Fundamentalism

From RationalWiki

Fundamentalism is a reactionary tendency exhibited by significant minorities within most major religions. Fundamentalists seek to recapture a supposed ideological "purity," often by reasserting the primacy of their own idiosyncratic interpretation of religious texts over centuries of acquired knowledge and practice. This puts them at odds not only with the secular world and members of other religions, but also with their less zealous brethren.

Christianity contains within it an actual movement called "fundamentalism", founded around the time of the First World War.

Fundamentalists are sometimes nicknamed "fundies" or "Fundy loons".

Fundamentalist christian groups can be pentecostal and otheriwse |pietistic (doctrinaly focused on ones personal relationship with God), but the terms do not mean the same thing.

1 Introduction
2 Etymology
3 Characteristics of fundamentalists
4 Significant fundamentalists
5 Insignificant fundamentalists
6 Really insignificant fundamentalists
7 Religious fundamentalism and education
8 The world of fundamentalists
9 See also
10 External links
11 Footnotes

[edit] Introduction

Fundamentalist rhetoric is frequently apocalyptic in order to provide their crusade with a driving theological imperative. Typically: the secular world has become decadent and corrupt; their co-religionists have become tainted by it; and [insert deity of choice] is but a short time away from unleashing its loving Wrath (of DOOM!) upon the whole sorry mess. Only those who attain their stipulated degree of "purity" will be saved. In more extreme cases, only the 'elect', or those chosen before birth for salvation, have the opportunity for salvation, and those less fortunate, no matter how saintly, are doomed to damnation by a fickle and capricious deity.

Although such rhetoric may serve to recruit wavering co-religionists to the cause, it also serves as a natural limiting factor on how successful fundamentalist thought can be outside of these circles. Put simply, the majority of people respond very poorly to such a relentlessly negative message. That they then champion 1000+ year old texts over the explanatory width and depth of modern science leaves the widespread acceptance of fundamentalist thought utterly hamstrung. After said date of apocalyptic fury, you'd expect for there to be apologies to those who believed. Instead, however, a new date is often set. This can get boring and lead to de-conversions after the fifth time someone has given away all their worldly goods in anticipation of the apocalypse. Thus fundamentalism is often doing harm to its own cause.

[edit] Etymology

There is some debate as to the origin of the term. The two main ideas are referred to as the bottom up hypothesis and the top down hypothesis

Bottom up: says that the term is derived from the word fundament, which is a polite word for asshole. Support for this contention is to be found amongst the rank and file fundamentalists.
Top down: suggests that the term is derived from an amalgamation of the words fund a mental. Support for this idea is to be found in the leaders of the fundamentalist organisations and their pre-occupation with people sending them money in spite of their obvious less-than-stellar intellect.

So far the evidence for each hypothesis is equally balanced and no firm conclusion may be drawn. However, a recent idea suggests that this may be a case of convergent etymology, where the same word has been applied to different things that have over the years formed some sort of symbiotic relationship, so that the same word now applies to the almost indistinguishable amalgam of the two groups. Support for this hypothesis is found amongst the fundamentalist leaders who are also assholes, and the number of rank and file fundamentalists who have a pre-occupation with money and clear signs of a less than robust intellect.

[edit] Characteristics of fundamentalists

Religious idealism is basis for personal and communal identity;
Fundamentalists understand truth to be revealed and unified;
It is intentionally scandalous (outsiders cannot understand it and will always be outsiders);
Fundamentalists envision themselves as part of a cosmic struggle;
They seize on historical moments and reinterpret them in light of this cosmic struggle;
They demonize their opposition and are reactionary;
Fundamentalists are selective in what parts of their tradition and heritage they stress;
They are primarily led by a narrow demographic (e.g. white males);
They envy modernist cultural hegemony and try to overturn the distribution of power.^[1]

“

The problem not only with fundamentalist Christians but with Republicans in general is not that they act on blind faith, without thinking. The problem is that they are incorrigible doubters with an insatiable appetite for Evidence. What they get off on is not Believing, but in having their beliefs tested. That's why their conversations and their media are so completely dominated by implacable bogeymen: marrying gays, liberals, the ACLU, Sean Penn, Europeans and so on. Their faith both in God and in their political convictions is too weak to survive without an unceasing string of real and imaginary confrontations with those people -- and for those confrontations, they are constantly assembling evidence and facts to make their case.

But here's the twist. They are not looking for facts with which to defeat opponents. They are looking for facts that ensure them an ever-expanding roster of opponents. They can be correct facts, incorrect facts, irrelevant facts, it doesn't matter. The point is not to win the argument, the point is to make sure the argument never stops. Permanent war isn't a policy imposed from above; it's an emotional imperative that rises from the bottom. In a way, it actually helps if the fact is dubious or untrue (like the Swift-boat business), because that guarantees an argument. You're arguing the particulars, where you're right, while they're arguing the underlying generalities, where they are.

Once you grasp this fact, you're a long way to understanding what the Hannitys and Limbaughs figured out long ago: These people will swallow anything you feed them, so long as it leaves them with a demon to wrestle with in their dreams.

”

—Matt Taibbi, [1]

[edit] Significant fundamentalists

George W. Bush
Osama bin Laden
Ayatollah Khomeni
Meir Kahane
A bunch of convicts who used to be "famous".

[edit] Insignificant fundamentalists

Mike Huckabee
Sarah Palin (scarily within reach of "significance" as of September 2008)
Any fundamentalist sect leader with fewer than fifty adherents who doesn't successfully lead them all into mass suicide.

[edit] Really insignificant fundamentalists

Andrew Schlafly

[edit] Religious fundamentalism and education

One of the tenets of religious fundamentalism is how easy it is for the "pure" to be spoiled, which leads to a desire for as much of life as possible to be lived outside of mainstream society. Obviously the unrestrained contact with others of different opinions/beliefs is dangerous to the young fundamentalist, and avoiding such opportunities may be achieved by homeschooling, or in whole institutions dedicated to maintaining the purity of the schooled, with the added advantage of captive audiences who are more easily indoctrinated. See Pensacola Christian College for a prime example.

[edit] The world of fundamentalists

The world of fundamentalists consists of snake handlers, Jehovah's Witlesses, Moonies, primitive rockin' back 'n forth, eyes rolled back in their heads Southern Boobtists, roll-in-the sawdust, babble-in-tongues gibbering Pentecostals, whacked out television and radio "send us yer money Thank Yewwww Jesssssuzzzz!" crooked evangelists, weird cults in the desert, beat your kids and wives, vicious word o' the Lord Christian whackos like Jim Bakker, Jim Jones, Bob Larson, Jimmy Swaggart, Peter Popov, Reverend Ike, prosperity preachers grubbing $20 from little old ladies on Social Security, thieves, frauds and pedophiles, anti-semitic remark of the day ala Pat Robertson, Billy Graham, et al., white man's nation, white man's religion, white power preachers, skinheads, Klansmen, white citizen's councils with their whites-only religious schools, backward masking, demons, secular humanism, creationism, black helicopters, commies under every bed, UN is going to invade us, militia-joining, tax-resisting, Harry Potter-fearing hysterical creeps and loonies.