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! :)
[the formatting of this comment has been amended, and two citations added, thanks to help from reader “raemon” (see below)]
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.
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:
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.
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