Entries associated with the tag "Fundamentalism":

James F. McGrath, who teaches at Butler University in Indianapolis and blogs at Exploring Our Matrix, takes exception to the usual usage of the word "faith" to mean "belief in the absence of evidence," and goes on from there:

"When people today read the Bible in a non-literal fashion, this is not a retreat from the advances of scientific knowledge. It is rather a return to the classic way of approaching these texts. The only people who are allowing the concerns of modern science to determine the way they read the text are, ironically, the fundamentalists, who seek absolute certain scientific explanations in a text that does not offer them.

"If you are looking for inerrancy in Scriptures and won't take no for an answer, I suspect that most Christians would be grateful if you would try Islam or some tradition that at least claims to offer such a text. But please, please stop trying to make Christianity live up to your strange modernistic expectations."

Read the whole thing -- it's not long. I personally would disagree that there is such a thing as "absolute certain scientific explanations," nor would I say the available evidence justifies McGrath's claim that "the reality of which we are a part is neither simply hostile nor ultimately meaningless." But those are side issues compared to the fundamentalists' failure to understand what it is they're reading.

The indefatigable Martin Marty reports that of the 14,720 lines written in his column "Sightings" since 1999, only 7 were devoted to the late fundamentalist politico Rev. Jerry Falwell. "Accuse us not of overdoing comment on [the religious] Right," Marty wrote last week. "We resolved early on not to over-comment on over-done subjects that need no one to do any 'sighting.'"

I won't. I accuse him of not commenting enough on Falwell and his ilk. Who better than a popular mainstream Christian writer and professor to explain how Falwell's beliefs and actions contradicted many Christian tenets? Who better than one of the pre-eminent church historians of our time to explain how thoroughly Falwell's attempt to join church and state runs contrary to the insights of his own Baptist denomination (which for centuries understood that the wall between church and state was there to protect the church)? And who better to do these two jobs over and over again, as needed?

I don't make this accusation lightly. I like Marty, profiled him 21 years ago, worked with him briefly on a book-reading committee. Plus the Reader has long prided itself on a similar editorial philosophy of not overdoing already overexposed subjects.

But we've been known to repeat ourselves when the cause was serious enough. Given the damage that political fundamentalism has done to American life, culture, morality, and, yes, religion, Falwell needed to be tracked and exposed at every turn. The fact that he and Marty pray to the same god makes the task more imperative, if anything. (The bloggers at Talk to Action have seen this and are acting on it.)

Marty and his colleagues and successors are better placed than any humanist or atheist to expose the fallacies and evils perpetrated by Falwell and his colleagues and successors. But do the moderates care enough to truth-squad these renegades?

Somewhere along the way, I lost the bad habit of Newsweek without picking up the good habit of the Economist. So a hat tip to Jim Krohe, who calls attention to the Economist's alarming reportage on anti-Darwinian extremism on the march not just in the U.S., especially Kentucky, but in Russia, Turkey, the Vatican -- even Kenya, where

"there is a bitter controversy over plans to put on display the most complete skeleton of a prehistoric human being ever found, a figure known as Turkana Boy—along with a collection of fossils, some of which may be as much as 200m years old. Bishop Boniface Adoyo, an evangelical leader who claims to speak for 35 denominations and 10m believers, has denounced the proposed exhibit, asserting that: 'I did not evolve from Turkana Boy or anything like it.'

"Richard Leakey, the palaeontologist who unearthed both the skeleton and the fossils in northern Kenya, is adamant that the show must go on. 'Whether the bishop likes it or not, Turkana Boy is a distant relation of his,' Mr Leakey has insisted. Local Catholics have backed him."

As this excerpt hints and the whole article makes clear, this isn't religion vs. atheism. This is knowledge vs. militant ignorance, not to mention freedom vs. theocracy, with religious believers on both sides.

Not to get all ironic about it, but the world the militant ignorant would usher in has already been described by Matthew Arnold, although he meant to be talking about something else: a world with "neither joy, nor love, nor light,/ Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain..."

