fundamentalism

[_] I began to see Algiers as one of the most fascinating and dramatic places on earth. In the small space of this beautiful but congested city intersected two great conflicts of the contemporary world. The first was the one between Christianity and Islam (expressed here in the clash between colonizing France and colonized Algeria). The second, which acquired a sharpness of focus immediately after the independence and departure of the French, was a conflict at the very heart of Islam, between its open, dialectical _ I would even say __editerranean_ _ current and its other, inward-looking one, born of a sense of uncertainty and confusion vis-_-vis the contemporary world, guided by fundamentalists who take advantage of modern technology and organizational principles yet at the same time deem the defense of faith and custom against modernity as the condition of their own existence, their sole identity.[_] In Algiers one speaks simply of the existence of two varieties of Islam _ one, which is called the Islam of the desert, and a second, which is defined as the Islam of the river (or of the sea). The first is the religion practiced by warlike nomadic tribes struggling to survive in one of the world's most hostile environments, the Sahara. The second Islam is the faith of merchants, itinerant peddlers, people of the road and of the bazaar, for whom openness, compromise, and exchange are not only beneficial to trade, but necessary to life itself.

Christians today who view the Bible as God's unadulterated and inerrant word are rightly labeled fundamentalists, while Muslims who think the same of the Qur'an are simply considered Muslims.

We fundamentalists are a pack of mood-loving showoffs. I'm sure the Minor Prophets would have found subject for correction.

The entire idea of sin, is based on books of the dead people. It is a sociological invention founded on textual fanaticism.

Religion has kept all of us suffocated, I can__ raise my voice you can__ raise your voice, still they call us fundamentalists.

Religious people claim that it's just the fundamentalists of each religion that cause problems. But there's got to be something wrong with the religion itself if those who strictly adhere to its most fundamental principles are violent bigots and sexists.

The more fundamentalist a person, the more immoral and inhuman he is.

And even those who claim to read the Bible literally and to lead their lives according to its precepts are, in actual practice, highly selective about which parts of the Bible they live by and which they don't. Jesus' condemnations of wealth and war are generally ignored; so are Levitical prohibitions on eating pork, wearing mixed fabrics and so forth. Though legalistic Christians accuse nonlegalistic Christians of selective interpretation and relativistic morality (of adjusting the Bible, in short, to suit their own lifestyles and prejudices), what is usually happening is that nonlegalists are, as the Baptist tradition puts it, reading the Bible with Jesus as their criterion, while the legalists are, without any philosophical consistency whatsoever, embracing those laws and doctrines that affirm their own predilections and prejudices and ignoring the rest.

When the Bible is understood in its literary and historical context; errors, contradictions, and inconsistencies pose no threat to spirituality, whether that spirituality is theistic, non-theistic, or even explicitly Jesus-centered. The graver threat to what Christians call godliness may be fundamentalism - religion that flows from literalism and fear, religion based on anachronism and law. Fundamentalism teachers, in effect, that the tattered musings of our ancestors, those human words that so poorly represent the content of human thinking, somehow adequately describe God. Fundamentalism offers identity, security, and simplicity, but at a price: by binding believers to the moral imitations and cultural trappings of the Ancients, it precludes a deeper embrace of goodness, love, and truth - in other words, of Divinity.

You didn't learn the Bible as a Fundamentalist. You learned fragments of Old Testament legalism mixed with Behaviorism & Nietzschean ethics

Morality does not come from a book, it comes from the human mind.

Real morality is not the product of fearing a spanking. But what does fundamentalist hell-belief encourage? It retards any developing moral judgment by freezing moral maturity right at the most primitive, most childish, stage: the fear of retribution-and fundamentalism threatens one hell of a spanking.

I was brought up Christian, then I was agnostic and then I realized I was atheist... This movie [Agora] is about fundamentalism and hate.

The problem with carnal anger and outrage is that it__ one of the easiest sins to commit while convincing oneself that one is being faithful. . . . how many angry, divisive, perpetually outraged Christians are convinced that they are reincarnated Old Testament prophets, calling down fire from heaven? Now to be sure there is a time to call down fire from heaven . . . The prophets of Baal called down fire from heaven too, and they screamed and raved for a fire that never fell (1 Kings 18:29). James and John . . . wanted to call down fire from heaven on the Christ-rejecting villages of Samaria. Jesus wanted nothing to do with that spirit because he saw it for what it really was (Luke 9:54ff).

In describing the ways that religious and other types of communities appropriate and understand their histories, among both fundamentalists and non-fundamentalists, the sociologist Anthony Giddens utilizes the term __eflexivity_ and states that it is the characteristic of __ll human action._ Reflexivity takes place when individuals and/or communities utilize their perceptions of their histories as a way of guiding their present and future actions. For Giddens, tradition is a means of __andling time and space, which asserts any particular activity or experience with the community of past, present, and future, these in turn being structured by recurrent social practices._ In light of this, tradition is a set of entities which religious communities and cultures continually reconstruct within certain parameters. Religions are not completely static in that almost every new generation reinvents the religious and cultural inheritance from the generations that preceded it.