Truth
Fundamentalism
Abstract
There is something deep in religious belief that divides people and amplifies social conflict.E O Wilson
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 01 March 2006
The Fundamentals
Fundamentalist religions are getting popular on every continent. Fundamentalism began in 1910 at Princeton University when some Presbyterians published a set of pamphlets called The Fundamentals, protesting against the Modernist policy of churches to treat the bible as the historical document it is. The Fundamentals were that the bible is inerrant, God created everything ex nihilo, the life of Jesus was just as it was described, virgin birth, miracles, atoning death, resurrection, and all. Oh, and his return on a cloud will be soon, still! Definitely! Oh yes! Those who espoused these ideas were soon described as Fundamentalists, and today, they are essentially the same as the anti-evolutionists called Evangelists. In brief, Fundamentalists reject the idea of progress, and in that sense, it was applied to some Moslems in 1937. They liked it, and took it up even more fanatically than the Christians. Now we are caught between these fanatics, and have to defend the modern world, they unite together to try to destroy.
Religious movements that reject rational enquiry as the basis of our civilization, and empirical evidence as the best way of deciding things, are ballooning. Each believes it alone has the truth, usually the literal “truth” of some ancient book, and a wish to impose it on everyone else, especially if they do not want it, because, on their own part, there is no toleration of dissent from this “truth”, or anything they choose to add to it by way of “interpretation”.
You are either in the charmed circle of believers or you are the enemy.Stuart Sim, Sunderland University
Modernists, those of us who see a huge threat in this to Enlightenment values, like science, reason, pluralism, freedom of thought, and democracy are concerned. Yet these very virtues, once expected to render religion obsolete, are categorized by the leaders of Fundamentalism as the worst of society’s evils. Modernity is exemplified, above all, by science, the discoveries of which, and not religion, have given us the modern benefits we enjoy. Science begins with skepticism, not belief in anything, except its own tested discoveries, and rejection of “authorities”, whose authority is proclaimed by no one except their followers. Science uses empirically obtained evidence, not revealed falsehoods called “truth” to make them acceptable, to promote progress, and give us benefits never before imagined when religions were unquestionable in the world.
Religions were developed for primitive agriculturalists, and they remain the main interest of primitive people, often still in rural communities. They declare reality—meaning the world we actually live in—as superficial, and injustice as excused by it being God’s will. That despite God, in the Christian holy book supposedly giving us free will in the first place. So God imposing His own will makes Him a liar. It illustrates their lack of reason. Rural life is cyclical, following the seasons, as it is indeed, but Fundamentalists use it to reject the idea of any overall progress, and instead to impose, in God’s name, His “will”, when it is the will of rogues who hope to benefit from the scam. Inevitable God’s will is conservative, even backward looking, because progress is not what these farmers and cowboys want. They should have their mobile phones, SUVs or 4x4s, firearms, TV sets, convenience foods, cleaners and refrigerators taken away from them, and they should be left to sleep with the pigs, until they realize what they are advocating.
Analysing Fundamentalism
Analysts of the Fundamentalist malaise, or maybe apologists for it, say that modernism has undermined old certainties, but these supposed certainties never were certain, and must be so old as to have ceased to be relevant to anyone by now. Or believers are unconscious of the way modernism has removed far more uncertainties of those in olden times. Science has reduced mortality rates in every respect. Disease, starvation, vermin, heat and cold, all no longer have the unpleasant consequences they have had for the human race until the last century. Was there some benefit in being certain that half your children would die as infants? Many Fundamentalists would not be alive at all had it not been for science, and science is the voluntary work of people, not anything imposed by God. If that were the Fundamentalist thesis then why have deeply religious societies had terrible death rates, starving beggars in the streets, stench and filth in the cities and so on? If they want to attribute the discoveries of science to God, then they should have th grace to recognize that God is more intelligent than they are and does not have to reveal everything by sending an angel or a prophet, because from the outset he gave us a brain. Fundamentalists are the straw men of The Wixard of Oz, they come from rural America with straw sticking out of their heads. In fact, they have a brain, but it is so unused, they never learnt what it does.
