Comment by Forrest Curo on 1st mo. 6, 2017 at 6:52pm

[Can't edit, needed to delete & rewrite]

God is responsible for every disaster and blessing. (Offhand, we get more blessings; and if our chief complaint about this world is fear of having to leave, that doesn't sound entirely unfavorable.)

The one Master whom Jesus told people to follow and obey was God. (If you think he meant 'Jesus', I disagree -- but our ideas of what God is like are pretty much the same as our idea of what Jesus was like, pretty much what Jesus said He was like. So that difference shouldn't add up to much, in practice.)

Jesus didn't say to avoid 'politics'; he didn't avoid it himself, or he wouldn't have died the way he did.

But clearly there was something more important to God, and to Jesus, than any political success -- and he was willing to be killed rather than to compromise that.

Comment by Kirby Urner on 1st mo. 6, 2017 at 6:53pm

God saw He'd made a buncha of cry-baby whiners.
"Shut up Job" said God.  And Job did, if he know
what was good for him. [ unpublished gospels ]

I'm finding Quakers on Facebook more receptive to voting machine theory.  I'll let QuakerQuaker stay primitive and not worry its little head with machines.

Comment by Forrest Curo on 1st mo. 6, 2017 at 7:27pm

What God said (in the published story) was essentially: "Job was right; he hadn't screwed up. You pious folks screwed up when you started blaming him for his troubles; you should ask him to pray for you."

What He said specifically to Job was not that God was "a bigger Bully, so don't you dare kvetch" but something more like: "I've seen it all from the Beginning, know what it's for and how it works -- and you didn't have a clue until I blew your mind open with all this."

Good stories in that book; maybe you should read it with an eye towards letting your mind blow a little more open.

Comment by Kirby Urner on 1st mo. 6, 2017 at 9:02pm

Not sure that'd be a good idea.  Your more-knowing-than-thou attitude is not recommending.  Back burner for now; I need to stay focused.

Comment by Kirby Urner on 1st mo. 6, 2017 at 9:20pm

Me on Facebook:

Jon Watts talks about looking the early Friends as role models. I do that too, e.g. Mary Dyer. However that was a steeply uphill period after which Quakerism enjoyed a brief reprieve as "fashionable" during which Friends were married to wealth through the British caste system to become owners and managers (capitalists as we call them since Marx). So my role models include some "rich Quakers". However it's not their personal "net worth" that attracts my interest, so much as the institutions they were able to build. Schools, hospitals and so on. Even ships. Someday submarines?

---

There's no engineering reason we couldn't be polling people all the time, which we are, through on-line surveys or whatever. If we called it voting sometimes, not just polling, but used the same technology, then we wouldn't be such a laughing stock when we dust off old machines that live in a warehouse most of their lives. We need to think of ways to increase our ability to do verifiable authenticated polling / voting, using tools we trust enough to take seriously and use routinely, as a taken for granted aspect of citizenship.

Comment by Forrest Curo on 1st mo. 7, 2017 at 12:40am

Subject of this discussion: Is there a sense in which devotion to political activities interferes with devotion to God?

-------

I'm bringing up the case of my concern with a bit of personal politics: 'how to relate to Kirby nonviolently but without letting him turn the discussion into a discussion about him, me, or the effrontery of me learning more about something, thinking more about it, and concluding that having done this means I know more about it.' (Etc.):

Well, I'm supposed to settle these things before turning to God; but the fact is, I haven't been able to; hence I come to be very earnestly asking things like "Why me?" and "Do I have any business wanting a better way to verbally stomp him into the ground?" [No, that doesn't really accomplish what I want] and "All right, then, what am I missing about this situation?"

I mean, the guy has become a catalyst for some very intense devotional "?????!"

So, yes, this concern is in the way -- but it's supposed to be! I don't need to "succeed" in the matter (whatever _that_ might look like) but I'm assigned to try to deal with it, then take it to God (not the riot squad) for some sort of mutually tolerable resolution. I wouldn't necessarily need to _tell_ everyone I'm doing this, but in this case it seems relevant.

Not the big political issues like stopping a war, or a large Meeting coming to agreement on anything significant whatsoever -- We haven't so far been able to do that -- but this little bit of personal politics: going beyond cold courtesy & polite rudeness, true or otherwise, to getting things right between us.

