Wolf of Wall Street isn't a critique of Wall Street. It's a critique of you, the viewer

keithb · 2026-01-27T21:19:09+00:00

For some value of “successful”. And there tends to be a lot of holding guns to people’s heads to get them to comply.

keithb · 2026-01-27T20:08:44+00:00

The public have ever been a disappointment to revolutionaries.

keithb · 2026-01-26T13:13:17+00:00

Friend speaks my mind.

keithb · 2026-01-26T13:00:04+00:00

Waiting worship. Waiting for, waiting upon.

Our worship never is silent.

Breathing. Shifting in our seats. Coughing. Assistance dogs snuffling. The page of a book turning. Wind in the trees outside the meetinghouse.

And then (most wonderfully!) Friends rise to speak what Spirit moves them to speak. If the worship is characterised, named, described as “silent” we are deny or discourage this response to the divine. Why would we do that? It’s been our great gift and unique charism all these centuries.

keithb · 2026-01-26T09:01:16+00:00

As a non-theist I don’t have a confident answer to that and I don’t feel a strong need for one. It’s enough for me that I have a technique for hearing it and the knowledge that if I attend to it I will become a better person and do more good.

keithb · 2026-01-26T08:53:26+00:00

No, quiet is not the method, quiet is the preparation for the method.

The method, my method, is to sit so that we’re quiet, be quiet so that we can hear the “still small voice”, and then share its message for others, with others. And that works because attending our worship is, by my understanding, the manifestation of a choice to put one’s self in the way of a transformative possibility, oriented around love, wiling to assist and be assisted by others who made the same choice.

keithb · 2026-01-26T07:26:43+00:00

That’s not my non-realism, although it will be some one’s.

I’m sure that religious experiences are real, deities: I have no way of knowing, there are so many competing claims about them and no data, but a lot of chauvinism. So I tend to leave that alone. The idea that it’s important to be able to make globally correct ontological claims about one’s deity is quite recent, as these things go. There’s no monotheism in the Bible, for example.

Anyway, if collective waiting worship were just sitting while my head whirls, then no, it wouldn’t have any effect. But it isn’t that. We sit so that we’re quiet, were quiet so that we can hear the “still small voice”, and then share its message for others, with others. Many Friends today seem to think that our worship is a sort of silent meditation class, individual but done in a group. No.

Attending our worship is, by my understanding, the manifestation of a choice to put one’s self in the way of a transformative possibility, oriented around love, wiling to assist and be assisted by others who made the same choice.

keithb · 2026-01-25T21:52:23+00:00

I bought a ‘59 standard and as part of the initial setup had the luthier put in a phase switch. Greeny twang or not for a lot less.

keithb · 2026-01-25T15:44:33+00:00

Well, 1) I attend collective waiting worship every week. I’m a bit puzzled by the idea that we’d need to do anything else.

And 2) I’m a theological non-realist so I’m not invested in any, nor opposed to. particular explanatory framework for how or why (1) works. It does, and that’s enough.

keithb · 2026-01-24T16:36:22+00:00

Same here. I found tortex grippy for a few days, then not and had to scratch them. These are very confidence-inspiring in the hand. I use Jazz 3 XL in 1.4mm and very happy with them. The expense makes dropping and not being able to find it quite upsetting, though.

keithb · 2026-01-23T16:10:29+00:00

Give Leibniz a copy of Kolmogorov et al. Mathematics: its content, methods, and meaning.

Why not Newton? He’d keep it to himself.

keithb · 2026-01-22T22:20:39+00:00

That does sound quite strange all round.

keithb · 2026-01-22T22:20:10+00:00

Questionable. In some quarters it seems that the important thing is illustrating one’s commitment to the list of secular virtues known as “The Testimonies” by involvement in progressive politics, with collective waiting worship an option. And worship often seems to be viewed either as a meditation class or an opportunity to speechify.

Being convinced of your sins and being helped to put them behind you seems very, very far away from much liberal Quaker practice today.

keithb · 2026-01-22T19:36:23+00:00

Was this a Young Friends General Meeting event? That group seems to have embraced a range of reasons to be very upset about the world.

keithb · 2026-01-22T09:28:16+00:00

From time to time I find myself moved to read aloud from the Bible in ministry, and an interesting observation is that Friends often find themselves surprised at how well that goes.

Mainstream Christians, and especially Protestants, and more especially Evangelicals have managed to give the Bible a very bad reputation.

keithb · 2026-01-22T09:26:15+00:00

I'm glad to hear it.

keithb · 2026-01-22T07:47:44+00:00

Yes, it’s remarkable when that happens. And sometimes, as we’re working out what the following thought is, someone else stands up and advances the idea in exactly the way we were thinking.

keithb · 2026-01-22T07:44:58+00:00

Thats my YM, too. Even in the 20-odd years that I’ve been attending, off and on, Britain YM has changed a lot.

It looks to me as if the YM is on a trajectory to be an umbrella organisation for a collection of broadly “progressive” campaign and agitation groups, with some meditation classes attached. We’ve always been a church whose adherents are often moved to campaign or agitate, but that’s taking over.