Some analysts blame Fundamentalism on to the slow step from traditional ruralism to modern urbanism. In the large urban communities of today, they meet people who think differently! Malise Ruthven calls it the “scandal of difference”. Small rural communities are culturally uniform—everyone thinks the same—and it is meeting societies in the towns who tolerate other people, with other viewpoints that scandalises the small town mentality:
What scandalises people is startlingly similar across countries and cultures—pluralism and tolerance of other faiths, non-traditional gender roles and sexualm behaviour, reliance on human reason rather than divine revelation, and democracy which grants power to people rather than God.Deborah MacKenzie
US Fundamentalists happily excuse the gerrymandering of the Bush family and Republican Perty as God’s will, as long as it comes out the way they like. But the constitutional separation of church and state, they challenge constantly, never accepting the judgement even of right wing judges who have the sense to value the benefits of the secular state. They want the US to be a Christian theocracy, whereupon it would become like the theocracies of history and those that exist today, and rarely have they ever been pleasant for anyone except the clergy and their immediate protectors.
Modern life faces everyone in traditional rural communities with the choice of embracing reason and progress or remaining in the backwoods of faith-based living. But even if they choose the latter, they are hypocrites if they refuse to accept that science not faith has given them all the toys and medicines that keep them alive and make life tolerable. Instead they delude themselves with their own false sense of certainty that faith gives them. It is a form of Dutch courage writ large. Scientifically, their faith is in the placebo God—the God of self-hypnosis. Sugar tablets called medicine and a rabbit’s foot that brings good luck work in just the same way. The main difference is their own sense that God is watching them, making them behave, because He is God the Father, and they are the Naughty Child that He will righteously chastise at the end. Fear of retribution was always a good discipline. Any priest or pastor that can induce this sense in their flock will not need a sheep dog! That always was the social purpose of religion.
Yet one thing that they chuck out of the window is compassion. “Love” you might say, in the Christian case. In their reduction of social complexity to a simple creed, they love only each other, and hate everyone else. Everyone except themselves is wicked, and, bugger God’s commandments, it is always moral to kill the wicked! So they had better accept the “truth”, because if they do not, it will be imposed as God’s will! Thus Islamicists want to impose Sharia law instead of the law of the land on everyone else. In the UK, a large minority of ordinary Moslems say they agree! In the US, Christian Fundamentalists do not believe that their God abrogated the law of Moses—selectively, that is. They do not mind bombing Moslems, supporting the KKK and dragginging blacks through the town with a truck, or murdering abortion doctors, but they hypocritically think the ten commandments should be up in every public building, especially schools, dead people should be kept apparently alive against their will, and sex should be banned except on very odd occasions. Moreover, they want to teach as “truth” a lot of ancient stories instead of the science that has given them all those toys, they now cannot do without.
Secularism Under Attack
Though they like to portray Christianity as being hard done by secularists, it is the other way round. The secular state is under attack from ignoramuses, and the secular state had better fight back. We have had a precedent. The victory of Christianity over Roman society in the fourth century led to the extinction of Rome in the West in the fifth, and the loss of the whole of classical learning very quickly indeed, leading to the Dark Ages, a thousand years of utter ignorance while Christendom thrived.
George W Bush is apparently proud of “running a faith based presidency”, because:
George Bush was not elected by a majority of voters in the USA. He was appointed by God.
His administration accepts that the “faith based presidency” differs from the rest of society, openly described as the “reality based community”. People who believe policy should be based on empirical evidence collected as needed is the reality community, whereas the administration is unreality based because it depends upon God whispering into the president’s ear, or sometimes his aid’s ears. The aim of religion is to dupe poor and ignorant people by using the authority of God in an utterly cynical way. Many of the ruling Straussist caste in Washington have not the least interest in God except as a tool of politics. The Republican party is interested in preserving the wealth of the rich, the very rich, not doing what the poor Galilean advocated which was to give everything to the poor, as being the only just and proper thing that any Christian could do. Instead, the Bush administration has the poor voting for tax cuts for the rich. The new Christianity is that the poor should give to the rich. And the poor dupes do not realize it, that is what is so beautiful about the Christian political scam in the US.
To keep them off the scent, the poor are distracted by a bogey man—terrorists, identified with Moslems, in fact. Big lies like that of the WMD keep the ignorant agitated about the supposed threat, so they think Bush is a proper saviour, a latter day Jesus Christ. Actually, he is in danger of creating one, Bin Laden! If Bin Laden is ever killed, he will be a great martyr and could become the Moslem Christ of the next century and beyond. That, after all is what happened to Jesus Christ, when the superpower of the time kiled him 2000 years ago.
