Raemon’s advice (below) guided me to click upon a small, gray “\vdots” icon at upper right; this allowed me to edit the markup and complete the essay (however, no way to include newlines in BibTeX reference-entries ever was evident to me; also the text-sizing options were not orthogonal to the other formatting options, and hence worked inconsistently).
For which help, thank you Raemon! :)
Some LW readers will be familiar with historian Sanford L. Segal’s Mathematicians under the Nazis (2014).
Segal is himself a Quaker, and his essay “Why I am not a Christian” (Friends Journal, 2010, see reference below) addresses several of the concerns raised by the OP. E.g.
Christianity is focused on a presumed life after death. One can be a good person in the usual concept of treating fellow human beings with respect and honesty, and not prejudging them.
But in Christianity the focus is on the individual’s future salvation, whereas in Judaism and traditional Islam the focus is on the community. For Christianity, being good is the price of the reward in heaven. In Judaism, one is good because it is the right thing to do. My sort of Quakerism deals with our present life, such as it is, here on Earth.
Some divisions of Christianity emphasize the role of good works, but even these are focused on an afterlife. Christianity, from its beginnings, was not focused on the “here and now,” but instead on what would come in the hereafter. This is not my focus, and it is why I am not a Christian.
As further reading, Segal’s observations on the shared foundations of Quakerism and Spinozism assume a background familiarity with the historical material in (for example) Popkin’s survey “Spinoza’s earliest philosophical years: 1655-61” (Studia Spinozana, 1988, see reference below), and also Laura Rediehs’ survey “Candlestick mysteries” (Quaker Studies, 2014, see reference below).
In turn, Rediehs’ titular Candlestick is a reference to “The light upon the candlestick” (1663, text here); an essay that is celebrated (among Friends) as a cogent manifesto of Quaker/Spinozist/Collegiant universalist principles.
These readings may therefore be of interest to LW readers of a Spinozist inclination—Spinozism being historically not all that different from Quakerism (as the above references discuss).
For still-more-heretical Quaker/Spinozist/Collegiant ideas—heretical from a rationalist/LW perspective, at any rate—Marcelo Abadi’s “Spinoza in Borges’ looking-glass” (Studia Spinozana, 1989, see reference below) is recommended:
The Vienna Circle held metaphysics to be a branch of fantastical literature. Borges shared this view, referring ironically but also appreciatively to metaphysics and enumerating among the masters of the genre authors such as Plato, Leibniz, Kant...and Spinoza, whose invention of an infinite substance with infinite attributes he considered a superb fiction.
Borges, admitting that he appraised philosophical ideas according to their aesthetic value or inasmuch as their content were singular or marvellous, never led his readers to expect a style of rigorous demonstration or sustained coherence, which is not to be found in his writings.
Nevertheless, one should not hasten to conclude that Borges was indifferent to truth; he felt there is ultimately a close solidarity between beauty, truth and good. And if he did express deep-rooted scepticism, it was scepticism that spurred his vigilant quest.
Friendly Heresies In what Quaker/Spinozist/Collegiant/Borgesian senses can the Lesser Wrong canon be regarded, consistently and rationally, as “a branch of fantastical literature”?
That is a cognitive perspective—for rationalists, a fundamentally heretical perspective, it must be stipulated—that the above Quaker/Spinozist/Collegiant/Borges writings encourage readers to consider.
Summary The Friends’ community is more cognitively diverse, more accommodating of heretical views, and more dynamically adaptive to ongoing advances in science, medicine, and society, than the OP might lead LW readers to appreciate.
---
@article{cite-key, Author = {Richard H. Popkin}, Journal = {Studia Spinozana}, Pages = {37--55}, Title = {Spinoza's earliest philosophical years, 1655-61}, Volume = {4}, Year = {1988}}@article{cite-key, Author = {Sanford L. Segal}, Journal = {Friends Journal}, Month = {February}, Pages = {15}, Title = {Why I am not a Christian}, Year = {2010}}@article{cite-key, Author = {Laura Rediehs}, Journal = {Quaker Studies}, Number = {2}, Pages = {151-169}, Title = {Candlestick Mysteries}, Volume = {18}, Year = {2014}}@article{cite-key, Author = {Marcelo Abadi}, Journal = {Studia Spinozana}, Pages = {29--42}, Title = {Spinoza in Borges' looking-glass}, Volume = {5}, Year = {1989}}
Within Quaker communities, the “social organization” that encourages Friends to “digest and use” their principles is grounded in a tradition of equibalance between “faith and practice”.
This tradition of equibalanced faith and practice is so strong that many Quaker congregations (re)write an explicit statement of their own community’s faith and practice at 10-to-20-year intervals; a web-search for “Quaker Faith and Practice” will find dozens of examples.
At the individual level, the consequences of the tradition of faith and practice equibalance are, broadly, as follows.
Suppose that an individual Friend’s faithful views and practices are broadly consonant with the traditional values that are associated to the Friendly mnemonic “SPICES”
S—Simplicity
P—Peace
I—Integrity
C—Community
E—Equality
S—Stewardship (optional)
Yet suppose too, that an individual Friend’s views and practices, in some sense or another, extend beyond traditional Quaker SPICE-values and SPICE-practices.
In this eventuality—which is so exceedingly common among Friends as to be nearly universal—individual Friends are expected to do nothing more, and nothing less, than to practice their own SPICE-values quietly, faithfully, and effectively.
Over time-spans of years and decades, individual Friends whose living faith and practice are assessed by their local Quaker community to be effectively SPICE-y come to be regarded—informally, without external reward, and solely by their local community—as “weighty” Quakers.
It is the faithful views and effective practices of individual weighty Quakers that chiefly inform each new “Faith and Practice” that is written by individual Quaker communities. And in turn, each community’s “Faith and Practice” is read by other Friendly communities, and influences them (or not) in proportion to their assessed SPICE-y weight.
By this individually-grounded and feedback-corrected mechanism of social evolution, the aggregate faith(s) and practice(s) of global Quakerism are stable on time-scales of years, moderately adaptive on timescales of decades, and transformationally adaptive on timescales of centuries.
As an in-depth account of this process, there is no better summary (known to me) than Howard H. Brinton’s Friends for 300 Years (1952), a history that was recently updated to Friends for 350 Years (2002) … and of course, younger Quakers look forward with reasonable confidence to reading Friends for 400 Years on-or-about the year 2052. :)
Needless to say, LW readers who foresee (e.g.) an AI Singularity as imminent on time-scales of decades, will assess the Quaker practice of guiding social evolution solely via local assessment of Friendly individual faiths and sustained effective practices, as being impracticably slow and (perhaps) irrationally informal.