If you want to understand fundies, start here:

This is good stuff. Whoever put this together really did their homework:

http://www.sullivan-county.com/news/

Here's a sample paragraph or two from the first page:

"Christians who clung to the old belief that every word of the Bible was literally true -- called biblical inerrancy, claim only the belief, they do not follow or live by the rules or teachings of Jesus. The Protestant belief of "faith alone" which Calvin and Luther took from Saint Augustine, makes all of that at best optional or morality of any kind, irrelevant. The only things they really see as "sin" is, matters of sex, not following their religious teaching teachings, and questioning authority."

And this (ay-yi-yi):

Fundamentalists have a loathing of democracy when it applies equally to others. One bitter fundamentalist had this to say, "democracy is the cause of all world problems...humans are under the law of God, and thus they CANNOT do anything they want or speak anything they wish to speak...democracy ultimately started with Satan...we can't rule ourselves. God must rule us...those who actually set up America, and drew up the laws were people who did not favor Christianity. Christians living during that time disagreed with those in power or rather the founding fathers. They saw them as ultra liberals, and of course, they were."


Rather eye-opening stuff.


Edited to add this, if only for the cartoon at the top!

http://www.sullivan-county.com/nf0/fundienazis/beyond_reason.htm

Thanks!

I'd rather keep my distance from those type of people.

But I've been looking for a good website that really delves into the history of how fundamentalism came to be and especially the point we are at now. He makes the interesting point that fundies really are NOT a big percentage of the population at ALL, rather small actually. But they have been working quietly for years to get elected representatives in office who believe the same way they do, and now with bush in office, they feel emboldened and are getting louder and louder.

I am reading this stuff so I can better COUNTER them.

On edit: I don't go seeking them out. I avoid them, too. But I think this may give me some insight on how to possibly break their hold on our government. I don't care WHAT a person believes, but as soon as their beliefs urge them to inject their church into our government, that's where I draw the line.

It's just that if the time comes and such a person tries to argue with me, I'd just see arguing with them as a lost cause. These folks have taken fanaticism and religious hysteria to new levels, and logic has ceased to make any sense. I mean, these are people who completely ignore the theory of evolution and instead claim that the creation of the world by a big magical guy in the sky over a period of six days is more logical. And I'm Christian.

I wish you all the luck in the world when you argue with them; you have much more patience than me. :)

But I think it was helpful for me to finally understand that logic really DOESN'T come into play for them. To my way of thinking, I couldn't fathom someone whose very arguments are not based on any logic at ALL. Rationalism and logic are actually viewed negatively by fundamentalists and while I knew they were pretty bad (check out my profile to see where I live) I didn't realize they were THAT bad. COMPLETELY lacking in logic, whew.

How can you take the Bible as LITERAL, yet pick and choose what you want to believe in it? If it is literal, it is literal. All of it. How does one decide what is literal and what is to be thrown out?

Apparently they decide those things based on their hate for others, their disagreement with the concept of equality, and their almost pathological need to feel they are RIGHT.

Wow. It just kinda blew me away.

that is your starting point.

Once you have that, you can branch out.

At it's heart, religion is about the womb and whose sperm is gonna make it both in and out of it.

As they say, as above, so below.

www.infidels.org

There's a wealth of information there. Links to organizations, libraries, discussion groups. I spent a couple of years on one discussion group, run by Farrell Till, a former Church of Christ preacher turned atheist. It was the errency list, and we debated fundies on the inerrancy doctrine.

hypocrites. Potentially violent hypocrites.

feel over their basic drives. These stories have to be placed far in the past so they can't be disproven.

the saddest thing about it for me is that they poison and warp the minds of children.

Once their minds have been twisted into these grooves, it's a lifetime of struggle learning to think a new way once one is an adult.

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"Where it is a duty to worship the sun, it is pretty sure to be a crime to examine the laws of heat."

Ya wouldn't know it to read me now, but I was a teenage fundamentalist. Graduate of a Bible College, even.

It almost killed me, but I eventually found myself again.

While it is rare to find someone who has "recovered" (for lack of a better word) from fundamentalism, it is possible and does happen.

Thanks for your post!

Tell me, does the author's observations of fundamentalism ring true to you?

There's little sense of a macro-ethic in fundamentalism. Sin is reduced to little more than sexuality and obedience to authority. And since salvation is all about adhering to church doctrine, you can be as big a selfish bastard as you please and still get to Heaven.

And here's an utterly shameless plug from an underemployed author: my first novel is losely based on my youthful religious indiscretion.


Currently sitting pretty at 2,810,534 on Amazon's Top 3 million!

Here's a review from The Univesity of Toronto Quarterly (I don't get the reviewer's reference to Roman Catholicism. My subject was Protestant Fundamentalism):

Anxious Gravity, by Jeff Wells, is a whole other story, a highly humorous one, but also a deadly serous coming of age story that marks a major talent at work. The novel begins by honouring Nietzsche's famous aphorism: 'a joke is the epigram on the death of feeling.' Here we have both a clue and a warning about how best to understand the narrator's ironic view of his own misadventures. I cheerfully allowed the young saucy narrator, Gideon Gast, to take me on his magic theological ride through Christian studies at the Overcome Bible Institute in Calgary. This highly enjoyable novel dares to explore the rarely answered question - just what was he thinking? Seeking spiritual purity, foregoing sex, drugs, rock and roll - even for a little while: these are not your ordinary modern adolescent initiation rites. A searching Gideon confronts the world with the full force of longing and expectation, and not surprisingly the world tends to let him down. But his buoyant attitude, his reflexive irreverence, his sheer joie, not to mention his hormonal drives, tend to keep him deep in the game, however contradictory its pleasures and pains. You don't have to be a Roman Catholic to find Anxious Gravity (great title) funny - or offensive. This terrific novel about denial is awash in excess, offering up one refreshingly smart-ass line of insight after another.

Thanks! :toast:

Most are unreachable and a danger to the Earth.

they're all self-lobotomized...

If I believed in the 2nd Appearance of Jesus, I would wish that he arrive tommorow and gather up all of the idiots that spout his name, dripping with blood and hate, and drop them off in Hell.

God has endowed some with greater strength, greater intelligence, etc. And it is God's will that those people so endowed should have dominion over those less endowed with his bounty.

Notice that the communists who claim total equality are also atheist, demonstrating that the concepts of equality and Godliness are mutually exclusive.

Good Christians should not revere our Founding Fathers, for these men were heretics who questioned the divine right of kings, thus going against God's word to establish democracy. The early Democratic Republics, ancienct Greece and Rome, were full of idol worshipers. Democracy is a concept born of idolators.

God is a King, not an elected official!

signed
Whack Job

means you are being sarcastic?

I am being sarcastic.
I just keep hearing about people who decry the supposed decline in moral values in this country trying to put their finger on some sort of turning point.

Personally, I think the state of moral values depends on your definition of morality. If you think slavery is cool, and it is okay for a man to beat his wife but a tit exposed on t.v. is just a horrible sin, than yes, our moral values have declined greatly in the past hundred fifty years.

preacher who kidnapped that girl and his family basically used as a slave -- seems like it was pretty big news a few years back.

"Make no mistake, their stated purpose is to impose, with force if necessary, a theocracy and eliminate all modern scientific theory and social philosophy. This means entire scientific fields and research would be banned, restricted, or curtailed. All civil law as we know it today would be replaced by Biblical Law based mainly on the most brutal sections of the Old Testament. Even many Christian churches would be banned for their lack of "Christian correctness."