If, the largely uncritical and unthinking Fundamentalist masses ever get that far, they might see the sense of abandoning their infantile faith because the reaction they will get elsewhere if they do not, such as in the Moslem world, will outdo their own fanaticism. Other movements for religious purity such as Calvinsim led to the growth of the secular state in the first place. The founders of America, contrary to what the pastors preach were secular thinkers, they were not motivated by absurd faith but by reason, and that is why they made the church constitutionally separate from the state itself. The fact is that a short study of history shows this clearly, but ignorant Fundamentalists will only believe the bible, or rather their pastor’s interpretation of it. The madness of Fundamentalist interpretation is the way they use Christ, the god who had nowhere to lay his head, to justify their own massive collections and wealth. The dupes can be made to believe anything as long as the pastor has the revivalist manner of addressing his sheep.
The Yearning for Credibility
Fundamentalists are conscious of the absurdity of believing as truth the content of an ancient book, and that is why they are desperate to show they have scientific credibility. They realize the importance of evidence in the modern scientific and secular world, if what they claim is to have any clout, and so they try to prove their faith by pseudo-science. That is one point of intelligent design, an attempt to frame the foundation of Judaeo-Christian belief as science. Some might think it is to impress the science community, but really it is to impress their own gullible flock, who cannot distinguish science from fairy stories. To uncritical people, it makes Christianity’s claims as valid as science’s. Unfortunately, anyone literate can see their scientific passport is false, so they become outraged at the “exclusivity” of science. It all suits the religious mythmakers.
The credulous flocks protest that intellectuals are anti-religion, quite unable to see that science is a method that their religion cannot make use of without disproving itself. Religious science has to be certainly true to match the religious “truth” of the silly Persian scriptures that the Fundamentalists are certain God wrote in person, or, at least, by dictating to a secretary. But science can never be certainly true. the point about science is that it is corrigible—new evidence might lead to it having to be revised. But the holy book is inerrant, so how can the two be compatible? Even to imagine they can be is like thinking there is a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. Yet they yearn for intellectual credibility that science has. By forcing a scientific response over creationism, or ID, they think science is accepting them. It is like a woman being harrassed by a stalker until she calls the police and has him jailed. He is briefly happy because “she’s acknowledged me”.
The truth is that everything Fundamentalists believe is old hat and offers no novel insights. As James Barr, a professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville says, “Fundamentalist scholarship is sterile”. Not only has it nothing to offer science, intelligent Christians find their drivel just as tedious and irrelevant, but generally do not respond simply because of the rule Christians have of not criticizing each other, however obnoxious another’s distortion of Christianity might be. So Fundamentalism is irrlevant all round, and that is something that sets them against the world, persuading themselves that they are the lone apostles standing out against society’s lions. Whenever Christians have had power, which was for a continuous seventeen centuries in Europe, they have done the opposite. They have fed dissenters and heretics to the lions, or rather worse, they tied them to a post and set them on fire. That is the real truth of Christian practice, something none of them want to hear.
The Faith of Science
Fundamentalist like to say that science is a faith just as much as Christianity is. The scientist must demur. Not that science is not a belief, but science is a belief based on observation, testing and reason, and it is a faith that has produced everything that makes the modern way of life so comfortable and enjoyable, for people in America, if no one else in the world. The difference in the faith in science and the faith in a supposedly inerrant book and its imaginary author is that science produces the goods. Science is real, religion is unreal. Science is material, religion is immaterial. Seventeen centuries of Christendom, in which large parts of the population lived in cloistered buildings praising and praying much of the day, consisted for most people of misery, perpetual religious wars, torture by the Inquisition, death by slow roasting to preserve the imaginary soul, disgusting murderous crusades of heavily armed knights and pikemen, disgusting pious crusades of unarmed children and peasants, genocide, squalor, poverty, starvation, plague, famine, to mention just some of the benefits of Christian history. Yet Fundamentalists think that the benefits of the mofdern world were brought about by prayer, in fact! They think God somehow manipulated scientists into making their discoveries because people prayed for them. They also think that this manipulation is compatible with free will, something the holy book of absolute truth tells us we definitely have! It is a measure of their insanity, and lack of ability to think.
The accusation is made that scientists operate a scientific fundamentalism. It is the belief that scientific method allows us to understand and control the world. The apologetic twerp, Bryan Appleyard, a tabloid hack who has set his sights on the Templeton millions, announces to us that this is not scientific because it is not provable or testable, despite the computer that he doubtless was writing his inanities on. He is plainly talking nonsense, but quickly and openly he backtracks to keep his oracles a bit safer by saying:
It is a leap of faith to insist that human reason is capable of fully understanding the world.
