Anti-Slavery, Chris Hitchens´ Fallacy, Thomas Paine, and the Quaker Friend Christians

Another Great Debate video came to my attention recently, this one in Mexico between the late C Hitchens, S Harris, D Dennett, with an agnostic in the middle versus Dinesh D´Souza, a Jewish Rabbi, and a neo-Western Muslim guy. It was quite a verbal melee. At one point, D´Souza asserted in relation to the subject of slavery, that it was Quaker Christians who had led a broader effort to end slavery historically, a point I´ve made frequently around here. C Hitchens then responded that Thomas Paine had made an early important effort.

It was clear that Hitchens´ last ditch attempt at contradiction by trying to oppose Paine to Dinesh´s Quaker reference reflected his own stubborn unwillingness to compromise with the fact. What he did was cite an example of an anti-institutionalist and anti-doctrinalist Paine who was in fact a theist. As for Paine´s anti-slavery action, he wrote an article in Philadelphia in 1775, the same year as the Quakers founded an Anti-Slavery Association in the same city. Meanwhile, it turns out that Paine´s father was in fact a Quaker. For someone like Hitchens and other ideological atheists, their "lack of belief in God" needs to be analyzed in relation to their psychosocial and cultural attitudes and the nature of Christian integrity, hypocrisy, and psychosocial and cultural complexity, and what actually can be called those elements´ physico-energetic inertia, or putting it all together, their psychocultural inertia. However, for Paine, that only needs to be done in terms of Jesus, not theism.

Paine didn´t swing in from any atheist haven, as Western ideological atheists also never have and don´t. Paine was the son of a Quaker father and an Anglican mother, and in his book The Age of Reason, he was imprisoned during the French Revolution when he wrote. He rejected institutional church creeds and layering upon Jesus of Nazareth, and affirmed only the belief of "one God," that God´s moral virtue, and that "his own mind is his own church."

Well, Paine´s efforts and intents were clear. His sense of his own psychocultural continuity, however, was lacking. His father had been a Quaker, and their high integrity and highly spiritual denomination was a genuine Christian phenomenon, and part of a resurgent high integrity Christian phenomenon extending from the Apostles to St. Francis of Assisi and Martin Luther. Meanwhile, George Fox was the founder of the Quaker Friends. He was born in a Puritan village, the son of a wealthy weaver and merchant and churchwarden. His formal education was limited. By eleven years old, Fox wrote, he had been "taught how to walk to be kept pure" and "to act faithfully in two ways, viz. inwardly to God and outwardly to man" as JL Nickalls and RM Jones help make clear. He was apprenticed to a shoemaker and animal farmer. He was recognized for his valuing of simplicity. By age 19, he recognized the abuse of alcohol by "professors," the term for followers of the standard religion. In prayer one night after leaving two acquaintances who he had been drinking with, he heard an inner voice telling him, "Thou seest how young people go together into vanity, and old people into the earth; thou must forsake all, young and old, keep out of all, and be as a stranger unto all." Impelled by his inner voice, Fox left his hometown heading towards London in 1643 during the English Civil War. In his encounters, he sought conversation with Anglican clergy, then English Dissenters in the proliferating sects under Puritanism. One clergyman encouraged him to use tobacco, and one Puritan group rejected him because he believed women have souls.

His inner voice then advised him, "There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition"; and when I heard it my heart did leap for joy. Then the Lord let me see why there was none upon the earth that could speak to my condition, namely, that I might give Him all the glory; for all are concluded under sin, and shut up in unbelief as I had been, that Jesus Christ might have the pre-eminence who enlightens, and gives grace, and faith, and power. Thus when God doth work, who shall let (i.e. prevent) it? And this I knew experimentally."

In continuing prayer and meditation, he came to an inner understanding of standard Christian beliefs, which included, as per Ingle and Fox in Nikalls: 1) Rituals can be ignored without harm if a person experiences a true spiritual conversion. 2) The qualification for ministry is given by the Holy Spirit, not ecclesiastical study. Women and children can both qualify. 3) God "dwelleth in the hearts of his obedient people": religious experience is not confined to a church building. 4) Though Fox used the Bible to support his views, Fox reasoned that, because God was within the faithful, believers could follow their own inner guide rather than rely on a strict reading of Scripture or the word of clerics.

In 1647, Fox began to preach publicly. There are accounts of healing in his, and perhaps others, ministry. He also practiced his integrity in social justice, famously refusing to bow to aristocrats and also protesting in situations like a woman thief condemned to death. The 1787 founding of the British Anti-Slavery Society happened after the US association, but both became ecumenical with members from other Christian denominations. Ben Franklin was involved in the US, for example, as was the daughter of a Quaker father Susan B Anthony, while Thomas Clarkson, a dissident Anglican, was an especially active member of the UK group. The African born Olaudah Equiano was at least one who could participate and promote the dignity of his own African roots in an integrated manner.

In the interest of appreciating the larger context of the spirit of anti-slavery activism by the pioneering Quaker NGOs, religious toleration and interfaith organizing are worth noting. Religious toleration were values promoted by Hugo Grotius and John Locke, who strongly influenced Thomas Jefferson´s leadership with the US Founding Fathers in establishing the Freedom of Religion, the separation of Church and State, and secular education. Secularism´s original intent was to prevent religious conflict, not promote anti-religious ideologies.

It is worth noting that the 1893 World Parliament of Religion was inspired by the Chicago World Columbian Exposition, and the efforts of Swedenborgian layman Charles C Bonney. It was revived in 1993. A UK Quaker and a German Lutheran founded the NGO nonprofit the Fellowship of Reconciliation in 1914 at the beginning of WWI. It has remained firmly Christian in its principles, but has involved interfaith members. AP Randolph, the son of an African American minister, became an important labor leader around that time. FD Roosevelt was a high integrity Christian theist called a "traitor to his class" and who envisioned the United Nations, and whose wife Eleanor had participated in the Settlement House movement and led the formulation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, including the Freedom of Religion. That has made it possible for people like Africa´s Malidoma Some to overcome hypocritical Christian oppression and regain his indigenous spirituality. Finally, the NGO nonprofit Religions for Peace recognizes organizing efforts in 1961, which resulted in the 1970 founding of the group.

Taken all together, the late Hitchens´ reference to Thomas Paine in an apparent attempt to counter Quaker Christianity´s pioneering and exceptional leadership in ending slavery in the British Empire was misleading and fallacious. Paine himself was opposed to organized religion, but was himself a committed theist. His views maintained significant continuity with the Quakerism of his father.

How does this situation and review of things relate to or inspire your own thinking about spirituality, Christianity, atheism, or any related matters?

link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAmdbBWluYE