ExFundie

2009-04-01T15:37:00.000-07:00

For anyone checking up on me, I have moved this blog elsewhere, to ExFundie at Wordpress. My general cultural blog is at Confessions of a Cultural Idiot, also at WordPress. Meanwhile, my book-related blog is at Bookishgal on my "Shiny Ideas" professional editing and writing site, and my editing/writing blog (which I've only just started) is at Shiny Ideas.

Just checking...

2007-02-26T15:36:00.001-08:00

...to see if this blog still works in the "New Blogger," till I switch all my blogs to WordPress.

2007-02-25T16:34:00.000-08:00

CHANGING GEARS A BIT

I'm not leaving all the previous posts behind; in fact, I'm expanding and developing them into a book. So for the time being, I won't be posting any more of the chapters, while I work on the book.

However, I do hope to post more, soon, about various developments in the realm of religion and philosophy. So this blog will hopefully continue.

Love Thy Neighbour (How Fundamentalists Think: Part Ten)

2005-09-01T11:27:00.000-07:00

[Note: the very first essay begins here]

So, you've got a family of fundamentalists living next door to you. How are they going to behave toward you, if you're not a fundamentalist yourself?

There are several possibilities. The strictest of them will have nothing to do with you, period. This is because, of course, you are under a completely different allegiance: you are allied with the enemies of God no matter how nice you may seem, and there can be no fraternizing with the enemy.

A second reason for not fraternizing, though, comes from two beliefs, about themselves and you: firstly, they believe that they are inherently sinful and weak; secondly, they believe that as an enemy of God, you are given solely to sin. The spirit behind even your "good" actions is self-centred rather than God-centred, so even your "good" actions are sinful. So if they allow themselves to enjoy your company, they could easily be led back into sin under your influence. They want to avoid temptation, especially in the guise of goodness and friendship. Therefore, they will avoid you except for the most cursory, necessary interactions in the community.

For these people, this can apply even to neighbours who are supposedly Christians, but of a different sectarian persuasion. If you are Roman Catholic, for example, many fundamentalists will consider you just shy of a servant of the anti-Christ, and will avoid you almost as fervently as if you were a Satanist (and some would say you are!).

If you are of another religion altogether, say Sikh or Hindu or, heaven forfend, Islam, you are even worse. Catholics at least use the Bible, so there is some chance of God breaking through and converting them. But these others are, for the Christian fundamentalist, unabashed and brazen idolators. Their evil nature is much more out in the open. So a strict fundamentalist will have as little to do with these neighbours as humanly possible.

There are other fundamentalists, though, who will in fact be quite friendly, and fraternize to some degree with their atheist, or idolatrous, or otherwise ungodly neighbours. But do not be deceived, no matter how friendly they are: their primary motivation is NOT simple friendliness. Always and only, their purpose in befriending you will be TO TRY TO SHOW YOU THE TRUTH AND CONVERT YOU TO FUNDAMENTALIST CHRISTIANITY. Only after you are converted will they be able to relax, and enjoy you as a person, and enjoy your friendship for its own sake.

They believe that Jesus gave them a divine mission before he departed the world and ascended to heaven: "Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature" (Mark 16:15). It is their job to bring everyone they meet into a saving relationship with Jesus and God. If you were to die "in your sins," and go to hell, because they just hung out with you and didn't try to convert you, it would be a horrible tragedy and a lifelong accusation on their conscience. So their first business with you – always and only – is your conversion.

Sometimes it appears as though these neighbours are being friendly without trying to convert you. But they regard conversion as a process, often progressing gradually. They work to gain your trust, and gradually introduce ideas that work toward the real reason they have befriended you. At all times, they are watching and calculating: "How can this barbecue or that hockey practice lay more groundwork? How can I work this conversation around to point in God's direction? How often can I casually refer to God doing something in my life, to try to make them curious enough to bring up the subject themselves? When will they be ripe for another attempt?" And so on. Every friendly act and conversation IS A TACTIC. Even if they come to regard you genuinely as a friend, they are always plotting first and foremost how to convert you

If they end up having to sacrifice your friendship in the name of their God – they will. You are, at very best, in second place. But even being that high is rare, because they owe far more allegiance to their church, their religious friends, their political organizations, and so on. You will NEVER be considered on a par with them, as friends, till you have converted to fundamentalist Christianity.

This will have an effect on all sorts of family issues. Your children might be allowed to befriend their children – up to a point. But they will segregate their kids from yours at the first sign that your children might be putting non-fundamentalist ideas into their kids' heads. However, they will not hesitate to try to put fundamentalist ideas into your kids' heads. A mother making cookies while all your kids hang out in the kitchen may take that chance to talk about God while you're not there. The father driving the kids to practice might pray with the kids while travelling in the van, as a "witness" and influence on your children.

Because it is their responsibility to try to convert everybody they meet, they believe that you are harming your child if you do not introduce them to Jesus and his redemptive work. Therefore, they will always try surreptitiously to educate your child in their beliefs. They will do this EVEN IF YOU EXPLICITLY ASK THEM NOT TO. They will obey what they think God wants, even if it contradicts what you want, as a parent.

In fact, this is a good moment to comment on the fact that fundamentalists in North America yell very loudly about parental rights, but don't really believe in those rights for any parents but themselves. They yell that the government has no right to interfere with their parenting; they are the parents, and The State does not own their children. The State has no right to declare whether they can or can't strike their kids in punishment, for example. The State also has no right to tell them what they can or can't teach their children. In fact, they are the ones who should be dictating to The State what it can or can't teach. They believe this so strongly that if they disagree with what The State teaches their children, they tend more and more these days to pull their kids out of public school altogether, to engage in home schooling.

But it's odd, about parental rights, because fundamentalists in essence believe that only they have these rights. They will NOT recognize your right, as a parent, to tell them, "Do not talk to my children about religion." Whatever principles you try to teach your children, that they disagree with, they will subtly try to undermine in as many ways as possible. What they believe your child "should" be taught, they will try to teach, no matter what your wishes are.

In other words – not only do fundamentalists believe they have parenting rights over their own children that supersede any rights by The State or others – they believe THEY HAVE PARENTING RIGHTS OVER YOUR CHILDREN, if they disagree with what you are teaching your kids.

All you need to do to test their commitment to "parental rights" is ask them to join you in fighting for your right to teach your child evolution, or to be an atheist, or to support left-wing politics. They only believe in "parental rights" if the parents believe in the "right" things – meaning fundamentalist Christianity in its current manifestation of right-wing politics.

Family structure will play a big role in their beliefs as well. In theory at least, they believe that the wife is always subjected to her husband. Even if she works outside the home, in theory her husband is boss, and makes the decisions for the family. They may not come right out and tell you that your equal-partner relationship is wrong in the eyes of God, but they will support political groups that try to undermine male-female equality, and will subtly disapprove if you have a relationship where the female partner takes the lead as often as, or more often than, the male partner.

If your partnership consists of two men or two women living in a marital relationship, you will be lucky if the fundamentalist neighbours speak to you at all. Certainly they will discourage their children from having anything to do with yours. They may in fact actively try to force you out of the neighbourhood or out of community involvement. Most of the time the best you can hope for is to be ignored.

Though if they do try to befriend you – beware. More than any other type of non-fundamentalist neighbour, you have the most to worry about from these "friends," no matter how much they might genuinely like you. Since their primary goal is to try to convert you to fundamentalist Christianity, this means as a corollary that they are not just trying to convert you, but TRYING TO BREAK UP YOUR PARTNERSHIP AND FAMILY. Because of course, their talk about "family values" only extends to their type of family. Any other type is ungodly, and therefore evil, and gay relationships are the most evil of all. They can convert a standard male-female family to fundamentalist Christianity without breaking up the family (though they will immediately try to "mentor" the new converts into the man-ruling-the-woman type of hierarchy). But they will never tolerate a gay relationship without wanting to destroy it.

We could go on and on with specific examples of how a set of fundamentalist neighbours would relate to non-fundamentalists, but I think you get the picture. Some fundamentalists do not behave this way, because while they agree in principle with the things taught at their church, they either lack the courage to try to push these beliefs on their neighbours, or they retain some sense that their neighbours have a right to hold different beliefs without interference. However, the stronger and more fervent their fundamentalist faith, the more likely they are to behave this way. Converting their neighbours to fundamentalist Christianity will be their number one priority, overriding freedom of conscience, parenting rights, and different family values.

And naturally, they extend these attitudes beyond the local neighbourhood, into society in general. So let us move outward too, to view them in action in the wider world.

Back to: Interjection: Acting Out

INTERJECTION: Acting Out

2005-08-22T10:16:00.000-07:00

Alright. We've laid out the world view of Christian fundamentalists, and seen how logically everything flows from their initial premises. We can see, from this, how they don't find anything contradictory in their belief system, because given their initial premises, it holds together very well and provides explanations for almost everything they see around them. And provides hope, and an ultimate solution to all the world's long-standing woes.

But now that we understand their philosophical foundations, we need to examine just how fundamentalist principles are acted out in the world. Someone might respond, "Look all around you! We already know how they act in the world. Isn't it obvious??"

In one sense, it is. But I still maintain that their actions in the world do not stem primarily from "sheer orneriness" or "sheer hatred." It is very handy for us to attribute their actions to things like that; it makes our work so much easier, and makes it easier for us to judge them and, in fact, to dismiss them. (And doesn't that sound exactly like what they do to non-fundamentalists, by lumping us all together, dismissively, with a few handy, all-encompassing terms like "sinners" or "traitors"??)

But the truth is far more complex than that. From my own experience as a fundamentalist for 31 years, I know that most of them are trying to do their best, to sort out the complexities of society. They are operating from a belief system they genuinely believe to be true, and they truly believe that if this belief system is spread in the world, it will heal the world and ultimately make it better. Their world view seems so "obvious" as the solution to everything, because it FITS what they see. Beginning with the premises they start with, they do find answers. And therefore, as a corollary, if the answer as they see it is so "obvious," then anyone who opposes that answer must be doing it deliberately, with very bad intentions indeed for the world.

Therefore it is absolutely necessary to understand the logic behind how they act. Even if we could forbid all their actions, they would still adhere to that internal logic, and would find some other way to act it out. But if we can begin to chip away at those underlying principles themselves, demonstrating that the truths about the world are vastly different from what they've been taught, I am convinced that that's the only way we have a hope of changing the actions that flow from their underlying beliefs.

So, let us begin the next stage of our inquiry. How are these people going to act in the world, starting with the premises they do?

Let's start with the fundamentalist as your next door neighbour, and move outward from there.

Back to: Rise Up and Feel the Power

Next: Love Thy Neighbour

Rise Up and Feel the Power (How Fundamentalists Think: Part Nine)

2005-07-14T13:11:00.000-07:00

So. After all the historical buildup, the deed was finally done. The Redeemer promised to Adam and Eve in the garden had finally arrived, and made the sacrifice for all the sin that had resulted from their wrong choices at the beginning of time. "It is finished," Jesus said. Finally.

Now what?

Well, the sacrifice was finished when Jesus died, but in fact the atonement wasn’t, quite. There was one more thing that needed to happen, to seal it tight, finish it off, show that it was complete and accepted by God. That thing was the Resurrection of Jesus.

This doctrine again puts fundamentalist Christians squarely in the middle of orthodox doctrine for Christianity through the ages, so their beliefs about the resurrection don’t particularly stand out. But it's important to understand these beliefs anyway, so we have the complete picture of how fundamentalists view the world. Having this full picture helps us understand how they behave in the world as a result.

For Christian fundamentalists the resurrection was literal and physical, rather than symbolic or spiritual. It was not a case of a body that had been tortured and lapsed into a faint or a coma, and mistaken for dead, being "revived" in the coolness of the tomb and stolen by the disciples. Fundamentalists have no problem at all with a real, physical coming back to life after genuine death. Remember, they believe that God is the creator of nature and its laws, and that he can intervene to counteract those laws when he has a good reason.

One thing that follows the belief that Jesus was genuinely dead and was resurrected bodily is the belief that wherever Heaven is, Jesus is there literally in the flesh. Whatever the spiritual dimensions of Heaven, it is also, now, somehow a literally physical place as well, where physically resurrected bodies can exist. And because Jesus’ work on earth was done to represent all humanity, then any humans who follow him and are resurrected at the end of time will also be resurrected in physical bodies, and will exist for all eternity in a physical state, albeit a pure, exalted, and transformed one.

There is an even more thrilling repercussion, for fundamentalists. They believe that Jesus' divine/human fusion was permanent. So Jesus not only exists in heaven as God, but also as human. Which means that through Jesus' work, humanity itself has been lifted up from degradation, into the godhead itself, and will remain a part of divinity for eternity. Jesus lifted humanity higher than it ever would have been if the Fall into sin had never happened. (Which, of course, raises all sorts of other interesting implications, which we can't explore right now. But I'm sure you can think of them already.)

Of course, it's only Jesus' humanity that is actually divine; all other humans will forever be subordinate to him (except in Mormonism, but they have a very different theology of the nature of divinity to begin with, which we won't go into here). But even though fundamentalists never for an instant equate themselves with the divinity of Jesus' human side, it's still nice to be associated with it. It would certainly justify their belief that all other forms of life are vastly inferior to humanity, whenever a fundamentalist might consider such comparisons.

This idea, of humanity being lifted directly into the godhead, is of course abhorrent to Muslim fundamentalists; and although I haven't studied Jewish views on the subject, I imagine it would be equally abhorrent to them, at least in the sense that Christian fundamentalists mean it. Hindu fundamentalists would have no problem with the idea of humanity united with divinity, but their view of the Ultimate Divine is that it is pretty much impersonal, and human spirits are sort of "absorbed" into it. In fact, they were part of it all along, and their individuality has been an illusion. So that what we would call "salvation" consists of these human spirits recognizing this fact, and their individuality melting back into the blissful, impersonal Divine. This, obviously, is vastly different from the Christian fundamentalist view.

But let's backtrack to the resurrection itself, and God’s reasons for raising Jesus from the dead. What were these reasons? And how did the resurrection, indicating that the salvation work was complete, actually accomplish the salvation of humankind?

Why the resurrection in the first place? Well, if Jesus had died and stayed dead under that burden of sins, it would have indicated that he had to suffer eternal death just like every other human. There would be no guarantee that the payment had been enough to free all other humans from the same fate. The resurrection was thought to indicate that the payment for sin was so absolutely complete that eternal death could not hold Jesus. His resurrection was a victory over both sin in general, and physical and spiritual death as well – not just for himself, but for all humankind. It literally undid the entire curse placed on physical and spiritual nature back when the first humans sinned.