It is indeed, but in the previous expression of this thought there was no “fully” in it, and it is no leap of faith to insist that human reason is capable of understanding the world. It is typical of these Christian apologists to set up straw men, falsehoods that they can knock over with ease, giving the impression that they have chopped a leg off the scientific dinosaur, or whatever. It is a tenet of science that we shall never understand the world fully! So, sad hack Appleyard, like the sad sack Fundamentalists he is assisting, has to lie to seem to have something to say. His ploy unravels a few paragraphs on when he confesses that he knows “most scientists do not hold this view” he has been demolishing with his huge intellect. It turns out he is talking about “the hard scientistic thinkers who have dominated recent discourse”. These are the scientific fundamentalists. The only ones he can mean are the ones who have actually joined in the defence of science against the moronic attacks that people like him make on it. Tabloid Christian apologists do not like to be contradicted. So, they call the scientists who do contradict them “scientistic thinkers” and “scientific fundamentalists”. “Yah! Sucks!” is just his level of argument.
Nor is he deterred by facts himself, coming out with the commonplace postwar big lie that Christians have to believe to protect their belief, their self esteem, and yet again, their God. That is that the massacre of Jews and such atrocities of Hitler, and the atrocities committed by Stalin were the responsibility of science. Usually the accusation is against atheism, on the grounds that these idologies were atheistic, but here Appleyard uses a stylistic variant, as even tabloid journalists must do, and blames science instead. Whatever scientific expertise these dictators had, they were both practising Christians throughout their early lives until manhood, and Hitler continued a firmly Catholic believer until his death. Stalin began training as an orthodox Christian priest but never was ordained, becoming a communist revolutionary beforehand. But a man who is a Christian until the age of seven is a Christian for life, according to Ignatius Loyola, so we can accept that Stalin had his Christianity well indoctrinated into him, if he was attending a seminary much later in life. Indeed, plenty of hacks like Appleyard, when communism was considered a danger to their employer’s millions, and their own parasitic life, called it a Christian heresy. There is little doubt that Stalin would have concurred, no doubt easing his conscience.
Appleyard find another novel thought in his Fundamentalist polemic, he seems to think:
There is nothing whatsoever in science that makes it immune from such abuses.
Such perception! The point of all this is that the apologist is following the Fundamentalist line that science is nothing but a faith of its own, but such banalities demonstrate the flaccid thinking of those who believe it, and they are not the scientists themselves. It is the straw men that droopy Appleyard has to set up to shy his coconuts at. One of the objections of all the best scientists has been the uses to which the rulers of the world have put their discoveries. Science is no religion, and it has no political power base. Science is a method to discover things about the world, but it is a precious method that no one should want to lose if our secular and free way of living is to be preserved. If scientists are utopian, it is because human beings are. The biggest lie of all, the religious assurance to simple people that there is immortality after death is an appeal to a post mortem utopia that for many destroys all aspiration in this world, and Fundamentalism is an example of that. All science hopes, not with lies, but with tested hypotheses and observations, is that this world can be made better through human endeavour.
Should We Tolerate Intolerance?
What are secularists to do? One of our tenets is toleration, and it is one we have to keep, but the secular state does not tolerate terrorists, it seems. We should not tolerate murderers of any kind and we should expose them in the proper way by subjecting them to the law of the land. But there seems a fault in the tolerant society tolerating those who wish to overthrow the ideal of tolerance. Even liberals should not tolerate intolerant ideologies, and intolerant religions. To do so, especially in these times is to invite diaster. So, we should only bolster those who will properly protect the secular state. Then everyone is free to practice their religion as they wish, or practice none, but no religion must be allowed space to alter the basis of the secular constitution.
William Dembski of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky has set out to dismantle science. His plan is set out in a manifesto called Wedge Strategy, the idea being to split science by driving wedges into it. The manifesto sets the ID goal as to define science to be “more consonant with Christian beliefs and theistic convictions”. The “suffocating natural theology” of evolution is where the first wedge is being driven. Dembski, is described as a professor of theology and science, yet, as a scientist he ought to know that the way to drive wedges into any scientific theory is to bring up a better one. Yet all he can offer is intelligent design. It might seem risible to most busy scientists getting on with their jobs, but Dembski is well funded by Christian millionaires whose proimary aim is to keep the millions coming, for others like them, if not themselves, many having given the money because they have retired. There must be far more millionaires, Christian or not, who realize their wealth and our western way of life depends on science. Where then are the funds to oppose the Fundamentalists. Little is being done. Everone who values freedom and reason had better start getting concerned. The trouble with the tolerant society is that intolerant leaders only need to take power once, and that is the end of freedom.
