[ultimafan]

The interesting (to me) part about such a philosophy is that it seems like it can only really survive and prosper within a society where someone else is willing to pick up the burden of doing the killing for you.

It seems like in nature or on its own such a mindset would be akin to being in a death cult- you're just going to get rolled over by someone else and your "tribe" won't be around long enough to have this belief "reproduce" and be passed on.

But if you live in the midst of a society full of other people who are willing to kill or be killed to protect those in it beliefs like that can grow and gain followers without any risk of external challenge putting their faith to the test.

Reading my comment I realize it may sound a little bit inflammatory or perhaps bloodthirsty- that's not my intention, I don't know how to word it better. Just a passing thought on this topic

[castillar76]

Note that Quakers never rejected the possibility of being killed for their beliefs, just the choice of killing others for them. Pacifism does not equate to passivism, after all: it simply means that they reject the notion of visiting violence on others.

It's also important to note that pacifism has been a divisive issue for Quakers from very early times. The play 'Sword of Peace' that's performed throughout the year in Snow Camp, NC, is about Meetings in the US struggling with the question of pacifism vs. the desire to aid their nascent country during the American Revolution. It was a debate for Friends during the US Civil War, both World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, and onwards – one of the tenets of Quakerism is the need to wrestle with those issues by listening to the 'still small voice within' rather than blindly accepting the dictates of others. For many Friends, the threat posed by British colonial rule, the Confederacy, or Nazi Germany simply outweighed the demands of their conscience not to bear arms.

Friends often refer to the anecdote of William Penn asking George Fox (one of the founders of Quakerism) whether Penn should stop wearing his sword because he was now a Quaker. Fox told him, 'wear thy sword as long as thee is able' — meaning he should give it up because his conscience dictated it, not because he was a Quaker.

[ultimafan]

Thanks for the background! I am admittedly not very familiar with Quakers or their history. The clarification in the first part of your post helps with the context, I'll agree it's an entirely different story if it's a moral that is strived for but not strictly enforced (follow this or you're not one of us)

[Barrin92]

>your "tribe" won't be around long enough to have this belief "reproduce" and be passed on.

This is an atheistic understanding of the world that a Quaker obviously wouldn't share. Self-sacrifice aren't genes or memes your tribe reproduces, they're divine truths, the logos of the world so to speak that everyone will eventually be drawn into (represented by Christ as a person).

You can't destroy self-sacrifice any more than you can kill beauty or empathy or gravity. You can kill every good person, but not goodness ultimately. The entire starting point of the faith is Jesus dying on the cross, which in early Rome he was mocked for[1] according to exactly this logic "what, you worship a guy who just died on a cross, how will that religion continue to exist?"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexamenos_graffito

[ultimafan]

It is not a comment on the religious/philosophical validity of the belief as I initially understood it.

Just that for a specific belief to survive, some number of members need to survive to pass it on to the next generation, which if their beliefs bar them from killing or violence requires them to rely on people who aren't.

I don't think this comparison to early/mainline Christianity is entirely fair. It was murder, not "just" killing that was prohibited by their values.

[nine_k]

Quakerism is still a form of Christian faith. And for a Christian the life on Earth is but a small episode of existence. The point is to obtain the life eternal, the salvation. To suffer and be put to death for the refusal to reject the principles of the faith, aka martyrdom, is a known way to practically guarantee a salvation.

Of course, from a game-theoretic perspective, such ideas can only persist if someone else protects the pacifists from being killed, likely by use of lethal force. In this situation the only morally acceptable choice for the pacifists is to not be afraid of death, and not demand somebody to do the dirty work for them. Which is what we see.

[krapp]

>The interesting (to me) part about such a philosophy is that it seems like it can only really survive and prosper within a society where someone else is willing to pick up the burden of doing the killing for you.

This seems to assume the "the burden of killing" is not only necessary but unavoidable, as if violence were a constant which should be equitably distributed amongst everyone. If so, I would presume the Quakers would disagree, and would be perfectly satisfied if no one bothered killing at all.

And historically speaking not a lot of people have been willing to kill to protect pacifists like the Quakers who have little capital, social clout or political power. So it isn't much of a burden to begin with.

[ultimafan]

It's not a condemnation of the morals within their belief system, and not a demand that everyone should participate equally in (potential) violence that comes along with protecting a community/country.

Just an observation that at any given point in human history such a philosophy could only survive long enough to be passed generation to generation if its members offloaded the burden of having to make that moral choice onto someone else ie police or military. I don't think such a belief could have ever developed and survived in a vacuum.

Every group of humans with surviving beliefs in known history have had some subgroup of (or been a subgroup of) other humans willing to resort to violence to protect the whole.