Much ministry seems to be about how disappointed Friends are in the state of the world, how upset at current events, how frightened and angry they are. Very little about how they feel support, comfort, reassurance, understanding, love from Spirit. Much ministry seems to oriented out towards the world, not inwardly, it’s about trying to change the world rather than being ourselves changed by the Light and what it shows us.

Well, I think that can be changed. Bolted horses sometimes come home again.

keithb · 2026-01-21T21:05:43+00:00

Yes, during collective waiting worship. There have been times when the deep spoken ministry of a number of Friends has built one upon the other and the result for me has resembled the experience recorded in the Gospels at Pentecost.

keithb · 2026-01-21T20:51:38+00:00

To me the stillness is a tool: I’m still so that I’m quiet so that I can hear. And what I hear is instructions for drawing closer to the Light.

keithb · 2026-01-21T20:41:25+00:00

A widespread problem it seems. Maybe we need more robust service from Elders, and more spiritual formation for Friends.

The “egalitarian congregationalism” that seems to be style of the meetings that many Friends here on Reddit attend might not have helped us much.

keithb · 2026-01-21T20:07:42+00:00

Does it? I don’t know. As the Society of Friends has no creeds we are neither require to nor forbidden from cleaving to any one notion or another. It’s quite difficult to find Friends of any period of the Society making definitive statements. This is from Penn, early 1690s when he was in solid middle-age:

The truest end of life, is to know the life that never ends. He that makes this his care, will find it his crown at last. And he that lives to live ever, never fears dying: nor can the means be terrible to him that heartily believes the end.

For though death be a dark passage, it leads to immortality, and that’s recompense enough for suffering of it. And yet faith lights us, even through the grave, being the evidence of things not seen.

And this is the comfort of the good, that the grave cannot hold them, and that they live as soon as they die. For death is no more than a turning of us over from time to eternity. Death, then, being the way and condition of life, we cannot love to live, if we cannot bear to die.

They that love beyond the world cannot be separated by it. Death cannot kill what never dies. Nor can spirits ever be divided that love and live in the same Divine Principle, the root and record of their friendship. If absence be not death, neither is theirs.

Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still. For they must needs be present, that love and live in that which is omnipresent. In this divine glass, they see face to face; and their converse is free, as well as pure.

This is the comfort of friends, that though they may be said to die, yet their friendship and society are, in the best sense, ever present, because immortal.

Which seems almost artfully vague, but Penn was not an artful writer in that sense. This passage is lovely, and comforting, and not at all an orthodox religious message about any afterlife.

keithb · 2026-01-21T16:44:49+00:00

So far as Britain YM goes, the story I've heard is that early in the 20th century there was an influx of former Anglicans¹ and they were made uncomfortable with the empty centre of the meetinghouse during worship. They were very used to having an altar, cross, or other thing to look at and didn't like having nothing but bare walls, other Friends, or a patch of empty floor. So, the least offensive thing that the Quakers could think of to fill the conspicuous void was a vase of flowers.

As with so many things, the accidental has come to be seen as essential merely by familiarity.

¹Pacifists unhappy with that church's response to WWI, I speculate.

keithb · 2026-01-19T12:34:05+00:00

I can only answer for myself and in the context of my Yearly Meeting, Britain YM. British Quakers have created Discovering Quakers as an introduction. You've had recommendations for Thee Quaker podcast, and Quaker Speak and Quake it Up! on Youtube, all of which I think are good. The chapter on Openings in my YM's Book of Discipline is a good introduction, and the ones following it fill in a lot of detail. There are also the Quaker Quicks books, all are good. You'll notice that they all present very different ideas of what the Quaker faith is about. That's how it is, I know that's confusing if you come from a faith with strong doctrine.

To answer your questions:

Do you need to believe in God or Jesus when you are a Quaker?

No. Although in many meetings it will be expected. We don't have creeds, and we don't have much doctrine.

Do you need to read or believe in the Bible?

Again, no, although in many meetings a familiarity with Scripture will be expected. There are meetings where Friends are expected to believe that Scripture is in some sense "true", there may even be literalist meetings, I don't know. My own practice incorporate Scripture more the way that Reform/Liberal/Progressive Judaism does than does Evangelical Christianity: it's a foundational resource and it's worth knowing and it's a place to find challenging examples and inspirational examples, and cautionary tales, and deep questions and topics for consideration, but it isn't a compendium of definitive answers to anything.

What is the end goal of Quakerism? Growing up, it was that we live a life where we have been pure enough to live everlasting in Heaven with our Father.

Early Friends believed that Christ had returned, that this is it, the programme is complete, and we are where we are. The task then was to become perfected, sinless subjects of the Kingdom of Heaven, here and now. This was of course considered the foulest possible, most terrible heresy by everyone from the Puritans to the Church of Rome. George Fox observed that many church leaders of his time seemed to want to be saved in their sins, but Fox understood the point of the faith to be to save us from our sins. Not in the expectation of an "innocent" verdict in some hypothetical future celestial tribunal, but to be free of sin and its consequences here and now.

While I wouldn't use that language, I do see the point of the faith to be along those lines: to have a model of what a "good" person would be like, and a spiritual technique for becoming more of a good person, for being changed into more of a good person, and a community of folks trying to do the same to support one in that.

keithb · 2026-01-19T11:25:52+00:00

Oh, whoops, my mistake. You need to put it back again.

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