When Christians consider the work accomplished by Jesus’ death and resurrection, there is often a sense of legal transaction: all sinful offenses, and the redemption and transformation of sinful humans, have somehow been "bought and paid for." God loved all humankind and wanted them to be saved, but rigid justice had to be served as well, so this was the ingenious way that he was true to both love and justice.

In North American fundamentalism, there are several interpretations of this legal transaction. One of these is the fairly simple view that Jesus suffered the equivalent of an eternity in hell for every single human being who has ever existed, who exists now, or who will ever exist. So the penalty due to each of them has been literally paid in full.

But this leads some Christians, called Universalists, to draw the logical conclusion that if the price has been fully paid, then all of humankind are now saved, whether they know about this gift – or accept it – or not. Missionary work done by these people in the past has consisted of telling people the good news, that God has done something about the sin in the world, and maybe they should mend their ways and try to live up to this great gift even if they don't actually convert to Christianity.

Which of course is abhorrent to most fundamentalists (and most orthodox Christians through history, in fact), who don't like the idea that anyone could possibly get into heaven who hasn't consciously (and abjectly) converted to their way of interpreting the Bible and Jesus' spiritual accomplishments. Nor do they like the idea that some Vishnu-worshipper across the world, or some mass murderer like Josef Stalin, are automatically "in" without any repenting or change of heart.

So the fundamentalists tend to adhere to varying versions of Calvinist beliefs, which teach that nobody gets into heaven without consciously repenting and converting to their version of Christianity. Everyone else goes to hell, even if the price has been paid for them, and despite the fact that this is not just. (Although in fact, pure Calvinism gets around this by teaching that whoever doesn't choose to convert and follow Jesus, well, Jesus didn't actually die for them anyway, because God foresaw what their decision would be and didn't waste his saving action on them. So if you're not a Christian, and you end up going to hell -- well, don’t worry: he didn’t die for you anyway. So your eternal death will be all yours, and was always going to happen. Feel better now?)

The Calvinist doctrines in their pure form (symbolized with the acronym TULIP) are fascinating – and horrifying. I debated going into more detail here, about each point in the acronym, but thought people might get bogged down with so much theology. But TULIP is still fairly important to get an understanding of the full extent of possible fundamentalist belief on the subject of salvation, and how people are saved. For those wanting a peek at the horrors of TULIP, check out these websites:

- This charming little page does a concise job of summing up TULIP, happily agreeing with all the logical and abominable conclusions of its five points.

- Whereas this one is a refutation of TULIP by a fundamentalist. So obviously, there are disagreements even among fundamentalists about the atonement and all its implications.

The final thing that is accomplished by Jesus' death and resurrection is the actual remaking of the individual who receives this gift and converts, deciding to follow God from now on. This is referred to as being "born again," and many Christians mean this as literally as possible without meaning an actual rebirth from the womb. For them, this is a spiritual re-birth which is very literal: the person's spirit is changed from their natural one that was already dead to God, into a reborn and alive spirit whose natural home is now heaven.

When a person repents and asks God to apply the blood of Jesus to their soul, the Holy Spirit (third person of the Christian trinity) is said to enter the person's soul and regenerate and energize it. So officially, he or she is reborn, and now considered holy and pure in God's eyes – as always, not because of their own merit, but because God now sees them through the filter of Jesus' blood, which was itself pure and holy. And in fact, their soul's destination is now heaven rather than eternal death.

The problem is that these born again people are still living in natural, untransformed bodies, which still have their natural tendency to sin and nothing but sin. So the rest of these Christians' lives are a learning process of allowing God's spirit to "live through" them, overcoming all these sinful tendencies. Any good or holy thing they do is only God doing it through them as they submit to him. Any bad or evil thing they do, on the other hand, results from their listening to their own natural tendencies to sin, which will be there until they are transformed at death. In other words, when they do good, God gets the credit, but when they do bad, it's all their fault.

This is why it's so easy for Christian fundamentalists, based in Calvinism, always to "blame the sinner" or even "blame the victim." Their belief system itself is never questioned. If anyone ever has difficulty accepting certain doctrines, or has difficulty putting certain lifestyle commands into practise, it is never the fault of a belief system that demands too much of human beings, or that has flaws in its reasoning or explanations. It is always the believer's fault, for "not having enough faith" or "not having prayed hard enough" or "not being submissive enough to God."

This also makes it easy to dismiss criticisms of their results, and makes it unlikely that fundamentalists will learn any lessons from other faiths or other ways of doing things. The moment a believer questions whether Christian fundamentalism has got this or that point quite right, or thinks that some other faith or belief system might have a point here and there, that person is immediately assured that they are "trusting human reasoning" and should instead re-submit to God. All questions of the system are interpreted as an edging back into reliance on human "natural reasoning" (which, remember, is flawed to begin with). Only by "allowing God to live and understand these things through them" will people be in the right relationship to God. And then things will work properly. And if things don't work properly – again, it's the believers' fault, no matter how devout and obedient they have tried to be.

So, what would constitute sufficient evidence, for fundamentalists, that their belief system is erroneous? NOTHING. All such evidence is automatically excluded, or blamed on the "sinfulness" of its bearer.

This is also why Christian fundamentalists are so dependent on the Bible. They can't listen to their own conscience or sense of justice to know what is good, because it, too, is tainted by their natural sinfulness. Nor can they trust their own intellects to understand the world. So the Bible, God's message to them, is the only source of knowledge about good or evil, and the only interpreter of knowledge in general. They are quite literally lost in a bewildering and frightening world, without it. Therefore it must be divinely inspired and error-free, because otherwise, they believe, they SIMPLY. CAN. NOT. KNOW. ANY. TRUTH. Period. And every bit of truth they discover about the world, about science, about human beings and nature, must be filtered through the prism of the Bible to make sure they "get it right."

One of the favourite phrases in Christian fundamentalism is "Let God be true, and every man a liar." If any evidence in the natural world contradicts the Bible's claims – it's the natural world that's got it wrong. Or at least, its ungodly interpreters.

So the death and resurrection of Jesus, and the application of his saving work to their souls and minds, begins the process of re-orienting their view of the world to match the "real" view – the one that appears to them to be propounded in the Bible. Fundamentalists spend their lives aligning their thinking to match this world view more and more closely.

So perhaps it's finally time to look at how Christian fundamentalist beliefs actually work themselves into the world. We've learned most of their foundational beliefs, and many of these beliefs explain why they behave as they do. But we need to examine some specifics, so we can see just how tightly their world view holds together as they put it into practise in the world. After that...perhaps we may be able to start finding the chinks in the wall, the jutting bricks that don't quite fit, so they can be pulled out and the edifice can be brought down.

Back to: Jesus Christ Was Not A Good Man

Next: Interjection: Acting Out

Jesus Christ Was Not A Good Man (How Fundamentalists Think: Part Eight)

2005-04-02T16:11:00.000-08:00

[Note: I should mention that the fundamentalists' beliefs about Jesus fit pretty much into the camp of general historic Christian orthodoxy. So when I talk about their believing this or that about Jesus, I'm not trying to say that these particular beliefs are different from what mainstream Christianity has always believed about Jesus. The reason I go into some detail about these beliefs is that when they are fitted into the rest of the fundamentalists' world view, they produce much different results from what we see in non-fundamentalist Christianity. So it isn't the beliefs about Jesus where the two sets of Christians differ very much; it's how those beliefs fit into the wider philosophy, and what is produced in the Christians' behavior as a result.]

Before we discuss Jesus, we should remind ourselves of the most important beliefs that Christian fundamentalists hold about God, the world, who Man [sic] is, and how humanity got into its current predicament. These beliefs don’t just form the backdrop to their views about Jesus; they actually determine these views, dictating that Jesus must be viewed in certain ways and not in others.

First, beliefs about God. He is the one and only God who exists (Christianity believes itself to be a monotheistic world view, with all other gods being counterfeits of the Real Thing). The pronoun “he” is the proper pronoun to use of God. He is love. He is holy. He cannot sacrifice either of these attributes in favor of the other (though in fundamentalism, he tends to lean more to the “holy,” judgemental side). He is also, despite the monotheistic claim, a Trinity; in the story of Jesus this doctrine really comes into its own.

Next, Man and the world (and fundamentalists take “Man” as the proper word to represent the entire race; women are by definition subordinate to men in this world view). Both Man and the world were created perfect, but when Man disobeyed God’s command and made himself the ruler of his own life, he and the physical world immediately began to run down and die. Man’s reasoning power became prone to error, and his spirit is born in a state of separation from God that, if he dies unredeemed, becomes permanent upon his physical death. He is born sinful, and will do nothing but sin, and therefore is born already condemned. He can do nothing to redeem himself.

So God promised a Redeemer, and spent a few thousand years manipulating history, nations, and people, to engineer the conditions required to produce the one who was promised.

Because God, being infinite, was infinitely wronged by Man’s sin, the payment to wipe the slate clean would have to be awfully big. It would, in fact, involve infinite sacrifice, blood, and death before the demands of infinite holiness and justice could be satisfied. The extensive laws God gave to the Israelites, his chosen people, were meant to illustrate the magnitude and completeness of the payment that would be required to redeem humankind.

With all of that as a backdrop, we come to it at last: the moment at which the whole wretched mess can start to be cleaned up. Jesus is born.

But already, that simple statement is not so simple. For fundamentalists, the Redeemer cannot be just a regular guy born in Bethlehem to a humble Jewish couple.

First off, if he is an ordinary human, he will be born sinful and already under condemnation himself, and therefore disqualified to redeem anyone. So he must be sinless.

Enter the Virgin Birth. For Jesus to be a sinless human, it seems that he cannot have a human father. Various reasons for this belief have been advanced throughout theological history. Some believe that Mary had to be a virgin because sex is basically sinful (or at least questionable and icky), and Jesus’ nature would have been tainted if he had been produced sexually. Others believe that the sinful nature (and everything else that’s really significant about human beings) comes down from the father rather than the mother, so Jesus bypassed the sinful nature by not having a human father.

The virgin birth is a doctrinal detail that is absolutely non-negotiable. The fact that such a thing appears virtually impossible in the natural world is no obstacle to belief. Remember that fundamentalists believe they are dealing with the Creator of the entire universe, who is the author of Nature rather than a servant of Nature, and who can certainly intervene at selected moments for his larger purposes. A supernatural intervention is not just unsurprising at such a crucial moment – it is almost imperative, to make sure everything turns out right.

So Jesus was born, literally without the hand (or anything else) of any human man being involved. And he was sinless.

We should add a note here, about Mary his mother. Christian fundamentalists do not venerate her, except as a normal woman who was obedient to God despite the social stigma she might suffer from the circumstances of this birth. They neither believe her to have been sinless, nor do they believe she was a perpetual virgin [references to Jesus’ brothers and sisters seem to prove she was not]. Fundamentalists view the Roman Catholic veneration of Mary as idolatry, and shrink in horror from the very thought that a sinful human woman could be thought of as the Queen of Heaven, or as an intercessor between people and God. Fundamentalists believe Jesus died as much for Mary’s sins as for anyone else’s. The Catholic veneration of Mary is one of several reasons that fundamentalists believe the Roman Catholic church is not a “real” Christian church. They consider it as counterfeit as any other religious belief that sets up a man-made substitute for God’s “true” plan of salvation. To venerate Mary, in their view, is no different from venerating the Hindu Lakshmi, the Babylonian Ishtar, or any other false goddess.

But back to Jesus. If he was merely human, he would still not be sufficient, even as a single sinless Man, to atone for humanity’s offense against the infinite holiness of God. In fact, the only one “big enough” to atone for infinite offense would be God himself.

Well, guess what! Luckily, Jesus isn’t just a man – he is also God. And here we encounter the divine Trinity in earnest.

Fundamentalists believe that God couldn’t just say, “Oh well, boys will be boys” and let the offense go; the demands of justice had to be met, and the atonement had to be made. And it had to be made by Man, since Man was the offender, yet no man was sufficient to the task. So because God loved Man, he himself would make the atonement, in sufficient measure – by becoming a Man and making the atonement in both his divine capacity and his human capacity.

So as well as being fully human (indeed, a complete representative of the entire human race in the same way Adam was at the beginning), Jesus is fully God.

And what a colossal stroke of luck – the structure of the Trinity (Divine Father, Divine Son, Divine Spirit) was exactly what was needed to fulfill the logistical requirements for making the atonement. The Spirit created Mary’s pregnancy, the Son descended to become human and make the atonement, and the Father was the one to whom the sacrifice was made, the one who judged it sufficient.

You could almost think the whole thing was pre-planned. And of course – according to fundamentalists, it was. God created the world, and created Man, knowing full well that Man would fall, and that atonement would be needed. Fundamentalists are careful to say (though the logic is hard to maintain; in fact, I believe it impossible to maintain) that humans had free will despite God’s foreknowledge, and were not inevitably doomed to sin. But God knew it all before it happened, and had already planned the solution. Which is why Jesus can be described in the scriptures as “the lamb of God, slain before the foundation of the world.”

So the Trinity plays a big part in Jesus’ birth and ministry, and the fundamentalists will not part with this doctrine. In practical terms, the exact same results could theoretically have been achieved with three separate divine beings instead of one, all united in purpose and love and holiness. But the fundamentalists are determined that there is only one God, and are fiercely in love with the idea of God sacrificing himself to himself to atone for sin. So the Trinity is here to stay.

The first big reason why they want to maintain the Three-in-One idea is that they insist that they are the heirs of the Jews of the Old Testament, for whom there truly was only one God. Fundamentalists regard the ancient Jewish writings as the foundational documents for their own beliefs, so they cannot allow themselves to split the godhead into three separate beings, despite the fact that fundamentalist theology has God functioning essentially that way. (We won’t discuss, here, the evidences for polytheism even in the ancient Jewish writings of the Old Testament.) So the Trinity is the only way they can resolve the contradiction. But also, they feel that if you make the three beings into separate individuals, you can possibly divide the running of the world into separate spheres. So that, theoretically, any one of those beings could be focussed on something that the others were not. But the fundamentalists want God to be in absolute control of, and conscious of, everything there is, all at once, totally and completely and simultaneously. Splitting into three separate gods is seen as somehow making the three into lesser beings, which cannot encompass the fundamentalist idea of how God functions.

The nature of Jesus himself is subject to similar debate, trying to understand how his divine nature and human nature interact and somehow function as one. He is described as both fully human, and fully God, and this can be a dilemma when one tries to understand how he could have been a realistic representative of all human beings during his life.

Fundamentalists say that the reason his thirty-plus years of human life were valuable to us is that he showed us how to live sinlessly and in full obedience to God. He is therefore an example for all other humans to follow as they re-orient themselves from a life of sinful self-centeredness into a God-oriented life. Another reason for his human lifespan is that he is supposed to have faced temptations and trials and weakness the same way the rest of us do, and therefore knows our difficulties, and empathizes with us and our hardships. And his perfectly sinless human life also became a life that qualified to be offered as a sacrifice to God, for the sins of the world.

