I started working, some time ago, on the blog post "Political Minds with Religious Implications", because it seemed to me there were religious implications and I couldn't quite get my mind around them. [I realize that that post itself, a short summary of where George Lakoff's thinking has led me, is a lot to digest & comment on right away... and I hope that's why I'm not seeing comments there.]

What makes a system of morality 'moral', as I see it, is that regardless of whether it seems right to me, there are people able and willing to agree that action via its principles is a right means of acting and of settling disputes between them. Lakoff says that "liberal" and "conservative" positions on issues differ because people on different sides, on any particular issue, are applying different moral systems to evaluate the rights and wrongs of it. The two basic available flavors are what he calls "nurturant parent" and "strict father". [People have preferences between these models, but typically can apply both in different circumstances.]

Clearly, the so-called Testimony of Equality clashes with "strict father" morality; I've heard somewhere that when a few 17th Century crewmembers started holding Meeting for worship on a British warship, what first got them into trouble was not an attack of pacifism (though violence & authoritarianism seem to be mutually compatible) but an inability to justify 'sir'ing and saluting their officers.

But I'm not so much examining Quaker "doctrines" as general theological ones. All persons are morally equal because God utterly outranks us all... which seems to make for an egalitarian morality with one big exception. Throughout the Bible you find God acting in a high-handed and sometimes violently punitive way, presumably because He's doing so from a position of transcendent benevolence and wisdom-- but where people have trouble discerning that, the splat flat fact is that He can.

Between people... Early on, you don't seem to have any authority of one person over another-- until Cain, in founding a city, and his descendants presumably lord it over their adherents. The patriarchs live in an inter-tribal anarchy, a sort of 'peer-to-peer' moral system where there are customs governing raiding, hospitality etc.-- but enforcement of them seems to depend on who's got more trained fighters on the spot... and within each tribe, a despotic father. But the women have their own ideas on this. And cunning is a value, even when it undercuts hierarchical authority. Consider how Jacob snatches the birthright and the paternal blessing, with his mother's connivance. Or how, when he takes his women and secedes from his father-in-law's household, the women bring the family idols and hide them by sitting over them, claiming to be having their period. (This is evasion of their basic top-down moral order-- but no one makes them return the idols.)

Abraham dickers with God like a fellow-trader, and indeed seeks to catch Him in a moral headlock: "Shall not the Lord of all the Earth do right?"

Moses, under God's orders, subverts the authority of Pharaoh and leads a multitude out of slavery... who then persistently kvetch and dispute Moses' authority, and God's, for some forty years, whereupon the lot of them move into Canaan and set up an anarchistic tribal theocracy. Establishing a monarchy, and a centralized Temple, is at first seen as not what God wants-- but then we find a hierarchical moral order established, generally considered to be God's will, for some time thereafter. It is the hubris and injustices, the worldly-mindedness of the elite under this moral order, which the prophets insist God objects to-- and punishes-- with murderous conquests by the Assyrians (of Israel) and the Babylonians (of Judah). Here we have a classical picture of God, supporting (and dominating, and making use of) the powers of the world, but strongly disapproving of oppression.

But by  Jesus' time, the land has passed into the power of several oppressive world empires, enjoyed a brief independence under its own squabbling local oppressors, then fallen into the iron grasp of Rome. "The Kingdom of God", which many of his people yearn for, would imply the overthrow (undermining?) of all that established "order". Jesus himself (as I see him) seems to embody the ultimate "nurturing parent" ethic, but with an ominous element of "Just wait until your Father gets home! You'll catch it!" That element, of heavy-handed Fatherly 'discipline', manifests in the Jewish Revolt(s), the destruction of the Temple, indeed in our increasingly violence subsequent history...

and in fact, to this day you will find large numbers of people, utterly certain that their version of hierarchical, punitive, militaristic, sexually-restrictive, harsh morality is just what God (and Jesus) ordered.

And God built all of this into us, into this world-- produced people unquestioningly dedicated to one or another conflicting systems. I've got my notions on this, but what do others think?