Time Frames and Taboo Data Blog

Back in the Middle Ages the Crusades became the big religious pastime in European circles. Christians were called by Catholic fundamentalists to mount an offensive against the “evil Moors,” and the unquestioning believers dutifully sallied forth to slay hundreds of thousands of “heretics” for the glory of the “Prince of Peace.” The bulk of the victims across Europe over the centuries of the Inquisition were not Moors, but simply people who sought spiritual alliance with the Source in their own way. Later, in the 1800s the popular sport of the British Protestant fundamentalists was to indulge in terrorism against the Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland. More recently, when Iran was taken over by Muslim fundamentalists in the Islamic Revolution of 1979, thousands of “non-believers” were heartlessly slaughtered. In India on October 31, 1984, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, a Hindu of the Adi Dharma Brahmic religion, was shot to death by a Sikh fundamentalist. The Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was shot to death in 1995 by a Jewish fundamentalist. And in our present day epidemic of fundamentalist mental affliction, one brand of Muslim fundamentalists continue to indulge themselves in the hit-or-miss slaughtering anywhere of anyone whom they judge to be infidels.

In the United States today the fever of Christian fundamentalists has managed (since 1996) to infect and pervert the workings of true democracy. As usual with any fundamentalist, the delusions of righteousness and holy exclusiveness from which they suffer is detectable by their addiction to unclean hatreds. In the affliction of fundamentalism it is not really their specific narrow faith that is at fault: it is the delusion that they and they alone know what is true and right in the sight of God. In their spiritual fever they fail to recognize that the “truths” they credit to God are actually nothing other than their own ego judgments fashioned by man’s fear of the unknown. Ego does not like any contrariness, and once ego fashions an emotional fortress (faith) it will rarely respond to rational examination.

Karl Marx made the insightful observation that religion is the opium of the masses. As with drug addiction, the quest of the religious fundies is the pursuit of the feel-good high they get from their indulgence. And they will defend without scruples their indulgence of “faith” against any rational examination. The lust for God’s imagined favoritism commonly drives them into unholy behavior such as name-calling, half-truths, outright lies, and even killing anyone considered to be a threat to their imagined superior spiritual status. So contaminated are they that they cannot see their spiritual insincerity when they judge other people to be “lost,” or a “devil’s advocate,” or “demon possessed” as they themselves go about disrupting every facet of social structure for the majority. They never explain why God, if “he” is omniscient,” has to rely on their pathetically limited abilities to clean up the spiritual confusion in regard to himself.

Fundamentalist Christians hold that the Bible is man’s sole authority. This is stridently avowed despite the many contradictions that the “holy texts” hold. There is a fact that would be amusing if it were not so tragic, but the average fundamentalists have not and do not actually read the Bible themselves—it is so much easier to listen to some overzealous interpreter who cherry picks verses from the “good book” to inflame others with their slanted concepts. The common response to weaving some out-of-context verses into emotional rhetoric is to focus on some imagined revulsion that God supposedly finds within his creation of variety and diversity of life. Hatred for the superficial differences which make up life expressions is very easy to arouse, and accusations that others indulge in sin are so easy to assert—especially if any of those “sins” happen not to be one of the favorites of the fundamentalists.

Such pretense of possessing the only upright “faith” may give each other within their little faith system clique a sense of exclusivity, but it does not fool the ultimate power which creates in endless variety and diversity. And that fundamentalist attitude that everyone else is wrong certainly was not a message in the alleged teachings of Jesus. Indeed, Jesus was depicted as actually standing up to the Jewish fundamentalists of his day; he was radical in that he praised compassion, forgiveness, and being non-judgmental. In the book of Matthew 23:27 Jesus is even depicted as having commented on the shallow spirituality of fundamentalists. It might be wise, therefore, if the fundamentalists of today would get down off their self-constructed pedestals and actually read the book they claim to live by. Concerning the fundamentalists, Jesus is quoted as referring to them as “…whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness.”

Yikes! Does that Gospel truth mean that all fundamentalists are actually—zombies?

This entry was posted on August 21, 2013 at 10:03 pm and is filed under Atheist, belief, Christianity, faith, history, humanity, religion, scriptures, Social, thoughts with tags Fundamentalism, God's favorites, religion, spiritual pretense, violence in the name of God. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.