[Buddha-l] Dissent or Service?

[curt]

Richard Hayes wrote:
> On Friday 06 October 2006 02:11, Joy Vriens wrote:
>
>   
>> I expect that since Quakers were present right from the founding of
>> America, when everything still needed to be built, together with other
>> Christian sanghas that left the European continent for similar reasons,
>> there weren't any autochtones to befriend first, there simply was a
>> promised land to be implemented.
>>     
>
> It's not clear to me what you are expecting.  Quakers were among those who 
> opposed war with the native peoples who got to the Americas  before the 
> Europeans. John Woolman and other Quakers made attempts to befriend the 
> native Americans and to discourage other Christians from feeling justified in 
> taking their ands away from them. 
>
>
>   
And yet how did the Quakers think that the state of Pennsylvania came to 
be inhabited by white people? That is, if not by conquering and 
exterminating the people who had been there previously? This is far more 
than a rhetorical jab - it goes to the point of whether or not Quakers 
should be seen as somehow superior to other European Christians - or if 
they are simply more naive or, if possible, more hypocritical.

- Curt