Problems with Fundamentalism

[mrfriend27]

Modern fundamentalism is being impaled on two horns; a pietistic approach to faith, and an insistence on the inerrancy of the bible. Both of these mistakes damage the individuals and communities who practice them, and encourage ignorance, cultural elitism and isolation.

By a pietistic approach to faith, I mean the kind of deeply personal understanding of religion where everything is viewed through the filter of self. In this worldview, few things just happen - instead, things, events, fleeting thoughts are part of some pre-arranged plan - and it is all about how he self is moving through the world.

One effect of this is that we stay focussed on ourself - "what is God trying to tell me here?" "What does God want me to learn, to do, to say?" "Did I miss God's will for me?" "Did I destroy God's purpose by failing to act, or by acting, or failing to think, or thinking too much..." It becomes all about me, and only tangentially about "you" or even God.

Quite the opposite of being a spiritual life, I think this is a profoundly selfish life,and one that is doomed to generate anxiety and a sense of failure, because it constantly forces our awareness, our gaze back to ourself. When we are happiest, most fulfilled, most effective is when we forget ourself, when we are able to immerse ourself in our life and lose sense of self, awareness of the passing of time and that self-critical voice.

I am not advocating that we never examine ourself or our life - just that we recognize that huge swaths of life is just what happens, and that we learn to accept that not everything serves some eternal purpose.

The second horn is the idea of biblical inerrancy - the view that the bible is some magic book, preserved through its writing, transcription and translation in a state that is free from error. To insist that the bible is inerrant is to misunderstand the bible - and therefore to misinterpret it. It is to put artificial limits on how we think about issues, about how our faith impacts our culture, about what community and faith look like in the world we live in here and now.

We need to recover an accurate picture of faith, and what it means to be a person of faith, and an important first step is to recover a more accurate understanding of the bible.

So how does this encourage ignorance, cultural elitism and isolation?

The world is viewed as evil, opposed to God, and passing away. What does not concern the self and its relationship with God is unimportant, uninteresting. This perspective encourages the notion that the fundamentalist culture is under attack, because it alone is the special collection of chosen people, the true insiders, the only ones who really "get it."

Anyone who reaches a different conclusion is the enemy. Scientists don't reach the "right" conclusions, so they must be evil, others do not believe "correctly" so they must be either deluded or not real Christians. No other faith can have truth, no other choice is acceptable. This encourages a kind of barbarian mentality - where things that are not valued by the fundamentalist community are devalued - and ought to be abandoned, simply because they are not appreciated by this one culture.

So we can have a 1 issue election, where conservative put a totally unqualified president in the White House simply because he agrees with them about abortion. Because the security, welfare and prosperity of the hundreds of millions of people who live in the US are nothing compared to a politician's attitude on this one issue.

Hopefully even conservatives are learning their lesson - but these two traits - piety and inerrancy allowed cynical leaders like Dobson and Kennedy manipulate conservatives for their own power and ego. Shame on Dobson and Kennedy, sure - but shame on conservatives to make so little of the gospel that good government means nothing, and their view of personal morality means everything - and as you would expect, we got neither good governance nor a moral administration.

The way out of this mess is to face the facts - starting with the actual nature of the bible, and the fact that people have value beyond the state of their souls. We need community, not based on how closely we agree on issues of faith, but on our common humanity and our shared needs for one another.

[KarenM]

I couldn't agree more!!

[sunken]

I never did quite understand why science and religion has to be at odds with eachother. If God truly did create the cosmos, he certainly did so with a unique system, one that he must have intended that humans would explore. If he didn't want that, he wouldn't have given people curiosity. To me, I would think religion would embrace science as an explanation of God's plan, to learn what the intent was.

Such is the case with people who believe medicine is evil. If God hadn't intended medicine to be available, it would have been just as easy to leave it off the list. The fact that there is such a thing says that the system is designed for humans to find it, again through exploration and curiosity.

I would think science and religion would go hand in hand, instead of opposites.

How do they know that creationism didn't create the evolutionary path that is believed to have occured?

[azhariq_8]

The greatest danger associated with fundamentalism (whether Christian, Mormon, or Islamic) is that the statements of fundamentalists sound so true. Christians frequently listen to a fundamentalist preacher and agree with every word. Many fundamentalist preachers are charismatic leaders and persuasive orators. They have a passion and commitment, a devotion, that we would all like to achieve in our own lives. It is easy to be moved and blessed by their messages.