Fundamentalists stress that it was in Jesus’ human capacity that he lived this perfect, sinless life. But objections have been made to this scenario, from the very beginning of church history. For one thing, Jesus can hardly be viewed as a typical human (and therefore someone we can expect to emulate) when he seems to have been born with a few distinct advantages we don’t have. He was born without the sinful nature the rest of us are saddled with, meaning he had no automatic tendency to sin. So could he, in fact, really empathize with those of us who, as fundamentalists delight to remind us, will always and only choose to sin because of our intrinsic nature? The very reason Jesus qualifies at all to be the Redeemer is that he is sinless. No sinful nature dragging him down inevitably. He starts out with a leg up on the rest of us from the very beginning.

And what about that little matter of his being God? Fundamentalists deny that Jesus’ God-nature helped him make his human choices, and insist that he faced all of them only as a human. Yet his God-nature manifests all over the place, almost every time he acts, in the biblical writings. The most charitable interpretation one can make is that he switches back and forth a lot.

Fundamentalists do have discussions about how Jesus’ basic natures function, but not in the sense of questioning whether the God-man doctrine is correct in the first place. Rather, they make a few assumptions – that Jesus was both God and Man, that he was perfectly human except that he lived sinlessly, that he was as fully God as he was fully human, that his two natures are still one rather than making him two separate beings – and any discussion the fundamentalists have after that are just questions of mechanics and logistics and results, rather than questioning the basic doctrines themselves.

So. We have the Redeemer as they see him: Jesus the Christ. The title “the Christ,” meaning the “anointed one,” refers to the long-standing Jewish practise of anointing someone with oil when they enter a leadership role. The anointing symbolizes the authority of the Spirit of God, descending onto the person to enable him to fulfill his role. In Jesus’ case, his anointing with the Spirit was literal, rather than symbolic, when the Spirit descended to him in person at his baptism and God’s voice announced that this was his Son. And so Jesus received the title: the Christ.

At the end of his sinless life, and a few short years of teaching and ministry to the needy, came at last the sacrifice that fundamentalists believe was prophesied to Adam and Eve thousands of years earlier, just after they had eaten the forbidden fruit and fallen into sin.

And here another question arises. Why could Jesus not simply have just died, rather than first be rejected so violently by the Jewish and Roman authorities, then tortured, then executed? One of the reasons offered by fundamentalists is that mere bloodshed wasn’t sufficient to atone for the offenses of Man – there had to be extreme suffering involved as well. (There were no hints, though, that the millions of sacrificed animals in the Old Testament were tortured before being sacrificed, even though they were supposed to prefigure Jesus’ sacrifice.) The more blood and gore the better, as far as fundamentalists are concerned. The extreme suffering supports one of their favorite doctrines: that the sin of the human race is really, really bad, so evil and bad that it’s almost unforgivable. So to atone for it, there has to be some really, really bad and nasty punishment. (This is undoubtedly one reason why fundamentalists generally adored Mel Gibson’s gory movie about the crucifixion, despite his being one of those “not-real-Christian” Roman Catholics.)

But fundamentalists would offer another reason why the torture and suffering happened. This would be that sinful people simply DO reject the purity of God and his teachings. Humans are so sinful and wicked that even if God himself came down, in love and mercy, to try to reconcile with them, they would always in their pride reject him furiously. The torture and the crucifixion simply prove, to fundamentalists, that humanity really is in a state of evil, and really is in need of redemption.

But there’s no denying that the torture, bloodshed, and violent death were pre-planned by God. For some reason, Jesus couldn’t just have his throat slit in the temple, like all the foreshadowing sacrificial animals, and let his own blood be sufficient for the atonement. There had to be suffering too.

One can see, rather graphically, why fundamentalists major so much on the holiness and judgement of God rather than the love and mercy. When they do speak of love and mercy, it is in the context of saying, “See what he horribly suffered because he loved you, because it was necessary to save you?? If you can reject that magnitude of love, then you deserve all the horrible suffering of hell!” So even love is intricately connected with death and judgement, always. There is no mercy except what is bought and paid for, violently. This goes a long way to explain many fundamentalist attitudes toward non-believers.

But to summarize, before we go on. Why is Jesus not just a “good man”? Because he had to be not just “good” but completely sinless, to qualify to stand in for sinful humanity. And he couldn’t just be a man, because to make the sacrifice sufficient, he had to be as big as God, the one who was offended by sin. In fact, he had to be God. He lived life as a human being, facing all the temptations and trials we face (though with his godhood manifesting at frequent intervals), and then had to suffer rejection, torture, and a violent death, to appease God and make the sacrifice effective.

Next we need to examine just what this sacrifice actually accomplished -- and why, even though it was supposedly sufficient for everybody, not everybody will be "saved" by it.

Back to: History - Oh, Those Other People

Next: Rise Up and Feel the Power

History - Oh, Those Other People (How Fundamentalists Think: Part Seven)

2005-02-17T17:05:00.000-08:00

It’s probably not entirely accurate to say that Christian fundamentalism thinks all history apart from its own is completely unimportant. But most fundamentalisms tend to believe that their own history is the defining story for the rest of humanity. Their God is the only God, and their revelation is either the only acceptable revelation, or the last and final word, capping and giving the final meaning to all revelation that came before.

So you have Christians saying that their “New Testament” books explain, complement, and complete all the revelation in what they call the “Old Testament” – the Law, the Prophets, and the Sayings of the Jews. The Mormons come along and add the Book of Mormon, which supposedly gives the final revelation to top the Bibles of the Jews and Christians. The Muslims’ book, the Qur’an, purports to tell many Biblical stories the way they really happened, since the Jews’ and Christians’ books have somehow “corrupted” them, and the Qur’an is now the only and final authority about the real God, Allah. (And amusingly, even the Baha’is, who are much less fundamentalist than most other religions, accepting other religions as true ways to God, still claim that their own scriptures “really” give the pure explanations about God, topping other scriptures, and incidentally being the very last word (yet again) on the matter.)

So it’s typical of a fundamentalist religion to regard its own story as The History That Matters, not just to themselves but to the whole world. And everything else has, at best, a secondary status.

Christian fundamentalists regard the history of all nations and races, apart from the ones they’re concerned with, as an illustration of just how badly human beings do when they lose touch with God. Since the world view and beliefs contained in the Bible are the One Truth, cultures and religions teaching anything else are false by definition. But Christians must then explain how other beliefs and cultures came into being, since they apparently began at the same place, and with the same knowledge, as the forerunners of the Cultures That Matter.

You can probably guess how they explain these variations. As usual, the answer is not primarily a matter of diversity, geography, difference of interpretation, or anything like that. No, the answer, as in everything else, is a matter of sinful moral choice.

According to Christian fundamentalism, those other cultures are the result of their populations’ deliberate attempt to deny God and avoid the responsibility of relating properly to him. They did, indeed, start with the same knowledge of God as all other cultures descended from Noah and his sons. But the ones that chose to deny God began a long spiral into sin, darkness, and corruption of the One Truth.

This sweeps away all cultural developments, all governments, all scientific and artistic achievements – everything. If a culture, say, in what later became China was the first to create paper, or pasta, this must have happened only because despite their sin, the people of China still retained glimmers of the image of God inside them. The great architecture of China, India, Greece, Egypt – clinically beautiful, but all essentially worthless because none of it was done to the honor of God or in knowledge of him.

Philosophies and religious thought are even more firmly dismissed. If a philosophy has developed that tries to teach justice and mercy for one’s fellow humans (Confucianism, for example; or the Laws of Hammurabi), again this must only have happened because there’s a glimmer of the image of God still inside human beings. In their groping around in the darkness, they still sometimes hit on bits of The Truth. But all these philosophies are basically man-centered, so again, they are worthless.

But – but – some philosophies and theologies aren’t “man-centered” at all, surely. There are a great many world belief systems that put God, or gods, at the center, and treat human beings as even less valuable than Christian fundamentalism does. Surely those can’t fall into the same category?

Of course they do, because they do not promote the Christian God. They are the most insidious philosophies of all, because they acknowledge human beings’ innate sinfulness and their need for a right relationship to God – but they substitute a human-created “god” for the real God. Anything, anything to avoid the real God and the real issue, which is their rebellion against him. Even when these cultures go so far as to admit they have a problem when it comes to the divine Creator – their human pride drives them to do anything to avoid bending the knee to him.

Even a polytheistic (many gods) belief system will have started with the same knowledge of the One God as did all descendants of Noah. But in their avoidance of God, they will gradually have allowed this knowledge to be obscured. And yet, the spiritual impulse was still there. So they began inventing other divine explanations for the mysteries of the world. Yet none of these man-made divinities was ever sufficient to explain the world, so the deities would gradually be multiplied. The original monotheistic knowledge fragmented and splintered until there was a multitude of gods and spirits and divinities.

But there are clues, say the fundamentalists, that this polytheism did begin as monotheism – the knowledge of the One God. In every polytheistic culture, they say, you can trace farther and farther back till you discover a belief that originally there was only One God. For Hindus, one of the big candidates could be Dyaus, an ancient sky god (though in fact there are many myths about one original god, and the stories are very different from each other, and there are many candidates). Dyaus is a candidate partly because he fits the “one god” profile in many ways, but also because he can be linked to Zeus of the Greeks, and Jupiter of the Romans (“Dyaus” and “Zeus” are from the same root word, and “Jupiter” comes from something like “Dyaus piter” [father god]). There are other explanations for this linkage – the fact, for instance, that the Indo-Aryan, Greek, and Roman cultures are all Indo-European cultures whose languages descended from the same proto-language – but no, the “real” explanation is that they were all originally talking about the One True God.

There are other primal gods that the fundamentalists point to as evidence of an original knowledge of the One God. For example, Viracocha of the Incas, who supposedly was a god above and behind all the other gods.

So the fundamentalists believe that every polytheistic culture began with a belief in the One God, and this belief degenerated and splintered into a belief in many gods.

There is also the matter of the legends of the Great Flood. This, for fundamentalists, is a major pointer to an original knowledge that was lost. Almost every culture in the world has such a legend, with a flood covering the entire known world, and a few human survivors, usually helped in their escape by a divinity. Certainly, one possible explanation might be the fact that every culture probably had some type of catastrophic flooding in its past history, but for fundamentalists, these legends are a racial memory of the Great Flood. It was such a catastrophic event in human history that every culture remembers it in some form. This legend is proof, for fundamentalists, that despite all of humanity’s attempts to pretend, they can’t entirely lose their knowledge of the One Truth. It still comes back to haunt them, making them accountable for rejecting it.

Then there is another biggie: the dying god. Many, many cultures have this idea among their myths. For Christian fundamentalists, this proves that these cultures have found it impossible to forget that God promised the Redeemer. They have twisted the promise till it fits into their own false religions, but they cannot eradicate it. Balder, Tammuz, Attis, Adonis, the Sacred King – everywhere, the dying divinity appears. But all reverence shown to him is within a man-made context, and therefore wicked. Yet these stories do serve as reminders of the promise so that there is no excuse, when a culture finally hears about the real Redeemer (Jesus), for their then rejecting him.

And by the way, returning to the idea of linguistic convergence – that the farther back you go, the closer and closer languages converge until you find the One Original Language – this idea fits perfectly with the fundamentalists’ claim that all cultures really did descend from the one original culture that knew God. They, of course, trace the split in languages back to the Tower of Babel, but for them, the convergence is proof that their beliefs about the descent of cultures are true.

So. What are the implications of this overview and interpretation of world cultures?

First – every religion is false. Not only false, but evil, because it was of man-made design, attempting to sidestep the question of human sin and rebellion against the One True God. In fact, every religion is not just evil, but outright degenerate. Fundamentalists look at the strange gods of Hinduism, for example, with their multiple arms and their weird adventures, and see demons. They will see the same thing in all mythologies that are so different from Christian myth – the Japanese tales of ice vampires and demons, Chinese tales of dragon gods – the stranger they are to western Christian mythical views, the more “demonic” they are interpreted to be, simply by definition.

Also, every non-Christian culture is evil at its root. And again, not just evil, but outright degenerate. Christian fundamentalists take special delight in discovering artistic and architectural achievements that were accomplished in the past, but could not now be repeated by the indigenous culture. The pyramids, for example, or some of the great ancient buildings of Zimbabwe. These, say the fundamentalists, were produced when those cultures were much less darkened by sin and degradation, but their subsequent degeneration has made them incapable of such things now.

Christian fundamentalists are particularly prone to point to Africa, to what they have called “savages” – “look at those people, half-naked and dirty, who only have the intelligence to build grass huts now, but once were mentally capable of conceiving great structures. They have obviously degenerated almost to the level of animals! Look what sin eventually produces in human cultures!” When the first missionaries spoke of going to “Darkest Africa,” they did not mean “a continent we don’t know very well” when they used the word “dark.” They meant “morally dark and degenerated.” It is also not surprising, then, that slavery of Africans could be justified from the Bible with a completely straight face.

Firm and coldly rational racism is pretty much inevitable when fundamentalism holds the view that its own story is the History That Matters, while everyone else has degenerated due to sin. Since Christianity has risen and gained power through the centuries mostly through the white, western races, it has been easy and logical to assume that the white races have remained much closer to the original purity of Man, while the races that were not the receptacles and fosterers of Christianity are intrinsically more degenerate and impure, and probably even less human.

Another ramification of fundamentalist belief about other cultures: their artistic achievements are of much less value. As always, morality is intrinsic to everything. So a piece of art that is used in the service of a foreign god, or is even a depiction of that god, however beautiful it is, is evil. For this reason, the fundamentalist Muslim Taliban could explode the beautiful and priceless Buddhist statues in Afghanistan, because Buddhism is a “false religion.” For this reason also, a Christian fundamentalist can destroy works of art without a qualm, because the art works are supposedly promoting the belief in false gods.

Even if the art is not explicitly religious, it is evil because it comes from a non-Christian culture, period. So that a North American Christian fundamentalist can hear music from India, and because it is so foreign to his own cultural musical ear, and because he has pre-defined India as an “evil culture,” he can immediately dismiss it as demonic music. The ancient painting styles of Japan – wrong. The twisted and strange sculptures of the Mayans – obviously demonic. And those jungle rhythms that became rock ‘n’ roll music? Fundamentalists have devised all sorts of theories claiming that those rhythms actually affect and harm the natural rhythms of the body and that’s “really” why they disapprove of the music – but the root reason, I suspect, is that the music and rhythms originated with non-white, non-Christian cultures. Which, of course, are inferior because they abandoned God, millennia ago.

