office wall. Remember that Hamas was once supported by Benjamin Netanyahu and his colleagues.

The Al-Qassam Brigades were proscribed by the UK in 2001 under the 2000 Terrorism Act. Hamas as a political party was not proscribed until twenty years later. The latter proscription has been pointless and unhelpful. It has obstructed direct negotiations with Hamas, hindering the UK’s role as a peacemaker.

Nowadays the majority of Palestinians in Gaza, in the West Bank and in their diaspora, respect Hamas as part of the Muslim Brotherhood and as a provider of schools, hospitals, universities and social facilities. They contrast Hamas’ resistance to the Israeli occupation with the perceived ineffectiveness of their west-aligned Fatah rivals. The notion that bombing Palestinians will stop them from supporting Hamas is tragically preposterous. The opposite is likelier.

I believe our testimony should be pro-peace, pro-reconciliation, pro-Israeli, pro-Palestinian… and pro-Hamas.

John Lynes

A human creation

I refer to George Penaluna’s question of the nontheist view, that religion is a human creation (9 February).
Bearing in mind that words themselves are a human creation, I am reminded of the first sentences of the Tao Te Ching by Taoist Lao Tzu: ‘The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.’

If we were to ask the identified nontheist: ‘Who or what is this God that you don’t believe in?’, s/he may well describe a concept totally related to our own experience, as George Penaluna highlights in his quote from the nontheist gathering, or as an entity outside of ourselves that does not meet our own experience of God – for example the outdated concept of the old bearded man in the sky.

‘Theist’ or ‘nontheist’, if we were able to trust our experiences of deep connection to the power that is greater than self; the inner knowing; the essence; the divine, the oneness, or God, why let the words that we use in an attempt to describe having or believing/not believing in these experiences, create unnecessary divisions?

Susan Holden

Pacifism and pacificism

Bob Johnson’s forthright account of violence and its origin (19 January) is convincing and tells us where we can begin our efforts to prevent it. But it does not seek to address current issues or organised violence in present time.

The ‘Hitler question’ – how to confront the aggression of a dictator with an ideology justifying violence and the military strength to use it, also immune to domestic opposition and not open to meaningful negotiation – is not new.

Like Roger Sturge (9 February), I have been troubled by it for a long time, initially as ‘head knowledge’, but since 24 February 2022 a ‘heart’ question as well.

In 2023, Quaker Peace & Social Witness convened a Ukraine/Russia cluster of experienced Friends to collect and consider the implications for our Peace Testimony of Vladimir Putin’s invasion (www.quaker.org.uk/documents/hard-questions-ukraine-invasion-anniversary). It produced no settled Quaker answer to the Hitler question, pointing to space for individual conscience and to the tender holding of different views within Quaker Meetings.

Perhaps it is appropriate to apply here the distinction between pacifism and pacificism (see Wikipedia, or www.academia.edu/1095087/On_the_Distinction_between_Pacifism_and_Pacificism).

Pacifism in this definition is complete rejection of all war. Pacificism sees the institution of war as unacceptably bad and wrong but accepts that armed violence may be justified and necessary in some current circumstances.

This latter view is to be found already among early Friends – Isaac Pennington, Quaker faith & practice 24.21. It has knock-on implications, for instance for our attitude to the arms industry. But from recent public utterances of some Quakers, I suspect that it may be widespread in the present Society of Friends.

I find this position helpful. Will it also help other troubled pacifists?

Roger Bartlett