First Asma Khalid explained why she rejects the label "moderate Muslim" (at Christian Science Monitor, then at Alternet). Applied to Muslims who reject terrorism, the phrase seems to imply that "Osama bin Laden and Co. must represent the pinnacle of orthodoxy," that "suicide bombing is a religious obligation for the orthodox faithful," something that "moderates" have fallen away from.

Then Lindsay Beyerstein of Majikthise chimes in with the more general point that claims of "moderation" and "orthodoxy" can't be taken at face value in any situation. Why should UCC members be called "moderate Christians," as if they were watered-down alumni of Moody Bible Institute? "Claims of fundamentalism or orthodoxy are positioning statements for brands. We often treat claims of religious orthodoxy as if they were statements of fact rather than rhetorical devices. Positioning your doctrine as the orthodoxy is a way to marginalize your competition. If we uncritically allow the most reactionary sects to claim the mantle of orthodoxy, we do the work of fundamentalists for them."

Khalid says, too simply, that "True orthodoxy is simply the attempt to adhere piously to a religion's tenets." But it is rarely obvious what those tenets are, or, more precisely, which ones are considered operative at any given time. I can't say whether Khalid or Osama is the more accurate interpreter of Islam, but I do know that both warmongers and pacifists believe they're following Jesus.

In normal usage, "orthodox" pretty much signals "conservative" or "fundamentalist." Anyone willing to apply that word to themselves probably doesn't believe what many more liberal Christians do, that their religion's tenets evolve over time and will continue to do so. For those folks there is neither orthodox nor unorthodox, but simply more or less evolved. (Correct me at will.)

It would be nice to think that Osama and Pat Robertson were unorthodox representatives of their faiths, but I don't think it can be assumed. It has to be checked out. The mantle of orthodoxy is not necessarily the property of those whose opinions we agree with.

Hemant Mehta, the "friendly atheist" in his blog and this week's Reader, is congenial by temperament, heritage, and strategy. (He's speaking tonight at the Barbara's near UIC.) But that attitude also reflects his confidence that extreme fundamentalism will die out soon, and that supernatural belief will too, eventually.

Is this confidence justified? He says kids these days are too well-educated to fall for religious hoo-ha. The Pew Center has some evidence in that direction: of those born before 1946, 5 percent call themselves agnostic, atheist, or nonreligious. That percentage increases to 11 among those born 1946-64, 14 among those born 1965-76, and 19 among Mehta's generation, born since 1977.

But at this rate it will be a couple of centuries before believers are the same-size minority atheists are today. And trends of this sort have been reversed in the past. 

Talk to Action, a group blog that keeps a mainstream eye on wacko Christians, has a link-filled post on the latest chilling development: "Seven Virginia Episcopal churches, including two of the largest and wealthiest in the American Episcopal Communion in the American Episcopal Communion, voted to break away and, as a New York Times story written prior to the vote put it, 'report to the powerful archbishop of Nigeria, Peter Akinola, an outspoken opponent of homosexuality who supports legislation in his country that would make it illegal for gay men and lesbians to form organizations, read gay literature or eat together in a restaurant.'"

Akinola heads the largest Anglican province in the world, and the legislation he supports echoes Nazi efforts in 1933. 

In the Washington Post story on the Episcopalian split, the self-described Christian conservatives try to excuse Akinola's homobigotry. In the AP story run by the Chicago Tribune one of them describes the change from being part of a denomination that ordains women and gays to one that seeks to imprison them:  "A burden is being lifted. There are new possibilities breaking through."

Anyone else remember the good old days when leftists imagined that the third world would enlighten Americans?  Or when Christians expected foreign missions to bear good fruit?

Is this bumper sticker (which apparently still has to be imported from the U.K.) sarcastic or not? Does it depend on the gross weight of the vehicle to which it's attached? (Thanks, Treehugger.)

And here's a glimpse of the world where sarcasm can go entirely undetected: "The November 15 edition of 'The Colbert Report' on Comedy Central offered more proof of comedian Stephen Colbert's ineffective charade at pretending to be a conservative." (Hat tip to Pharyngula, where commenters indulge in a discussion of whether there has been an intentionally funny conservative since Evelyn Waugh. Your thoughts?)