It is too simplistic to say that the Christian fundamentalist attitude is, “We are better than you, our beliefs are better than your beliefs, and our God is better than your gods.” That is the surface manifestation of the even deeper attitude: “You were us, your belief was our belief, and you did know the True God. But you rejected the truth and preferred darkness and evil instead.”

And this, finally, is one of the great impulses for the colonization of the world by cultures based in Christianity. Yes, the main impulse (as with many non-Christian cultures in the past) was probably sheer economics. But much of the justification the European colonizing cultures used was based in the Christian view that theirs was the History That Mattered in the divine scheme, and that all other cultures were somehow morally and humanly inferior. This meant they could be exploited, but it also meant that they must be converted, and “lifted up” from the darkness, degradation, and evil into which they had sunk for so many centuries.

This is why most fundamentalists do not believe they are racists. They are trying to do good to these cultures, by “bringing them back” to God and lifting them out of darkness. But the racism beneath their good deeds is always ready to boil out at the first rejection. A fundamentalist soldier may believe he is doing Christian work, trying to “free the Iraqis” and open the way for them to hear the Gospel, but just let the Iraqis not show appropriate gratitude, just let them cling to their “false” Islamic beliefs, and that fundamentalist soldier will probably hate them very quickly for “rejecting freedom and rejecting God.” It will suddenly be much easier to blow their brains out, or torture them in an Iraqi prison. In that case, he will become God’s instrument of judgement, and those Iraqis will deserve it because they stubbornly cling to their rebellion against God.

Taking it in reverse, this was why the 9/11 hijackers so fervently believed they were doing God’s work in taking more than 3,000 lives with those planes. In their view, we are the inferior, degraded culture, while Islamic history is the History That Matters. They were Allah’s instruments of judgement, since we continue to cling to false beliefs and refuse to return to the true Creator. We are the ones who have invented a counterfeit, to avoid our responsibility to repent.

Although there are two possible ways to interpret all the above-noted cultural similarities as well as the differences, a fundamentalist will always choose the second way.

The first interpretation is that since we are all human, it is inevitable that the cultures we create through history will have many similarities in belief, in the types of stories we tell, in what we value. The similar myths – the dying god, the flood, the uber-god – repeat themselves in various cultures because the human psyche is prone to creating such stories. Meanwhile, differences in culture will develop as groups become isolated from each other and interact with their environment and live their own history. This view easily accounts for both the similarities and the differences.

The second interpretation (which the fundamentalist will always choose) is that despite the many similarities among cultures, only one of the cultures is the real history – and all others are merely copies and counterfeits or, at best, pointers away from themselves to the History That Matters. Differences in culture develop simply because Everyone Else Is Wrong.

Small wonder that the historical relations of any fundamentalist culture with all other cultures are so consistently nasty.

But, just as a final aside, it is also not hard to see how Christian fundamentalists’ view of their own history dovetails so easily with the “Me first, at everyone else’s expense” form of rabid capitalism they currently espouse. But we will deal with that in a later essay.

For now, we have finally come to the Crux (literally) of everything. All of pre-history and world history have been working toward this moment. And so we proceed to the most important person in (Christian) fundamentalist history: Jesus Christ the promised Redeemer.

Next: Jesus Christ was Not a Good Man

Back to: Interjection: All Will Be Revealed

INTERJECTION: All Will be Revealed

2005-01-27T16:05:00.000-08:00

We have followed the History That Mattered, as Christian fundamentalists see it, in which God engineered the fates of middle eastern nations and peoples to bring about the birth of the promised Redeemer, Jesus.

We should mention, just to wrap up that history, why we seem to know so much about it, especially since some of the tales go back so far (all the way to the first human couple). All through the years, prophets and other leaders were inspired by God to write down this history and preserve it (and frequently explain the moral of the object lesson). It was the History That Mattered, after all, so it needed to be recorded. The fundamentalists believe that the writers were inspired word-for-word, and that the words that were preserved were the actual words of God himself, expressed through the personality of the writer.

But it wasn't just for the sake of keeping an accurate record that these things were written.

Remember that Man was now separated from God, and no longer had direct communication with him. Remember also that with the Fall of physical nature, Man's body became subject to frailties, and his mind and reasoning became darkened.

Therefore, as the years accumulated, the remembrance of the most important events in the world would fade and either be forgotten altogether, or corrupted into mere legend and probably embroidered with false details. And as to Man remembering or rediscovering the truths about God himself - forget it.

Therefore, what was needed was Revelation. The only way to keep human beings from sinking entirely into intellectual darkness was if God occasionally interjected the One Truth back into their awareness. They would never, ever be capable of learning the One Truth with their own intellect. So God had to tell them, and once he had told them and it had been recorded, he had to preserve the records so that they remained accurate.

This is a common thread in most fundamentalisms: that humans with their own minds are not capable of discovering anything about God. This is why Ganesha wrote the Vedas with his tusk, why Allah visited Mohammed and gave him the Qur'an, and why God inspired so many writers through the ages. It's even why the Mormon God sent the angel to show Joseph Smith the golden plates that he translated into the Book of Mormon.

For Christian fundamentalists, Revelation is where the books of the Bible came from, and this is why the Bible is so important to them. It contains the One Truth that they would never have known without it. And because it was essentially dictated by God, and God is the one who knows the One Truth, and is not a liar - every single word of the Bible is absolute truth. In fact, his Spirit is within the words and the stories. Read them, and you are in literal contact with God.

This, for them, is why you don't tamper with the Bible. Nor do you pick and choose which parts of it you "like" and which you "don't agree with." It's all literally true, and it is also terribly precious. Humanity would not have known why they were in such a mess, nor would they have known what God had done to get them out of the mess, if he hadn't revealed the Bible to them, gradually through history.

It is the one, final Authority. On EVERYTHING. Since it was given by God for the salvation of humanity, it explains the basic way to live in any era of human history. It teaches the underlying principles by which you can judge anything that comes up in human history - everything from whether or not it's a good idea to switch from a short bow to a long bow in battle, to whether or not video games are acceptable.

So that was another purpose of the long history leading up to the Redeemer, and at least part of the history that came after him: to provide the Revelation humans needed so that they would understand the Big Problem, and know about the Promised Solution. The History That Mattered, then, was designed to do the following:

1) Set up the right conditions to produce the Redeemer
2) Provide a graphic object lesson about having the right relationship to God
3) Provide all the Revelation necessary for men to be saved by the Redeemer

But an awful lot of stuff happened elsewhere in the world, while this narrowly-focussed history was going on. What about all those other people and the things they were doing in the meantime? Let's go on now to look at their history, and its significance.

Next: History - Oh, Those Other People

Back to: History - The Part God is Interested In

History – The Part God is Interested In (How Fundamentalists Think: Part Six)

2005-01-26T16:37:00.000-08:00

And so history began. Fundamentalists divide past history into two segments: the history of humankind in general, and the narrower, highly-focussed stream of history that God really cared about. The only “real” history is the part leading to the promised Redeemer, Jesus. The rest of history, and those millions of lives, were of no real importance except where they intersected the history God was working on and affected it somehow. When Christian fundamentalists view any history not directly connected to the project of producing the Redeemer, they dismiss it as a long fall into degradation. Any history or culture not connected to God’s historical project is regarded as degraded and evil by definition.

In this essay, we will look first at the part of history that is “really” important, the stream engineered by God to bring Jesus into existence as the redeemer. (In the next essay, we will examine the fundamentalist view of everyone else’s history.) It appears to have taken about 4000 years to get Jesus born. That may not be long for God, but it’s awfully long for humans. So what was he up to all that time?

Envision history as a sort of funnel on its side, very wide at the beginning, getting narrower and narrower till it finally reaches its point: Jesus.

Biblical history is portrayed like that. We began with the mass of people-in-general as the world population got fairly large (and yes, Cain and Abel and Seth did marry their own sisters). Man gradually developed culture, music, agriculture, cities, etc. He also committed the first murder, followed by others, as his inherent sinfulness began to manifest.

His sinfulness became so widespread, in fact, that God sent the Great Flood, saving only Noah and his family from the entire human population. (Fundamentalists take this Flood literally; it covered the world; and only eight people, and two of every animal, survived.) The historical funnel narrowed to a point, but this was a false start. So humanity began to grow again from this small group.

There are some interesting details in the flood story, though. There was another blood sacrifice to give thanks to God for the rescue from the flood. The habit of killing an animal to mark Man’s redemption was starting to develop in the biblical narrative. Additionally, it was only now that Man was given permission to eat animals. Nature was again given into his hands, but their relationship was harsher: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth. And the fear of you and the terror of you shall be on every beast of the earth and on every bird of the sky; with everything that creeps on the ground, and all the fish of the sea, into your hand they are given” (Genesis 9:1, 2 – New American Standard version).

As humanity re-multiplied, nations and races developed, taking their names from Noah’s three sons and their descendants. (Fundamentalists believe that “Semites” are descended from Noah’s son Shem, for example.) Eventually it was time for God to start the narrowing-down process in earnest, that would lead to Jesus.

First he formed yet another nation, beginning by pulling Abraham out of the ancient Babylonian city of Ur. This “pulling out” from one’s original setting is a motif repeated constantly in Christian fundamentalism. Their theology is very much about separating people from their original family, friends, and other ties, coalescing them into a new, God-based “family” with new allegiances. Abraham is considered the archetypal separation figure, because the Jewish nation starts with him.

Through Abraham, his son Isaac, Isaac’s son Jacob, and Jacob’s twelve sons, the Israelite nation was formed, with its twelve tribes descending from those twelve sons. God changed Jacob’s name to “Israel,” and the new nation took its name from him. During the course of his sons’ adventures, another “narrowing-down” occurred: the tribe of Judah, was designated as the tribe from which the promised redeemer would come. So this was the progression as the funnel of history and humanity narrowed:

General humanity --> One nation (Israel) --> One tribe (Judah)

After the Israelites found themselves enslaved in Egypt, and God miraculously delivered them, he promised them a homeland all their own. This was another separation, of an entire nation this time, and the nation would be an object lesson to the rest of humanity on the ups and downs of a proper relationship to God.

Along the way to the promised land, though, the concept of bloodshed for the sake of redemption was institutionalized. This is where the many rules we associate with Jewish observance originated: food laws, marriage and family relationships, financial laws, and most importantly, the laws about what animals one was to sacrifice to atone for which type of sin. Blood and death were crucial to the relationship with God. There were so many sacrifices designated for so many sins, great and small, that it creates the impression that these people were constantly living on the very edge of falling out of righteousness into eternal damnation. One begins to wonder just how big these people’s flocks had to be, to accommodate all this killing.

Remember that I am describing this from the Christian fundamentalist point of view. Many things in the historical account of the Israelites would be explained very differently by the adherents of Judaism. But for the Christian fundamentalist, the reason all these sacrifices were needed was that the promised Redeemer had not yet come. So technically, none of these people were saved from eternal damnation, because the Savior hadn’t come yet.

This is another logical outcome of the fundamentalist system described so far. If a person physically died in a state of separation from God, the state of their soul at that moment should have become permanent. That would mean that every single human being who lived in the four thousand years before Jesus came should have been lost and damned, irrevocably.

And they would have been, except that the loving God instituted the means whereby all humans who repented of their innate sinfulness could be put in a sort of “holding pattern” until the final transaction was complete that could save them. Since the sacrifice Jesus was to make involved blood and death, all sacrifices designed to point people’s faith toward that future sacrifice must also involve blood and death. Except, of course, that animals were only symbolic, and could not really remove sin. So the sacrifice had to be made over and over and over, for all sins, repeatedly. These sacrifices, when offered in a properly repentant state of heart, expressed the penitent’s faith in God’s promise of future redemption, and their reliance on it to save them.

When God eventually brought this raucous nation to the promised land (after a lot of sin, judgement, and wandering through the desert), the land unfortunately had long-standing inhabitants already. But this is God we’re talking about; nothing is an obstacle for him. He authorized many invasions, and genocide on a staggering scale. Men, women, children, even animals – he frequently ordered every single one slaughtered. (Sometimes exceptions were made for female virgins; we can pretty much imagine where they ended up, can’t we?) But this was okay, you see, because they were all eeeeevil. God is good by definition, so if he said this particular mass genocide was good – why, it was good. Period.

If you question that, well, we already know it’s because your mind is corrupted by sin, and your reasoning doesn’t work properly. Remember?

During the years of establishing the Israelites in the promised land, another narrowing-down occurred, designating the family of Jesse (through King David, its most prominent member), of the tribe of Judah as the family from which the promised redeemer would come.

General humanity --> One nation (Israel) --> One tribe (Judah) --> One family (Jesse, through David)

The rest of the Israel’s history, until Jesus finally arrived, was mainly an object lesson for us in the future. Stories from these centuries support some favorite fundamentalist motifs. For example, Israel frequently abandoned its relationship to God and misbehaved, for which God always judged them. Twice, in fact, he did so by having a heathen empire invade and take most of the population captive. Ancient Assyria came first, hauling away most of ten Israelite tribes, which were so decimated that they never existed as coherent tribes again, and are known even today as the “lost tribes of Israel.” Later, the Babylonian empire did the same thing to the tribe of Judah, taking them into captivity.

Judah, however, had a different fate from the lost ten tribes, for these people were brought back to Israel after a generation or two of captivity. This plays into the fundamentalist motif of “separation” – those who repented and reconciled with God were called out of both their place of captivity, and out of the mass of the twelve tribes, to become a distinctive God-serving entity of their own. Another name for this, in fundamentalist terms, is the “righteous remnant.”

Any time you hear a fundamentalist talking about a “remnant,” this is the motif they are referring back to. The “remnant” motif has been used throughout Christian history, and not just by fundamentalists. Any time the established church is seen as having fallen into sin and fallen away from God, so that people who want to serve God break away and form their own church or community, they think of themselves as another manifestation of that “righteous remnant.” Protestants breaking away from the Catholic church – a remnant, called to separate, by God. Parents taking kids out of secular schools and teaching them in private Christian schools – another “righteous remnant.” Modern American fundamentalists looking back at the Pilgrims and the founding of the United States – they view this history as another instance of God calling the “righteous remnant” out of the mass of unrighteous humanity, to start a godly enterprise.

It all goes back to these biblical examples where God judged Israel but saved the righteous few and started something new and divine with those few people who remained loyal to God.

Another fundamentalist motif supported by the history of Israel is the subjugation of women. This may sound far-fetched, until you realize that the image of Israel as either Bride or Whore is used incessantly by many of the prophets whose writings make up most of the Old Testament. When Israel is obedient to God, she is God’s Bride. When Israel abandons God and the people become interested in other deities – she is “whoring after other gods.”

