Speaker 2: Well we look at this other book which I also had some copies of, Practical Christianity which has chapters on how to live a practical Christian way and there is one on, you know, with respect to government, with respect to education, with respect to society and with respect to yourself and there is all kinds of things about how you treat your body, about health and personal morality. A lot of stuff about sex and marriage and proper relations between intimate partners, so it is a complete encompassing way of life, that embraces everything from how you treat your own body, all the way to how governments are working on it.

Speaker 3: We had a brief discussion yesterday about some instances of non resistant violence and it was more on principles and we talked for example about Seattle, where the issue is violence against property as opposed to violence against persons, is that a distinction that Ballou would draw?

Speaker 2: You know, that is an interesting question but I am not aware at any place in this where it explicitly mentions violence against a manner of offense.

Speaker 3: Well I am just flashing on the property relation.

Speaker 2: No, I think it’s a great question, I would really have to research it to think what would Aiden do with the case..

Speaker 3: He says do not confront evil with evil, so if you were destroying somebody’s property, that was an evil act, that might fall under the…

Speaker 4: I mean where it would be different would be if you said “this is not property” so for example, slavery, slaves, a slave is not a property, therefore if you are helping a slave escape, you would be accused of destroying or stealing a property. Perhaps, that, you know, that is one of the reasons it was an illegal act. But what if it is immoral if you propagate something that is immoral.

Speaker 3: Go to jail.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Speaker 3: You would still have to be careful not to confront evil with evil.

Speaker 2: Great! But he does talk about personal injury, I do not count personal injury and I do know that destruction of property or a separation of property from those who think they own it would come under the heading of personal injury. I am not sure you would oppose that under all circumstances.

Speaker 4: Actually Paul told me to ask that question, I was going to ask, but I’ll just say that I think that this person versus property is really germane to our discussion, and I hope that it comes back again and again, I am particularly understand the work of radical Catholics, who are into like breaking into a nuclearinstallations and hammering on missile silos with hammers and iron bars with their own blood over things and stuff like that . And they also have at the root of their idiology this idea that the definition of evil is starting to believe that it is okay for one per…

Speaker 1: They were influenced by a physical force exerted by one human being upon another. The legitimate effect of which is to destroy or impair life, to destroy or impair the physical faculties, to destroy or impair the intellectual faculties, or to destroy or impair the absolute welfare, all things considered, of the person on whom such influence or force is exerted. So I really think that it leaves open the question of injuries directed at non (4:49)

Speaker 3: At the same time that was certainly not something since it was something not directly addressed. I think when you are confronted with a society that, like a government that does evil and stuff, I don’t think that a first idea was to go out and find forth whatever and break into the arsenal and destroy the things. It was their form of safely led violence against the society, was to refrain from participating, to not support, to withdraw your support from the society in which you live, that operates through violence, so they would not participate in the judicial system and they would not vote, they would not support the government. Basically it is almost the form of secession. They are forming Hopedale a little country within a country. You know, nowadays you do not find those kind of things going on in the liberal sector, but you see what we might think of as very right-winged kind of succession groups within this country, who are highly armed too and they are quite the opposite of Hopedale in that respect, but they are sort of seceding from the country, and when the country gets a chance, there is brutal repression against those groups admittedly with potentially violent groups. One wonders what Hopedale will do nowadays. You know, if you said okay, you know we are own group and we are just not going to have anything to do with those people.

Speaker 1: I want to say only my own comment about these communes. Tennessee, they published, well between…..

Speaker 2: They are left alone as one who is very small, an example from that nineteenth century of what might have happened if the Practical Christian Republic that Adin Ballou had planned, had actually grown to be more than just this one little , basically, commune of about two hundred people, is the example of the Mormons, who were doing that very thing, forming a kind of state within a state. That was not considered acceptable.

Speaker 3: And here it led to war too didn’t it ?

Speaker 2: Yeah it did.

Speaker 4: Well, the forts that were built out there were all built with the guns aiming at the sole exit. Not to become a (07:59)

Speaker 5: Okay! Actually what I wanted to mention has something to do about the property destruction. They say that one of the, I think “confusions”, that has really hindered our movement and our time that was less confusing then, was the notion of the corporation as a person, so if you harmed a corporation, legally that is harming a person. And I think that relates to the question you were going to answer, (06:41) being able to escape the society , and there’s a way that now it has become such an enclosure , that there is I think far less opportunities for that. And so the concept that we could get outside and do something different is much more reduced. But I also want to raise the question of symbolism and struggle around how do you, called the prophetic and ancient word and I would like to say the practical, let us make this succeed in our lives, and then there is the question of how do we see that affecting the society at large and it relates also to the notions of (09:26) would also a successions in a certain sense but that may also have a notion about how that is going to transform as the above question.