And finally, just for fairness and balance, here's an unbelievably ignorant comment from the liberal side by David Shenk, author of The Immortal Game, published in the Toronto Star and republished at 3 Quarks Daily:

"Q. Do you ever fantasize about teaching chess to some religious fundamentalists?

"A. What a great question. I should actually try to do this some time—just spend time studying how someone who thinks in this fundamentalist way most of the time is also a chess player, because I really see it as a contradiction."

Here I wish he was being saracastic! Having played tournament chess for decades, I can assure Mr. Shenk that strong chess players can hold every imaginable kind of preposterous opinion without damaging their game at all.  George Orwell still rules—he had to make this same point about Ezra Pound, who spoke for fascism and wrote great poetry. Deal with it, folks.

Everyone's talking about death these days. I guess it's more fun than following the campaign ads. Depending on who you read, the fear of death may make you a bigot, or a Republican, or a Buddhist.

• Amanda Marcotte writes, "As Lorraine noted in her post on this the other day, one of the primary features of turning someone into an Other that you can feel superior towards is to symbolically cast them as embodied and then implicitly or even explicitly cast yourself as superior and transcendent of bodily concerns. How does this work? Well, . . . you have racists who think that white people are smarter than black people and concurrently that black people are better athletes, which is a way of saying that black people are embodied but white people are somehow transcendent. Fundie homophobes obsess over anal sex because to them, penetration is about humiliating and embodying the penetrated one, showing that she is just a fleshy thing that will die. That men can get penetrated means men are soft, fleshy beings that will die and this causes them to panic." More, including the application to torture and some good links.

• The omnipresent Cass Sunstein blogs about a 2004 study (abstract here) that found people were more likely to approve of Bush's policies and to vote for him after being reminded that they would die someday.  "Unless circumstances have relevantly changed since 2004, Bush -- and almost certainly Republican candidates more generally -- are likely to benefit from any reference to terrorism or the September 11 attacks. So Karl Rove knows exactly what he is doing." More. The generic name for this kind of research is "mortality salience."

• My one-time classmate and longtime friend, philosopher David Loy, has published in this area too, but he takes it in a different direction. "Consciousness of death is our primary repression [contra Freud].  The Buddhists claim that, since the self is insubstantial, the death-denial represents quite valid suspicion that 'I' do not really exist.  Fear of physical death is one manifestation of the deeper fear of the death of this 'I'." The cure is to recognize the truth. "When I am no longer striving to make myself real through things, I am actualized. When I stop trying to become something, I discover that I am everything." Bad news for fundamentalism, both political and religious. Much more.

Walter Feinberg, who teaches philosophy of education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, spent three years visiting Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and Islamic schools. In April Routledge published his book about what they teach and how, For Goodness Sake: Religious Schools and Education for Democratic Citizenry.

One of his recommendations--this comes from the U. of I. press release, not the book, which I haven't seen--is that religious schools should teach the history of their own religious doctrines, because young students "need to know that it is possible for religious doctrine to change over time."

Is this naive? A review of the book in Teachers College Record (behind a pay wall) makes it clear that some religious schools do a fine job of this while upholding their distinctive traditions. But can they all? Isn't fundamentalism all about denying change? 

A liberal faith can postulate that human knowledge of God is inevitably partly false--hence doctrine has changed and will continue to do so. Fundamentalists don't go that way, even when one of their heroes makes a change himself.

For example: In 1993 Pope John Paul II included slavery in a long list of practices that he called "intrinsically evil" and that are therefore prohibited at all times and places. That statement goes well beyond anything written in the Bible or in later Catholic teaching.

Writing in the far-right journal First Things last fall, Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., did his sophisticated best to square that circle. Since neither the pope nor the tradition could be wrong or have changed, Dulles argued that slavery isn't intrinsically evil and that the pope didn't mean what he'd plainly said. The piece is a strange and strained intellectual exercise.

Would it be naive to expect Dulles, let alone less erudite Bible-thumpers, to appreciate Feinberg's recommendation?