Here is another reason why Christian fundamentalists insist on women’s subjugation to their husbands. This relationship is supposed to model humanity’s proper relationship to God. If women are independent or equal, this destroys the object lesson. Fundamentalists believe that deep down inside, even if we are not aware of it, we know what the proper hierarchy is: God above Man above Woman above Children. If we deviate from this, we have sinned, and subconsciously know it. And if we allow a deviation from this hierarchy to become normal in society, we send a message that it’s alright for humans to be independent of God, rather than his subjects. So women must be kept subjugated to men, to keep the object lesson clear and keep society functioning properly. The Bride/Whore motif also gives fundamentalists the justification they want, for holding independent women in utter contempt and describing them in the most insulting terms.

The final narrowing-down in history – and the final example of how obedient women are supposed to be – is Mary, the mother of Jesus. She was a good woman, evidenced by her willingness to accept God’s will even though it could potentially ruin her reputation in society (and indeed, her pregnancy upset her betrothed so much that God had to send him a special message to reassure him that she was still a virgin and the baby was divine). And with this final object lesson of female humility, Jesus was finally born.

General humanity --> One nation (Israel) --> One tribe (Judah) --> One family (Jesse, through David) --> Mary --> Jesus

We will examine the nature and role of Jesus, in the fundamentalist view, in a later essay. But first we will take a quick peek at the rest of world history, and what the fundamentalists make of it.

Next: All Will be Revealed

Back to: Promises, Promises

Promises, Promises (How Fundamentalists Think: Part Five)

2005-01-20T15:17:00.000-08:00

Before going on, let’s review the situation so far, as Christian fundamentalists see it. Their belief addresses two issues: first, what the Big Problem is in the world and how it got that way; and second, the Promise of a solution and how it is to be implemented.

We’ve pretty much covered the Big Problem now. For almost all fundamentalists of any religion, the Big Problem is that humans and the world are not running according to the Real Truths of the universe. These Real Truths have usually been explained to humans in the past by a divinity of some sort, since people are incapable of discovering them on their own (e.g. in Hinduism, Ganesha the elephant god breaks off a tusk and uses it to write the sacred Vedas [Hindu scriptures]; or Allah visits Mohammad to bestow the Qur’an; or Yahweh dictates the Torah to Moses and later inspires several prophets and apostles with more of the Real Truths). Fundamentalists virtually always have a book that they refer to for their beliefs about the world. These Truths, since they came from God, are not modifiable, as we have seen in past essays.

In some fundamentalist systems (e.g. strict Hinduism) the problem of the world not running according to the Real Truths, although unfortunate, is part of a larger repeating cycle through the history of the universe. You should fight the decay, but if you’re in the final, most evil stage in the current cycle, it’s going to proceed almost inevitably to a very bad end before starting again with a pristine beginning. For other fundamentalist systems, which believe that history only happens once, in a straight line rather than in repeating cycles, all this badness should never have happened in the first place, and the divinity in charge (e.g. Allah or Yahweh) has had to go to a lot of trouble to mop up the mess, and boy, is humankind in trouble because of it.

In Christian fundamentalism, as we have observed, the Big Problem is that God created a perfect world and perfect human beings, and gave the first human a lot of control over the nature and future of the world. But Man (the correct word, for fundamentalists, even though the initial choice was made by the Woman) chose to make himself the ruler of his life rather than God. Therefore Man and all his descendants fell into inevitable sin, which separated them irrevocably from the holy God, and also plunged the physical world into entropy and corruption.

And so. This must mean that Man is a lost cause, right? God should just write off this creation and try another one to see if it will go better. Right?

Actually, no. This is where another big fundamentalist belief – that “God is love” – begins to come into its own. We may scoff at this idea, coming from them of all people. We do have many good reasons to think that oppressive, rigid, frequently hateful Christian fundamentalists have a lot of nerve trying to tell us that all their spleen and vindictiveness come from God’s love. But once again, things are not as simple as we might try to make them out for our convenience. We must at least try to understand how a vast group of people can simultaneously believe that love is a prime characteristic of their God, and yet perpetrate all sorts of nastiness in the name of that love. If we don’t get some understanding of how they can hold these contradictions in their minds, we will never unravel them in actual society.

For the fundamentalist, God demonstrated his love by not punishing Man with death as he deserved. True, Man was in a state of spiritual death and separation from God. But God, in his mercy, kept him physically alive, so this separation had not become irrevocable.* While Man was alive in the flesh, things could still be fixed. (*In the Christian fundamentalist view, and I believe the Islamic view as well, your spiritual state at the moment of death becomes permanent. Catholics have some leeway in the concept of Purgatory, where the sin that still weighs you down at death may be worked off, but after that, your spiritual state is also permanent. I suspect that Sikh fundamentalists have a similar view of the soul’s permanent state at death, but Hindus believe you can improve your state in your next incarnation by living a better life in this one. Their view of the soul’s primary goal, however, is very different from the western fundamentalists’ view: Hindus seek the individual soul’s blissful absorption into the one ultimate Soul.)

When God kept Man alive, it was so Man could still be restored to an eternal relationship with God. But the solution to the sin problem – which we will deal with when we talk about Jesus Christ – was going to take many years to work out. Therefore, Man’s survival had to be ensured in the meantime.

First, God clothed the Man and Woman in animal skins rather than the vegetation they had used. This act, incidentally, constituted the very first blood sacrifice toward the salvation of Man. Bloodshed is a constant element of the salvation plan in Christian fundamentalism. Theologians view even the sacrifice of these animals for the first clothing as an object lesson God made for Man, to demonstrate just how serious the sinful choice really was. There would be many more of these object lessons before history was done and salvation was accomplished.

This is the first instance of something we see over and over again in fundamentalism. God basically says this: “See how awful you are, having sinned. But see how I love you and take care of you. But see how awful your sin was, because I must kill to save you. But see how much I love you as I kill for you anyway. And by the way, the clothes you made yourselves were garbage; only things that I provide are valuable.” And so on. This wrenching mixture – professed love simultaneously mixed with utter condemnation – keeps fundamentalists in an abject state, teaching them to hate themselves while magnifying God’s love even though they are so worthless they don’t deserve it. The fundamentalists who most sincerely and genuinely believe their own doctrines hate themselves most completely.

This is also probably one root of their hatred of people who don’t view God as they do: “those nasty sinners who deserve death but who reject the life offered by God!”

The Genesis story displays a typical mixture of condemnation and love, as he takes care of the undeserving sinners. He gives Man a livelihood (tilling the soil) – but promises that “[c]ursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field; by the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground” (Genesis 3:17, 18 – New American Standard version). He also makes the complete subjugation of women a divinely decreed institution now: “I will greatly multiply your pain in childbirth, in pain you shall bring forth children; yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you” (Gen. 3:16, NAS version). Fundamentalists insist this was a loving decree, for women’s protection, to prevent their going off on their own and bringing trouble to their male leaders, the way Eve did to Adam when she ate the fruit and gave it to him [apparently he had no will power to refuse of his own accord]. This rationalization must be read into the decree, however, because the literal command is very harsh.

God makes another surprising move: he kicks Man out of the garden, “lest he stretch out his hand, and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever” (Gen. 3:22). This sounds like the harshest move of all. Isn’t death now the problem? Why wouldn’t it be a good thing for Man to regain eternal life?

The problem is that Man is now in a spiritually sinful state of separation from God. If he were to gain eternal life now, it would be a life of permanent separation from God. His condemnation could never be rectified, and his sinfulness could never change. So in fact, this was indeed an act of love.

All of these provisions to keep Man alive were enacted because God had made a Promise of redemption that had yet to be worked out in history. At least, that’s how the fundamentalists interpret the following verse, as God speaks sternly to the serpent who had tempted the Woman to eat the forbidden fruit in the first place:

“I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise you on the head, and you shall bruise him on the heel” (Gen. 3:15).

There. Makes everything clear, doesn’t it? This is obviously a Promise that all of man’s sinfulness would be taken care of eventually and everything would be perfect again. Got it?

Neither did I, the first time I was told about it. But I’m going to demonstrate how the fundamentalists interpret every phrase, because this is the first verse they use to make the claim that the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus were planned from the beginning of time, and that therefore there are no “other ways” to God and no other valid religions. (It is also “proof,” for them, that the Jews have been misunderstanding their own scriptures, and God’s plan for them, almost from the beginning.)

The “enmity between you and the woman” is pretty clear. Humans and serpents often have an iffy relationship, and it stands to reason that if the serpent tempted humans to fall into sin, and the consequences will reverberate to all future generations, then future serpents and future descendants of the Woman will continue to be at odds. (Though I have to interject that there isn’t even the slightest raising of an eyebrow at the purely folkloric element of a talking animal being essential in this account. And this isn’t the only talking animal in the scriptures either. But on we go…)

It’s where the enmity is prophesied “between your seed [the serpent’s] and her seed [obviously the Woman’s]” that the fundamentalist interpretation gets interesting. Supposedly, in the Bible, the “seed” is always described as the man’s seed (and is plural). Man is the biblical source of the next generation, not the woman. Except, apparently, this once. So why is that?

Silly. It’s obvious! This is a prophecy of the virgin birth of Jesus! Duh. The one time when the man didn’t provide the “seed,” but the human birth comes entirely from the woman – well, there you have the virgin birth. See?

And you thought the verse was talking about all future generations [“seed’] of humans. Nope. It’s talking about one person only: Jesus Christ. Which suggests that “thy seed” (meaning the serpent’s “seed”) may be…who? Sort of the diametric opposite of Jesus, in Christian theology. Satan, probably? (Mentioning the serpent’s “seed” is actually inaccurate, since the future “seed” is apparently the same being who appears in Genesis. The reasoning goes that it wasn’t the literal serpent, the animal, acting in Genesis but the serpent possessed by Satan, meaning that yes, Satan will reappear later in history. But the text never says that. In fact, in the temptation scene, the serpent is called “more crafty than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made” [Genesis 3:1], making it pretty clear that it is the actual animal we’re talking about. So many interesting problems trying to take this story literally, and still try to claim that the interpretation comes directly from the text itself!)

Anyway. The result of this enmity through the ages, between the serpent and the man. The man will bruise the serpent’s head, and the serpent will bruise his heel. The New American Standard version offers “crush” as an alternate word to “bruise” when talking about the man’s deed, by the way, but still doesn’t offer it as the primary translation, keeping “bruise” in the text.

But what’s with all this bruising? Well, that’s obvious too, surely. The serpent will “bruise the heel” of the man – meaning a temporary injury, but nothing too bad. Whereas the man will bruise (or crush) the serpent’s head. This is seen as a fatal blow, which will destroy the serpent. Head injury vs. heel injury – fatal injury vs. not-so-bad injury (although…tell that to Achilles! But anyway…). This is where Jesus permanently defeats Satan (say the fundamentalists, though if the original word really does carry the meaning of “bruise” more than “crush,” one might argue that the defeat surely isn’t as permanent as they want to claim).

And there you have it. This is the great Promise that was made to the primordial human couple. Go back and re-read the verse and see if you can see it now: Jesus will be born of a virgin (where does it say he will be part-God, though?), and although he will suffer a temporary “bruising” or setback (this would be the crucifixion in case you hadn’t guessed by now), in the end he will utterly defeat Satan (this would be the resurrection and everything that follows from it).

Fundamentalists are very clear on the Big Problem, and now they have their Promised solution. For them, this is the real beginning of history, and the sole purpose of human history is to bring this Promise to complete fruition. Everything that ever happens in human history is not in fact about human beings at all. The whole show is simply the working-out of the Promise, and once it is fulfilled and all the ramifications worked through, history ends. Poof.

So let’s go have a bit of a look at history, and see how it all works out, shall we?

Next: History -- The Part God is Interested In

Back to: The Nature of Nature

The Nature of Nature (How Fundamentalists Think: Part Four)

2005-01-08T14:57:00.000-08:00

We’ve established the following scenario, underlying Man’s relationship with Nature in the Christian fundamentalist world view:

Man had the say in where he and his descendants would end up, morally and spiritually. But he also had the say – at least that once – in what would happen to the physical world as well, seemingly right down to the atomic level. When he went down, he took the whole physical world with him.

This means that from the moment he chose to separate himself from God, things began to die. This was the beginning of entropy. Even if living systems are maintained and fed with the fuel they need to live, eventually they wear out or suffer some misfortune, and they die. Every amoeba, every plant, every animal. Even rock can wear away eventually. A fundamentalist may not explicitly blame this inanimate wearing-away on sin, yet every flaw or aberration in nature is taken by them as evidence that the world is “fallen” along with Man.

Therefore, Adam and his descendants, and the entire physical world, are skewed because of their separation from God. This is not just an explanation of why things now go wrong, but is far deeper and more insidious than that. It means that using “naturalness” as evidence for the properness of something can be dead wrong. It is not a positive recommendation, to say that something “comes naturally.” In fact, the more “naturally” a thing comes (especially relating to moral issues), the more likely it is to be wrong or outright forbidden. Its “coming naturally” is one of the things that condemns it. We will return to this in later installments.

Meanwhile, there wasn’t only punishment after Man’s fall. God, in his mercy, still made provisions for human beings and set them up to live in the world as it now was. It was going to be a lot harder to live in the fallen world, but there was no hint that God had entirely rescinded the authority he had given Man in the world. It was certainly still his possession and responsibility. The authority over nature was now more of a “legal” authority than his previous “magical” authority (i.e. being able to change the character of nature itself with a single moral choice). But the original command, given before the Fall, seemed still to stand: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth…And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (Genesis 1:26, 28, King James Version). This of course implies that nature is his to use as he sees fit; he is in charge of it while he lives in the world.

One might assume that this authority implies a wise stewardship of God’s “good creation,” but many fundamentalists sidestep this implication. They often emphasize man’s “dominion” and “subduing” more than any “stewardship.” Even among those who speak of stewardship, there is a tendency to justify practices that might leave nature in bad shape, if they appear to do some sort of good for Man, who is more important than nature in general.

In their view of the universe’s life span, Nature is going to be destroyed anyway. God doesn’t plan to leave the world as it is now, all imperfect and skewed. At the end of time, when God judges everyone, he will re-create the world and it will be perfect again. Therefore, for Christian fundamentalists especially, keeping nature in good shape is far down on the priority list, especially since they believe the end of time is actually quite near. They believe that keeping nature in good shape would be a waste of efforts better devoted to things that are far more important as the end of the world approaches.

For fundamentalists, environmental concerns are like trying to tape up the gaping hole in the Titanic. This is crucial for us to understand. If their premises were true, this position would be completely logical and even commendable. You don’t waste time trying to fix a ship that’s irrevocably sinking; all efforts must be directed toward saving the passengers. At the most, you may block a few holes to stem the inflow of water a bit, but only in passing and only as a means to the primary end: saving the people.