Speaker 2: Yes, if Ballou definitely intended Proteon as a model and an example to be copied, that is why he documented it so extensively. He wrote books about it that he and other people from Proteon lectured towards it. In their minds there was a very big difference between what they were doing and what some of these other societies were doing where they just wanted to live privately and be left alone to practice their religion without interference. These people did want to transform the society around them not to withdraw from them.

Speaker 3: I just want a brief follow-up, there is a theory I want to check, which is that Ballou’s work was primarily influenced for Tolstoy? Is that…

Speaker 2: Yes! Ballou and Tolstoy corresponded and actually Tolstoy wired Ballou more than Ballou wired Tolstoy and Tolstoy had arranged for some of Adin Ballou’s works to be translated into Russian and was known to have identified Adin Ballou as one of the greatest, in fact, the greatest American writer close to the amazement of the American visitor.

Speaker 2: And then Tolstoy had an influence. It was much admired by Gandhi. So Gandhi created his first commune in South Africa called the Tolstoy Farm.

Speaker 3: You can find the documentation on that in Tolstoy, in the introduction to Tolstoy’s book.

Speaker 1: The kingdom of God is within.

Speaker 3: The kingdom of God is within.

Speaker 2: The first chapter of the book actually he talked about Garrison and Ballou.

Speaker 3: Yeah, in the introductory chapter and he talks a lot of Lloyd.

Speaker 5: (12:01) distinction that you made about communities that it was just as a way of mobilizing, a way to interact with. There is a small society and that is transformation and can yourself exist because I have had enough of society and I just want to withdraw and I think generally the feeling that community I was living in was kind of love and withdrawing and starting your own system living your own life but as much as you can work within the system because like they still have a big property taxes and things like this. So if that, is that okay?

Speaker 4: I think if you pay your taxes, the government will cut you a lot of smile.

Speaker 1: And these folks did do that. They believed in submitting, not participating in but submitting to the powers that be, whenever you could do so without violating your conscience. So they did pay taxes and generally submit to whatever laws were applicable to them. They did not believe in, you know, the thought that you vote or held off really beyond something like the school committee would be compromising too much. It would be making yourself, you know, voluntarily saying that I am part of this. I am a co-governing citizen of this and they did believe in that. It was kind of a fine distinction that they drew and there was an incident during the civil war in which a member of the Hopedale community paid 300 dollars to be exempted from military service and there was a lot of discussion at the time about whether they should pay it or not paid, paid or resisted. You know, the people just going to go and serve but should you pay the fee that you can do it in lieu of service and Adin Ballou later said, later in life that he felt that he made the wrong decision. They should not have paid it.

Speaker 3: So did you have one more comment?

Speaker 2: Sure. Let us go back to the comment about do not confront evil with evil and I guess that what he mean was that you mean li,e if that is one of the main matches of Adin Ballou that would be remembered today in terms writing analyses of nonviolence and nonresistance. You mean it seems that how to break the pattern about where being tensions that are not actions that we perform you know, how do you do define evil in terms of resisting perhaps you know, entities such as corporations that have been given some sense it is unjust privileges, intolerance in the society over persons and such but I got to wonder about how can racism is able to find a sense of evil or how it become very simplistic in our thinking in our churches that we tend to believe simply with the basic ideas and do not always have I mean either too complex or too simple, you know always may be like Michael Moore would say more can be in a committable sense.

Speaker 5: I think one of the things that you have tried that covers the means and ends of idea and that you were, if you were doing something bad so that something good may come that is to be evil. Okay. So I mean you cannot transform a deed, which normally which you would think of is bad like killing somebody into a good thing no matter what the nobility of the cause is. So you cannot just say okay this is too simplistic to say thou shall not kill. You got to know what circumstances made it and the ideas. You know you just do not kill. You know, and to say when you do something bad so that something good may come… who knows what may come but you have done something bad so that is. That I think is one of the arguments that you could use against trying to rationalize some act of violence or outrage against something.

Speaker 3: Do you want to take it from there?

Speaker 5: Actually I just wanted to talk a little bit about, I guess I do not want people to go away with the impression that.