Hello, Frank Hamiton!

Well, Quakers are human. And like all humans, they have foibles. And when humans get together, those foibles are often magnified.

Different Meetings, even when the houses are only blocks apart in the same city, can be as different as night and day, in terms of their Faith and Practices. What one group will think of as "undue distinction," another group will think of as "overdue distinction." ;-)

There are also different traditions in Quakerism. I don't know about the Society of Friends in Britain (maybe someone here can enlighten me), but in America, the Society went through a big split in the early 19th century over a disagreement about the relative importance of the Scripture, and how much authority the elders should have. Eventually (in 1955), the Society officially came back together into one religous body -- at least officially. But the disagreements are still there, under the surface.

And I've noticed, through watching that Quaker community (that I linked to in the first post of this thread), that old split seems to be opening up again. There are meetings that gladly welcome Buddhists, Neo-Pagans, and even atheists into their circle. And, thanks to the Internet, these hybrid Quakers able to organize into formal (if small) groups. At the same time, there seems to be a growing number of Evangelical Quakers, who take Scripture as final authority, and believe that the Inner Christ comes only from the historical, died-and-arisen Christ of the New Testament.

So as hard as it is to generalize about Christians in general, it's exponentially harder to generalize about Quakers.

Don't judge the whole by the few.

(that's more or less a good rule to live by for everything, imnsho).