This means it is not an automatic fact that a fundamentalist who doesn’t care about the environment has those opinions because he/she is a nasty person. If their premises were correct, it would in fact be criminal to spend too much time trying to fix or maintain the sinking ship. They may actually be ignoring the environment because they are good people. Hard to imagine, isn’t it, for those of us who don’t accept their premises? But the whole purpose of these essays, after all, is to help people understand the world from the point of view of the fundamentalist.

We must differentiate, of course, between fundamentalists who ignore the environment because they think people are more important and time is short, and those who deliberately violate it for their own gain, even though it hurts many people. The latter group are not good people, and we can agree on this. They use fundamentalism to disguise their rapacity, and adopt a “survival of the fittest” mentality to justify trampling people. The former group, however, may have good motives which would make sense if their view of the world were correct. We may balk at admitting that there really are some fundamentalists who are good people, and de-value environmental issues “only” because they believe the physical world is a sinking ship and it’s more important to rescue the passengers. But we cannot paint them all, conveniently, with the “evil” brush. Their position is more complicated than that and we commit an intellectual error by caricaturing them to make our position seem stronger.

Indeed, there is constant debate in the fundamentalist communities about Man’s stewardship of the world, and the responsibility to pass a decent physical world to future generations, just in case the end of the world isn’t as near as some think. We don’t hear about these people because they’re not the ones trumpeting their positions all over the media, or influencing the government. But they are there, and are trying.

There is another thing we must consider, which is also unpopular among those who simply want to write fundamentalists off as absolutely crazy loonies whose views don’t need to be given any hearing. Remember these things: 1) the world was created by God; 2) Man was created in God’s image; 3) the implication is that Man can therefore understand God. And another implication is that Man can also understand God’s creation.

And voila! Science.

What?? But – but –the fundamentalists are against science, aren’t they? Fundamentalism pretty much squashes true scientific inquiry. Doesn’t it? Doesn’t it??

Well, yes, in practice it seems to. And no, in theory it doesn’t actually have to. If their premises were true, and God’s created world were understandable by Man made in God’s image – why, scientific research would actually be the crowning achievement for the fundamentalist scientist. And in fact, some of the early scientists who made great research breakthroughs were Christians energized by the conviction that they were deciphering the underlying physical laws of God’s created world. (For example, James Clerk Maxwell, who developed the theory of electromagnetism. Scroll down on this site to page two, where the scientist himself describes his views on the relationship of his beliefs and scientific study.) This basic belief – that the universe was created by a rational God, and can therefore be understood by rational humans created in his image – can be conducive to honest scientific inquiry.

BUT. You knew there would be a “But,” didn’t you?

The idea of humans being in the intellectual image of the creator God actually justifies science, inside the fundamentalist world view. But abuses almost inevitably creep in and take over, stemming from other parts of their belief system which over-ride scientific objectivity.

The problem arises when scientific evidence contradicts the claims of the fundamentalist’s sacred book (the Bible, the Qur’an, or other sacred writings). In the Christian fundamentalist world view, the Bible is the truth, and anything that contradicts it is false. Period. Even if there is a pile of evidence for it.

We’ve seen the types of responses to this situation. Evidence that contradicts biblical claims may be ignored, or its existence simply denied. People who still believe in a flat earth fall into this category. Or contradictory evidence may be explained away, sometimes with bizarre “explanations” that are more religious than scientific. My favorite in this category is the claim that fossils were placed in the rocks by Satan (or even God!) to “tempt” people to believe that the earth is more than the biblical 6,000 years old. (One can understand Satan wanting to tempt people this way; what this says about God if he’s the one who planted the fossils is another issue these people need to explain!)

There are some who try to explain the evidence in different ways than usual, again generally stemming from religion although there can be science mixed in with the explanations. Creationists and – more insidiously and recently – people promoting “Intelligent Design” fall smack into this category.

Then, of course, there are those who simply hide evidence that contradicts their world view or, worse, who even fabricate evidence to promote their world view. “Ex-gay” organizations fall into this category, as well as fundamentalist organizations trying to “prove” that teaching total sexual abstinence to teenagers will reduce sexual activity and reduce unwanted pregnancies (when in fact the exact opposite happens). A lot of fundamentalists involved in the oil industry are busily fabricating “evidence” trying to show that global climate change isn’t happening or – more recently, since it’s becoming harder and harder to deny – that all the changes it is bringing will be beneficial if we just “adapt” a little bit.

Or, if really pushed to the wall about scientific evidence contradicting biblical claims, there is the final fundamentalist fall-back that we’ve already encountered. This is the answer that if some evidence has convinced you that a biblical claim is untrue, you only believe it because your reasoning power is “fallen.” You are obviously not in a proper relationship with God, so of course the truths about God’s world will seem contradictory to you. But the fundamentalists no longer have that problem, and God’s true explanations are good enough for them, and they can now merely laugh at facts that appear to contradict their beliefs. And this is where intelligent dialogue stops, utterly.

This has been a bit of a diversion which we may explore in greater detail later. But I wanted to explain the fundamentalist view of Nature, and how that world view impacts on two of the big issues: environmentalism and science in general.

To sum up the basic beliefs about Nature in the Christian fundamentalist world view:

1. Man’s moral choice affected all of Nature, taking it down and corrupting it; Nature is skewed and “un-natural” compared to how it was originally supposed to function

2. Therefore, what “comes naturally” may not be a recommendation, but may in fact be considered wrong because corruption (moral as well as physical) is now built into the physical realm

3. Man’s authority over Nature was changed from literal control to a sort of “legal oversight,” meaning that he can use it as he sees fit

4. Environmentalism isn’t considered a high priority because the end of time is near, and Nature will be destroyed and re-made anyway; the number one priority is saving human beings for eternity rather than saving the planet temporarily

5. The idea of Man being in the image of the world’s creator suggests that science should be a very high calling for fundamentalists; but whenever scientific evidence contradicts biblical claims, the biblical claims are considered true while the scientific evidence is ignored, discarded, explained away, or even falsified

This leaves us with a pretty grim picture. Are you starting to understand why Christian fundamentalists are so consistently and relentlessly negative, about every possible thing?

Next: Promises, Promises

Back to: So, What's Wrong With People?

So, What’s Wrong With People? (How Fundamentalists Think: Part Three)

2004-12-29T12:56:00.000-08:00

Alright. Given the nature of God as fundamentalists see him, who exactly is Man, in their view of things? In the last section, we saw that he was created in God’s image, and recognized two implications of this: 1) that God is understandable by Man; and 2) that communication is possible between God and Man.

Before we go further, we should explain Christian fundamentalists' use of the pronoun "Man," rather than something more inclusive like "humankind." Being biblical literalists, they believe the creation story describing the Man (Adam) as God’s first human creation. Since Woman (Eve) was derived from the man, created to be his companion and helper, Man is the primary human while the Woman is essentially his subordinate, her identity always oriented to his authority, while his identity is oriented toward God’s authority.

I suspect that Islam also looks to this story for similar conclusions, since they accept many stories in the scriptures which Christians call the Old Testament; certainly Islamic fundamentalists have a similar idea about the position of men in the world, and the position of women under their authority. A "man first/woman second-if-that" teaching is typical in most fundamentalisms, though the justifications are sometimes different. (For example, fundamentalist Hinduism may justify women’s subjugation by describing them as so powerful that they need to be controlled and guided by men. The end result in the lives of women, of course, is the same in all fundamentalisms, whatever justification is devised.)

But meanwhile, for Christian fundamentalists, because of the biblical creation story the subordination of women is woven into the very fabric of the created universe, from the beginning. There is no getting around this.

But Man’s authority is not just over the female half of humankind, but over nature as well. We’ll have a closer look at nature in the next section. What is crucial here is that in the beginning he had authority over his own physical being, and over the physical, spiritual and moral fate of his descendants. He stood as humankind’s representative, and every choice he made in that first stage of human history would affect all humans after him.

Most people know the basic story: the Man and Woman were given freedom to do as they pleased in the garden God prepared. They were pretty much vegetarian, and could eat from any tree in the garden, including the tree of life (which implies that they were immortal). The forbidden fruit was from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But the serpent persuaded the Woman to disobey that prohibition, and she ate the fruit, and gave some to the Man also.

As a result, God exiled them into the now cold, cruel world. Physical mortality came upon them (though not spiritual mortality; they were created as beings whose spirits could never cease to exist). They would live their lives with hard work, and the Woman would be subjected to the man and give birth in pain. (This was the moment when women’s subjugation became onerous; before this, it was something of a partnership, though the Man still had the final say in everything [e.g. naming all the animals].)

One can debate the details of the story forever, but the important thing is how Christian fundamentalists view the results of the sin Man and Woman committed there.

The original prohibition was fairly light, so the Man was not denied anything he absolutely needed by obeying it. He was capable of the intellectual "knowledge of good and evil" even if he hadn’t eaten from the tree. The reason for the command was that Man would be deciding who was going to be in charge in his life – God, or himself. It was the act of disobedience itself that comprised the experiential "knowledge of good and evil" and began the plunge into further experience of evil.

So Man decided that he himself would be the "lord" of his life, instead of God who had created him. This, for fundamentalists, is the one Big No-No. God is in charge, and any act of independence is not mere "independence" or "self-expression" or anything else – it is morally wrong. Evil, in fact. Man, in effect, had separated himself from God by his disobedience. And since God is the source of life itself, Man had chosen death. (Fundamentalists believe that he deserved to die then and there because of this, but the fact that he continued to live was the first of many mercies God would show him.)

But since Man had been given authority over all of nature, his act had even greater implications. Remember that morality is woven into the very being of the universe. Both Man’s physical being, and all of nature itself, were changed by his choice – physicality itself became morally separated from God, and subject to death. This was the moment when entropy started. Things began to run down. All of life – not just human life, but animal and plant life as well – began to die.

Further, since the Man was representative of all humans who would come after, he plunged all his descendants into the same morass of entropy and death. They never got a choice of their own. He chose for them, and made the wrong choice. From his children onwards, every human would eventually die.

But it wasn’t just physical death. Since Man had chosen separation from God, then when his physical body died, his spirit would continue in separation from God. If something wasn’t done to rectify the situation, his spirit would be separated from God forever, which, since God was the essence of goodness, love, life, and everything nice, would be sheer torture. Forever.

But there’s more. It wasn’t just Man’s physicality that was affected, or his spirit, or nature in general. Man’s physical body, being born in a state of decay and separation from God, was born with a tendency to sin. So every human being is damned from birth, because they’re incapable of doing anything genuinely good. And since one sin is a rebellion against God, and deserving of death, one sin would be all it took for anyone, to separate them from him forever. And being born sinful from the start – well, every human being after Adam was pretty much doomed.

Ah, but there is still more! Because not only was his body and his capacity to choose affected – so was Man’s mind. His very mind, his reasoning power, became corrupted, most especially in the moral realm. So that he can reason things through very carefully and logically and sincerely, with all the best intentions in the world, and decide that something is good – and be totally wrong. In fact, he will always get it wrong. The only time he reasons anything correctly, it is because God has been gracious enough to help him out and remove the veil of deception.

This is why it is so hard to dialogue with fundamentalists. The moment you show them real evidence contradicting their claims, or show them how some idea they teach is simply not logical, they immediately fall back on the claim that of course to you it would seem illogical, because your mind is still "fallen" and sinful, and your reasoning is corrupted. But to those who have God’s constant help because their relationship to him has been restored (i.e. to fundamentalists), it’s all crystal clear because God has shown them "true reason."

The fact that they’re assuming what they’re trying to prove, and then using that assumption to justify itself – well, if you try to point that out to them, it’s merely further evidence of your "corrupted" power of reason.

Here is an example of a "problem" with "Man’s reasoning" versus "God’s reasoning," as a fundamentalist would see it. A few paragraphs ago, I explained that because of Man’s fallen physical and moral nature, he is incapable of doing any good act whatsoever. But one wants to protest against this. Surely human beings are capable of a lot of good! It’s simply inaccurate to say they can only do evil – they do good all the time! But no. You see, any good thing a human being does is now done from a human-centered world view, which means it is separate from God. So that even when a person gives to the poor or heals the sick or saves someone’s life – it is a "good" thing that stems entirely from that person’s self-centered world. It didn’t come from God, because that person is separated from God. Human reason would suggest this was a good act – but purified, divine reason says it was not. Despite everything.

You simply can’t argue at this point. The most dedicated fundamentalists will not budge on this, and will not even be able to conceive a contradiction or error here. This is why they can dismiss mountains of goodness without the flicker of an eyebrow. If the good deeds were not done by a Christian, they were not rightous deeds. Period.

So let’s sum up.

Communication between God and Man is possible and natural, but has been broken because Man chose to make himself lord of his existence, rather than his creator. The results are these:

1. Spiritual death

2. Physical death

3. Corruption of nature; entropy and decay

4. Men are born with an inability to do anything but sin; the tendency to choose sinfully is embedded into their very bodies, probably right into their genes

5. Man’s very power of reason has been corrupted, so that he can carefully and logically reason himself (pretty much inevitably) to the completely wrong conclusions, without God’s help in directing his reason properly

It looks like a pretty bad situation for Man, all around. Clearly, Something Had To Be Done. And in fact, something was.

But before we get to the solution to all this, we need to elaborate a bit more on nature in general, in its now-fallen state. So on we go.

Next: The Nature of Nature

Back to: Who is This God Person Anyway?

Who is This God Person Anyway? (with apologies to Douglas Adams and Oolon Colluphid) (How Fundamentalists Think: Part Two)

2004-11-16T10:22:00.000-08:00

As discussed in the previous essay, fundamentalists believe they know The Truth about the universe and human beings, and morality is a very large component of The Truth. The first implications of this belief were that: a) tolerance of “other truths” is illogical, since they are all false; b) the “moral fix” to problems will always take precedence over the “physical fix;” and c) deniers of The Truth are at best mistaken or deluded, but are more likely outright “sinful.”

But with this framework established, now we need to get into some specifics of The Truth as fundamentalists believe it. (Remember that I am using the capitalized phrase “The Truth” to show how fundamentalists view it; I am not endorsing their belief, but explaining it from their viewpoint.)

The first really big “specific,” of course, is God. He’s the one who they believe has told them The Truth in the first place. In fact, they’d never have figured out The Truth on their own, so he pretty much had to reveal it (and the reasons for this will be discussed later). But who is he, anyway?

Most of us are familiar with the basic ideas about God. According to fundamentalists, He (again the correct pronoun, from their viewpoint) is literally the creator of the universe, and is therefore the ultimate power, and the ultimate Authority over it in every respect (physical and moral).