Comment by James C Schultz on 1st mo. 7, 2017 at 9:21am

Personally, I believe, by Faith, that Jesus of Nazareth is God and that following Jesus is following God.  Having said that I acknowledge that living by Faith and not sight is irrational and that if you argue over irrational subjects you can become irrational.  So that being said I don't try to convince others of my belief, I just ask Him to give me the Grace to follow Him and the wisdom to avoid those intriguing detours along the way.

Comment by Forrest Curo on 1st mo. 7, 2017 at 11:52am

The practical consequence of either view is that if we do what Jesus calls for, we'll be doing what God wants of us, and vice versa.

The practical difficulty is distinguishing what Jesus said (and what he intended it to mean) to the Jewish nation of his historical time (so far) -- from how various intuitive reconstructions from collective oral tradition have quoted him (beginning with the gospels we know, and continuing to this day, influenced more-or-less accurately, by what influence these interpreters receive from God & by what they're prepared to accept) -- from how all that applies to present circumstances.

The world of 1st Century Judea differs from our present condition more significantly than we're prepared to recognize, and resembles it more significantly than we're prepared to recognize.

They didn't make the distinction we make between "religion" and "politics"; if we could have explained our distinction they wouldn't have considered it important. We make such a distinction -- but that distinction may be a great deal less important than we imagine.

We're inevitably engaged in political interaction, on a small scale or a larger one; and that's part of what we're together here to do. In what spirit, in what ways?

Comment by James C Schultz on 1st mo. 7, 2017 at 12:28pm

Determining what Jesus meant in 1st century Judea can be determined by asking the Holy Spirit.  We can't determine it from a book by an expert.  It's going to be different for each of us because of our life's circumstances and probably different for anyone of us from age to age.  That's why it's a "living" book and George Fox is attributed to having said it's open to continuing revelation, although I know that "continuing revelation" is defined differently by many.

Comment by Kirby Urner on 1st mo. 7, 2017 at 1:40pm

Here's what I suggest Forrest:  that you laugh behind your back at how I'm a quisling for these people not on QuakerQuaker already moving in lockstep in directions I seem to suggest.  Your job is not to talk me out of anything, but to draw attention to how dangerous I am, or if not me, my people.

I'm like an ambassador from a group waaay more annoying and obnoxious than you find me to be, and you're actually glad of this opportunity to go on record about how what I'm thinking is a bad idea.  It'll be fun.

Because yes, geeks around the world who have never heard of Quakers and will never read comments here, wake up every day, get dressed and sit down with coffee to hack on their blockchain voting machine whatevers, or their bitcoin pyramid scheme. They don't know about Forrest and all the reading he's done. Nor am I here to run back and tell them.

Me?  I have 0.000000 bitcoin and lost the app with my only wallet when I changed cell phones, can't find my security pass phrase.  That's how a lot of bitcoin leaks out.  Imagine some follow venturer with lots of money reads all my stuff, figures out I'm effective in ways they like, and anonymously donates a whole lotta bitcoin to my electronic coin purse. 

I'd never know, as it stands today. The bitcoin (worth about $700 lets say) is lost.  Yet there's to be a finite amount of it, the ultimate amount already preset. Tapering off will occur, is occurring. Have you done a lot of reading about bitcoin?  I have, and watched Youtubes.  I've studied hard in my life, and traveled. Why not use that to your advantage?  Why does it matter if you think God would like bitcoin or not when it's just a fact, like monkeys and parrots?  Since when did Creation give a fig for what humans think?

All that's just fact, about the geeks doing blockchain voting, like glaciers melting (or advancing in other ages).  The inevitability quotient is high. Just type blockchain voting into Google and get like 260,000 results.  That's not because it's Kirby Planet.

As Quakers, we should be used to people marching in directions we think God does not command.  Mortal fools with heads full of tangled neurons don't listen to Spirit and end up plunging us into violence eon after eon.  As Quakers, we're countering that violence, always seeking to uproot causes of war before the programmed-for-war tuned-out robots discover them.

I'm suggesting you use that fact to console yourself as you get distressing news from me, the Ambassador, about what Geek World is cooking up. Lets make the most of it.  It'd be like Alex Jones getting to interview Sorros or whatever Supreme Globalist he thinks the Nationalists need to be fighting, Nationalism being a religion people take far more seriously than all that freaky-fringe Jesus stuff (just kidding, I'm a Quaker OK, don't spill my drink just because I'm a Subgenius also).

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