He is also the creator of Man; in fact he created Man “in his image,” as the Genesis story claims. (“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” Genesis 1:26, 27) Most Christian fundamentalists do not take this to be a literal physical image, although Mormons do. Mormons also take quite literally the “male and female” reference to the image of God, which leads to many interesting theological ideas. We should note, though, that most Christian fundamentalists regard Mormons as heretics, and their religious establishment as a cult. What they all agree on, though, is that the “image of God” concept does apply at least to Man’s mind and soul, his inner components.

(I am less familiar with Islam, but what I have studied so far suggests that this view is part of Islam as well to some degree; they do, however, strongly emphasize the idea that God is so far above Man as to be almost unknowable unless He reveals the information; even then, all his self-description is metaphor, and cannot express in any way what God is “really” like. I believe, since Jewish fundamentalists share the book of Genesis with Christian fundamentalists, that they may have a similar understanding of the “image of God” in man. However, their rabbinic commentaries over the centuries may have elaborated and explained this concept in ways that diverge from the Christian concept. Since I haven’t studied Judaism very deeply, I can’t say for certain how they do interpret the “image of God.” I am not aware of a corresponding concept in Sikh fundamentalism, but this, too, would need further study to know for sure. Hinduism teaches a very different concept of the nature of both gods and humans.)

One implication of the “image of God” concept for Christian fundamentalists is that if the mind and spirit of Man is somehow analogous to the mind and spirit of God (albeit finite, whereas God is infinite), then God’s creations and acts are understandable by the mind of Man, even if he can’t press his understanding into the totality of everything. We will examine this idea in more detail later.

Another implication of the “image of God” concept is that communication is possible between God and Man. This, too, becomes very important later when we discuss whether Man can find out The Truth on his own, and why or why not.

More details about God: he is infinite; he is the three big “omni’s” – omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. In other words, he is all-powerful and all-knowing, and he is simultaneously everywhere at once. And being infinite, there is no end to him – whatever that really means. It does not have a spatial connotation, because God is believed to be outside both space and time – again, whatever that might mean.

Once you encounter these ideas about God, you can potentially find yourself enveloped in a lot of theological dispute, which becomes very confusing. Here is just a sample issue, probably familiar to everyone: if God is “omnipotent,” that is, all-powerful – can he create a rock that is too heavy for him to lift? If he can’t lift the rock, he is not all-powerful, is he? But if he can’t create such a rock, then there is something he can’t do – which means that, again, he is not all-powerful.

I don’t introduce this example so we can start a big philosophical debate about the question. It just shows that even among fundamentalists, there is some dispute about the meaning of particular concepts when they talk about God. There are similar debates, occurring in seminaries and Bible colleges everywhere, about every one of the other concepts as well. But the differences in their explanations are really a matter of degree only. When they use those terms in talking to the world outside their faith community, when insisting that God exists and we must do something about it, they pretty much agree on what they’re trying to tell us about God.

All we really need to glean from these descriptions is that the fundamentalists want us to believe that God is really, really big and powerful. They essentially want to convince us that: 1) God is THE Authority in the universe, in every conceivable way, period; and 2) what God says, goes. Period. He can’t be contradicted, he can’t be resisted, he can’t be denied. He is always right. The highest Court, and the last word on absolutely everything. And he is always going to win.

On this, every Christian fundamentalist is in complete agreement. You will find a similar confidence in their Allah, for Islamic fundamentalists, for similar reasons.

(This, incidentally, puts another lock on The Truth, because if the all-knowing, all-powerful, final Court of Appeal has spoken The Truth – there is no other. There is no room whatsoever for “alternate truths,” and no tolerance for them.)

Another description of God which must be included here, which is found only in fundamentalist Christianity, is that God is a Trinity. This is the oddest metaphysical concept of all, about God, and is very difficult to explain. [Indeed. Christian sects and church Councils have literally been fighting each other and excommunicating each other, for centuries, trying to explain it and force other sects to accept their explanation instead of someone else’s.] The idea is that God is one God (qualifying Christianity as a monotheistic religion), yet God exists in three distinct persons: the Father, the Son (Jesus Christ), and the Holy Spirit. Each member of the Trinity performs more-or-less separate functions, yet at the same time it is the unified, three-in-one Being who is acting each time.

One might wonder why the Trinity is considered important. If you study the actual functions of the three persons in the Trinity, it is hard to understand why these functions couldn’t just be performed by three separate deities, who are all “united in purpose.” Functionally speaking, the mechanics of creation and redemption would work no differently and the scheme of salvation would lose nothing essential, if all the work of salvation were done by three equally divine and holy Beings. So the Christian fundamentalists’ frantic, almost fanatic insistence on the doctrine of the Trinity is mystifying.

But cling to this doctrine they do, with everything they’ve got. In fact, despite the fact that the Trinity doctrine doesn’t even seem (to an outsider) remotely necessary to the logic of the rest of their world view, it is one of the yardsticks they themselves use to decide who is “a real Christian” and who is not, what is a “false religion” and what is not. A religion which talks about the Father, the Son, and the Spirit being three separate but infinitely cooperative beings (like Mormonism)? Right out. A religion which views God as one Being, and only one (like Unitarianism and especially Islam)? False religion or cult. Judaism gets a bit of a pass (but only a bit), because supposedly the early Hebrews gained understanding of God very gradually over their history, until all the promises of their religion were “fulfilled” in Christianity. So according to Christian fundamentalists, Jews “really” worship the same, tri-partite God that Christians do – they just haven’t realized it yet.

Meanwhile, non-Christian religions also use the Trinity to determine which faith is true and which is false. Much of the impetus for the formation of Islam was Mohammed’s repugnance for the doctrine of the Trinity as he perceived it being taught by the Christian church of his time. Hence, Islam’s insistence on the One-ness of God – he is so very One, in fact, that even describing his attributes constitutes a “dividing” of God, and is therefore done very cautiously, with the proviso that these descriptions are not “really” God, but only inadequate metaphors. Judaism, too, is fairly repulsed by Christians trying to claim that the Jewish god was “really” a multiple of some sort, and they certainly reject the concept of the “Son” of God, Jesus, being the Jewish Messiah.

Hindu fundamentalists, meanwhile, might be tempted to say sceptically, “What, only three??” Though really, even in polytheistic Hinduism, much of the fundamentalist fervor comes from devotion to one god (say, Vishnu) over all other Hindu gods. Indeed, the claim is frequently made that other gods are “really” included within the one god that a Hindu fundamentalist worships. So while they do not have trouble visualizing one god functioning in several different personalities, even they can fall into the trap of coalescing all gods into one and penalizing those who try to keep the gods separate – or coalesce all gods into a different god than they do.

Why bother going into this detailed discussion about the Trinity, when functionally it makes little difference in what a Christian fundamentalist thinks about the world, and how the person acts? It is necessary because the fundamentalists themselves vehemently insist on this doctrine, indeed consider it almost the most important doctrine in their entire belief system. The best we can do is acknowledge this and be prepared for their vehemence about it, even when we don’t see what difference it makes in practical terms.

Moving on. The above descriptions deal mainly with metaphysical aspects of God, but there are also some major personal qualities we should mention. Three of them are especially important: God is good; God is love; God is just.

Fundamentalists talk about the first two a lot, but the third quality is in fact the one they are most driven by. The idea of God’s justice – everything being where it should be and doing what it should do, or else suffering the consequences – is the principle that determines how his goodness operates, and how he shows his love. Neither his goodness nor his love are allowed to operate outside the rigid framework of his justice. All the rules and regulations have to be fulfilled, and if God wants to show mercy sometimes, even he has to go through some horrifying contortions so he can do so, without somehow violating the strict mathematical equations of justice.

In fact, God’s “goodness” and “love” are almost interchangeable with his “justice,” they are so subsumed in it. This is why fundamentalists are so keen on the idea of “tough love” – because they are convinced that as long as you are fulfilling the stern demands of justice, everything is going to come out alright in the end for the person upon whom you are exercising this “tough love,” so this is obviously the best, most loving thing you can do for them. If your concept of “goodness” prompts you to go soft, and let someone get away with something, this is not in fact a good thing at all, because justice is eventually going to get them for it. So the most loving, good thing you can do for someone is frequently the most harsh and rigid thing, so the demands of justice can be met.

There is an odd leakage of this idea of justice/goodness/love into the physical world. Because he is essentially justice and goodness personified, there is a sort of moral underpinning even to the physical world God created. Morality permeates everything. Nothing can really be neutral. In Genesis, where God creates the world and declares it “good,” fundamentalists understand this not merely to mean “Hey, look at this cool thing I made.” The word “good” carries the idea that everything functioned perfectly and was in its place. Nothing jutted out, and nothing went in a way that God didn’t want. The fact that things can nowadays go very wrong in nature has very little to do with the laws of physics, and virtually everything to do with the morality or immorality of Man, or at least, his not having a proper relationship to God. (This usually does not, however, include environmentalism as a moral concern. It is all about whether a person is a Christian or not, not whether they treat the environment “morally.”)

In the same way, this rigid justice operates in the world of choice, in the moral world. The concept that is foremost in every fundamentalist’s mind is that nobody gets away with ANYTHING, ever. Every sin, every crime, every foible, every mistake, every atrocity – it all has to be paid for. This requirement is above any other consideration whatsoever.

Which really puts Man in a very bad situation. We will look at the fundamentalist story of Man – how he began, what went wrong, how he got to where he is now, and what can be done about it – in the next section.

Next: So, What's Wrong with People?

Back to: First Premises

First Premises (How Fundamentalists Think: Part One)

2004-11-11T10:47:00.000-08:00

So, what do fundamentalists think? Why do they believe what they do, and how do these beliefs lead to their actions in the world? How can fundamentalists justify attitudes and actions which they themselves – not to mention Progressives in society – would consider wrong and hatred-based if performed by anyone else, in some other context? Let us start at the very beginning of their system, to work our way from their premises and see how they lead logically to their actions.

The source of everything is their belief that they have discovered The Truth. Not “a” truth, but THE Truth. This is the important, crucial fact from which everything else flows inexorably. They are convinced they have discovered (or rather, had revealed to them*) The Truth about the universe: why it exists, how it functions, what its fate will be. And most important for them, included in The Truth is everything important about human beings: how they came to be, how they should behave, and how they can shape their ultimate fate. [*We won’t, right now, go into questions about how The Truth was supposedly revealed to them, e.g. fallibility of human scripture-writers, how they chose some writings to be “infallible” and decided others were not (and their motivations for this picking-and-choosing), and so on. The purpose of these essays is only to explain what they think, and why, and what follows from that. To show the view from inside their own heads. Please concentrate on that alone while reading these essays, if you want to understand how they are functioning in and affecting the world. Later essays may deal with these other things, but they are not the priority to begin with.]

Certain things follow logically from believing you know The Truth. If you know the basic Truth about things (with details to be addressed as they come up, but all fitting within that framework) – you are not merely uninclined to entertain other truths, it is simply not logical to entertain other truths. Whatever is not The Truth is either a lie or, if you are being kind, a mistake or delusion. There is no room for “differing points of view.” Certain fundamentalists might grudgingly allow some differences of interpretation within their own belief system (e.g. should you be baptized by full immersion, or is sprinkling enough?). But the ones most convinced of The Truth often don’t allow even that. And for all of them, there is no allowance for completely different belief systems. Those are either wrong, or delusional. Or…

Or – the third option. Because fundamentalists also tie The Truth to morality.

Contained in The Truth is the explanation for why humans are the way they are (which is pretty bad), and what they can – nay, what they should – do about it. It is not a matter merely of mechanically fixing a flawed physical problem. Good and evil, morality and immorality, are the crux of what is wrong with humans, and any “fix” for this problem is a moral one. Therefore, alternate belief systems may be viewed not just as untrue or delusional, but as “sinful.”

Again, certain things flow from this.

First of all, since the root problem with humanity is moral rather than physical, the moral fix ALWAYS COMES FIRST. This is because, for Christian fundamentalists, there was an initial state of perfection for humans which their early representative chose to reject. For most of these fundamentalists, the Adam and Eve story is literally true. (For a very few, the story is regarded as metaphorical, but humans and nature still end up in the same state, so most of the following still holds true.) Man (and they would insist on this word) was made the overlord of all creation, and this overlordship was more than a matter of physical control. It included a great deal of authority and influence. So that when Adam chose to rely on himself rather than God, effectively alienating himself from God, he took all of nature down with him. Nature itself became flawed.

This is extremely important. In fact, it is absolutely pivotal, and influences everything that comes after. For Christian fundamentalists, the moral choice came first, and the physical problems were the result – not the cause. Therefore the fix for almost all physical situations, particularly in the human social sphere, is first of all a moral fix. We’ll come back to this crucial point later. But you may already see why their ideas about solutions to society’s problems are almost the exact opposite of ours.

Meanwhile, a second important idea flows from the initial belief that The Truth has this moral component. If alternate belief systems about the world are not only untrue but morally wrong, what does that say about the people who create them and those who believe them? At best, these people are mistaken. Fundamentalists can grant that people may not have the evidence or the means to figure out The Truth on their own. (In fact, they are almost inevitably NOT going to arrive at The Truth; the reasons for that will be explained in the next essay.) But there is absolutely no excuse, once The Truth has been shown to them, for not adhering to it. It is, after all, The Truth. There is no other.

So if they continue to deny it? The only logical explanation is that this is a deliberate, knowing choice not to accept The Truth. Alternate belief systems about the world can only be willful inventions of people who are determined to stay in a state – not of ignorance, but of SIN. Alternate belief systems are merely very complex and increasingly elaborate webs of lies that people have created over the centuries to avoid accepting and living by The Truth. That is the only possible interpretation of alternate belief systems, if one starts with The Truth, and it has that moral component.

So the first implications of fundamentalists’ ideas of The Truth are these:

1) It is not logical to be tolerant of “other truths” – since they are all false.

2) Since The Truth has the moral component, and a moral choice was supposedly the source of all that has gone wrong in the world since the beginning – THE MORAL FIX ALWAYS COMES BEFORE THE PHYSICAL, or at least is more important than the physical. If they can only concentrate on one of these fixes in a situation, the moral fix will always be their choice.

3) People who deny The Truth are wrong, in all senses of that word. Initially they may be deluded and mistaken, but once they have understood The Truth and continue to deny it, they are at that point outright (and deliberately) sinful.

Not a very bright picture, is it? But wait – it gets worse.

Next: Who is This God Person Anyway?

Back to: Introduction

How Fundamentalists Think: Introduction

2004-11-09T17:35:00.000-08:00

These essays are written mainly to explain how Christian fundamentalists think. They apply first of all to the North American versions, since those fundamentalists are the ones we mainly deal with in Canada and the U.S.

Most of what follows, however, will also apply to the growing Christian fundamentalist movements in Africa, South Korea, and some other places. In fact, many of the beliefs I describe will be even more strongly held in those “newer” fundamentalist groups than in their parent North American groups. There is nothing quite like the zeal of the newly-converted, or a group that has newly “discovered” an idea they believe will solve all their problems. Much of the drive for “doctrinal purity” in many Christian sects is coming right now from Africa and to some degree from South America, though not exclusively so by any means.

Many of the descriptions in these essays do not apply just to fundamentalists who are Christian, however. Many beliefs and attitudes are common to all fundamentalist sects within their larger religion. So it should not be surprising to notice similarities with the attitudes, say, of the Taliban or certain hard-line Sikh or Hindu religious groups as well. Almost every religion seems to have a hard-core sub-group that is essentially fundamentalist in the context of that religion.

Most fundamentalist groups seem to want to impose their beliefs and their will on society, to re-shape it in their own image. This is not true of all of them, however. Some do form a society in their own image, but do it by withdrawing from the larger society. People in Pennsylvania, for instance, are familiar with Amish groups who live in separate communities, based on their interpretation of their religion. In Alberta, several Hutterite colonies are based on the same idea. The Bountiful, British Columbia Mormon community is another Canadian example, affiliated with the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, with other communities in Colorado City, AZ and Hildale, UT.

Others who might be considered at least partly “fundamentalist” mingle to some degree with modern society, but try to keep their own religious culture as a separate community at the same time. General society is still regarded as “outside,” and its members are regarded with suspicion.

Another difference among fundamentalists may involve proselytizing, or the attempt to convert people to their way of thinking. The groups who withdraw from society altogether, and the ones who mingle as little as possible, are coincidentally the ones who tend not to try to convert people. They just want to be left alone. Other groups don’t necessarily want to convert the entire world to their religion, but do want to control their own political sphere as much as possible. Jewish fundamentalists in Israel might be an example of such thinking.

However, most fundamentalists not only want to control their own political space, they want to control others’ space as well. Other people in their own country, other countries – as much political space as they can take hold of, they want their religion to control. These are the groups we are most concerned with.

But what is a “fundamentalist” in the first place? The underlying impulse/idea for all fundamentalists, whether or not they use that term for themselves, derives from the word “fundamental” itself. The idea was given explicit description by the first Christian fundamentalists in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries. (This site, The Rise of Fundamentalism, offers excellent definitions both of “generic fundamentalism” with which we are concerned, and the original Christian Fundamentalism.) The core concept is that they are returning to the “fundamentals” of their religion – how they believe it was originally handed down by God before later modifications happened to it. Most later modifications are considered a bad thing. The “old time religion” was a static thing, handed down once-for-all, and since it was handed down by God, no human modifications are either required or acceptable.

What matters is that they believe they are returning to the original form of their religion, the one that will be most pleasing to God and divert his wrath.* One can argue from history that the fundamentalist Christianity of today is very different from the fundamentalist Christianity even of a century ago – and almost nothing like the religious life and practice of the very first Christians in the first century. The same inconsistency can also be demonstrated for other fundamentalist groups. But this is generally brushed aside. In fact, if presented with this evidence, they will usually provide a covering explanation. They may insist they are “really” closer to the original religion even than their predecessors. Or they are more likely, in this limited instance, to allow the idea of “modification” to enter the discussion: this is the “original religion” as it must be lived in the circumstances of this time period. This allows today’s fundamentalists, last century’s fundamentalists, and the first Christians, all to have been practising the “original religion,” in the circumstances of their time. This is a belief almost impossible to argue against. (*The desire to avoid the wrath of their deity is a driving force in fundamentalism; outsiders viewing their actions and listening to their fury have some justification for believing that fundamentalists are driven far more by fear of God’s wrath – or the eagerness to see it visited on someone else – than they are by embracing or demonstrating God’s love.)

In fact, most of their beliefs are very difficult to argue against, because in fact a fundamentalist system is very, very logical. If you grant a few specific premises at the beginning, everything else flows from these premises with such consistent internal logic that people feel like they’re banging their heads against a brick wall when trying to refute these beliefs.

The only way to make any headway in talking to a fundamentalist is, first, to understand the way they think, and how their ideas hold together. Only after we do that can we start looking for the small pieces of this tightly-held puzzle which can be pulled out, to make the entire edifice collapse.

Next: First Premises

2004-11-08T17:43:00.000-08:00

Okay. I'm going to be changing the nature of this blog, a little bit. With the immense influence of the fundamentalist Christian right-wing-politicos in the Presidential election in the United States last week, I think it's going to be necessary for people to understand how fundamentalists think.

Their system of thought is internally very logical and holds together tightly. And yet it is very alien to the system of thought common to Progressives in society. Progressives don't quite realize this, so they make arguments that, from their point of view, carry great weight and make major sense. Yet none of their arguments seem to get through. And the answers they get feel like they're coming from an alien civilization.

In fact, they are.

It's as though Progressives speak English, and Fundamentalists speak Sanskrit (apologies to all former Sanskrit-speakers). And what they're doing is talking to each other in their own language, and each side find the other completely incomprehensible. The worst part is that by immersing the culture in their language, the fundamentalists have taught the language to many people in both Canada and the U.S., just by sheer repetition. A lot of people seem to have forgotten Progressive language, and especially Progressive concepts.

So it's time to learn their language and viewpoint. Get into their heads -- so that we can find the effective way out of them, not just for ourselves, but most importantly for our entire culture and the rest of the world.

Tomorrow I'm going to start posting a series of essays under the general title, "How Christian Fundamentalists Think."

But in the meantime, here's an excellent article that is already saying some of the things I plan to say: How Can You Possibly Think That?. I'll start supplementing it shortly.

2004-07-09T16:29:00.000-07:00

Fundies of course have views on environmentalism. Most of them are sort of moderate: they think you probably shouldn't litter, and they really get irritated if their neighbors don't mow their lawns but instead let the grass grow three feet high.

But taking care of the world in general? Forget it! Man (yes, man, and they mean that literally) was put on this earth to dominate and subdue it. Just read the first couple of chapters of Genesis to see that.

And the other reason we don't really have to worry about cleaning up pollution or preserving the earth from global climate change? JESUS IS COMING BACK SOON SO THERE'S NO POINT IN FIXING UP THE EARTH, SINCE HE'S GOING TO DESTROY IT IN FIRE ANYWAY.

Even though, um, every time they've expected him to come back, he hasn't bothered. They're always like, "Okay, this time for sure!"

2004-02-28T18:54:00.000-08:00

One corollary of the idea that sin is somehow passed through the blood was that people who "had it really bad" could somehow pass the point of no return, and deserve nothing other than to be killed and the world ridded of them.

This was the rationale I was taught for all the genocides described in the Old Testament, when the children of Israel were being "led by God" into the promised land. Remember that they were told, frequently, to kill every man, woman, child, and even animal. They were all considered tainted by such extremes of sin that the only way to deal with them was wipe them off the face of the earth, so God's "righteous" people could go in and take their land and purify it. And, incidentally, achieve a whole country of their own thereby.

We never articulated it, but it was as if sin was an actual substance that could so permeate you that it could even make your livestock too icky to live. Like some kind of oil slick or something.

On other occasions, of course, the animals did get spared. And the virgins. You can imagine what their fate was. Er...not the animals (hopefully), but the virgins.

2004-02-15T14:02:00.000-08:00

Naturally, being fundies, we were taught about Politics. Or at least, politics as our fundie masters practised, which was basically a quest to take over the world, to put it mildly.

But they were also interested in details closer to home, in Canada and the U.S. And one of the things we were taught, even in Canada, was that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was just shy of being the Great Satan himself. What Roosevelt did was introduce all these social policies which were really -- *gasp!* -- SOCIALIST POLICIES! Stuff like redistribution of wealth, so the poor could be helped. Social Security. All that horrible stuff.

We were taught that it took him most of 20 years (4 presidential terms) to restructure society in this horrible way. And it would probably take almost as long to undo all of this evil. But to make sure nobody could do that, he made sure that no President after him could serve more than two terms! So we were STUCK with all this socialist, communist stuff that meant we as a society had to SHARE with those dirty, lazy, scabby, handout-hungry poor people who wouldn't be poor if they'd just go out and GET A JOB, for cryin' out loud!

All Roosevelt's fault.

2004-02-10T12:31:00.000-08:00

You do know that good fundamentalist Christians never participate in oral sex, right? That's perverted. [As a fundie friend of mine said during the Clinton impeachment hoo-haw, "Nobody I know would ever do something that disgusting!" Funny, that's what I said about sex, period, when I was eleven years old and read how it was done. I staunchly told my best friend, whose mother had said that that was indeed how sex was performed, "My parents are Christians, and they would never do anything like that!"] [My next thought for my fundie friend was, of course, "Oh? And how do you know that, hm?]

And of course, masturbation is a perversion of the "natural use" of the genitals.

I never got to learn what their opinion is of non-missionary sexual positions.

2004-02-04T17:11:00.000-08:00

A lot of these things came from Bible school. This one's from one of my floor leaders in the dormitory, my freshman year. She was an MK (a Missionary's Kid) and had never heard of or read Lord of the Rings. Since it was my favorite book in the world, I was eager to tell her about it.

But she stopped me as soon as I got to the elves and goblins. Because they were obviously Satanic, and no godly person should be reading about demons. Or books where they used -- shudder -- MAGIC.

I said something along the lines of, "Oh, but it's okay, the underlying theme of the whole book is the triumph of the servants of God (the One) over the Dark Lord. The author was a Catholic Christian -- "

She stopped me again. Because the author being Catholic absolutely proved her point: the whole thing was Satanic. Because we knew the Catholics were not really Christians, being such idolators (images of Christ in the churches, and worship of a human, Mary), relying on humans (priests) to mediate between them and God instead of Jesus, and teaching that you could lose your salvation if you didn't continue to confess to that man, and re-crucify Christ in the Eucharist every week (when everyone knew his sacrifice had been sufficient the first time and didn't need to be repeated).

I would tend to wonder what she thought, that the movies were made. But if she isn't back in "darkest Africa" somewhere as a missionary, I still doubt she even knows they exist. Because of course, movie-going is sinful too.

2004-02-04T17:05:00.000-08:00

Oh! And don't forget the toys and the cartoons! I remember my cousin telling me with a straight face that things like He-Man and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were Satanic plots to get kids' minds off God, and to get them to accept pagan philosophies as alright. I mean -- Ninja! There's a Satanic foreign philosophy right there!

2004-02-04T17:03:00.000-08:00

Did you know that the Japanese were gradually taking over the hearts and minds of good North American Christians? Apart from their making all those products that seduced us because, you know, they were good products, it had a lot to do with numbers as well. And wheels.

First, it was the two wheels. The motorcycles. They came into North America, and they were everywhere. Then -- I am absolutely sure there was some three-wheeled thing that was the next step up in the plot, but I learned this information so long ago that I've forgotten what it was. And of course, the final step was the four wheels, as they began producing cars and sending them over. Taking over our culture and, of course, inducing us to abandon God somehow as they did so. Thin edge of the wedge. Getting a toe (or wheel) in the door, and then forcing the door open wider and wider.

Those Damn Foreigners and their pagan gods again. They were everywhere.

2004-02-04T12:25:00.000-08:00

Regarding sin being passed down through the blood of our fathers (see previous blog entry), I've been asked why, then, the fundies put so much blame on the Woman for humankind (they call it mankind) falling into sin. Very good question. And of course, there's an answer for that, too, in fundie theology.

Ya see, Eve was deceived by the serpent, poor deluded creature. She didn't rely on the wisdom and guidance of her husband, as is the Only True And Right Way for women. Adam, on the other hand, went into the sinful act with his eyes fully open, and all of nature fell into sin right along with humans. He had that much clout in the grand scheme of things. If he had resisted his silly wife's encouragement to eat the fruit, man(sic)kind would not have fallen. And very likely, God would somehow have arranged a means for the woman's redemption pretty much then and there. Otherwise there would be no human race, after all.

So although Eve's actions are to blame for the whole mess, and her culpability is the justification for the subsequent 6000-year history of subjugation of women, simultaneously it was Adam's action that Really Counted. Eve was sort of negligible: a mistake that could quickly have been fixed. But when the Man did the sin -- boy howdy. Now, there was an act that actually meant something!

So that's why a) we get sin passed down to us from our father, but b) those silly Uppity Women who Don't Know Their Place are to be kept in perpetual subjection, opinions not to count, actions not to be independent, etc. etc. Look what they made the Man do the first time! Who knows what trouble they could induce Man to get into if they're not strictly controlled. Weak-willed airheads that they are, and all.

2004-02-02T11:34:00.000-08:00

Another professor at Bible school (I remember what he looked like but have forgotten his name) figured out how the sinful nature is passed down through all the generations. I mean, it had nothing to do with making sinful choices, and everything to do with actually being born sinful and guilty before we'd ever made a conscious choice about anything.

It's in the blood. We apparently get our blood from our fathers, and since the men are responsible for Everything Important, that's how guilt gets passed down to us. We got our guilt from our father. (Gee, thanks, dad.)

And this -- this! -- is why the Virgin Birth was An Absolute Necessity. Because Jesus didn't get his blood from a human father! And he didn't get it from Mary, because humans don't get their blood from their mothers. (So it didn't matter that she, too, was born sinful and guilty; there was where we knew the Catholics had gotten it wrong.) He got his blood from his divine Father, which was why that blood qualified to pay for the sins of the world.

Too bad God couldn't -- wouldn't? -- give us all that divine boost, but better that we all get born hell-bound before we ever made a decision for ourselves and have to go through the agony of a sinful world and hopefully hear the Gospel and hopefully decide to accept it than, you know, just helping us not to be born sinful in the first place.

2004-02-02T11:28:00.000-08:00

And again in the Damn Foreigner vein, this one came from a missionary visiting our church, whose mission work was in some Asian country.

Good Christians should never learn martial arts or even something like Tai Chi. Not only are the philosophies behind them sinful (and they will affect you sinfully even if you don't intend to actually adopt the philosophy or even read about it but just like the exercise), but the movements themselves are sinful. The very movements themselves, in the order they're done, with all the gestures and body angles and all that -- those very movements make you vulnerable to demonic influences! No guff.

[I admit that for this one, I never actually adopted the belief. I thought at the time, "This is nothing but superstition, of the 'Step on a Crack and Break Your Mother's Back' type. And Christianity is supposed to scoff at such superstitions. So I did.]

2004-02-02T11:06:00.000-08:00

Another one from a specific professor at Prairie Bible Institute (P.M., you know who you are!).

Did you know that the extent to which the eyes are darkened (eye shadow, eye liner, kohl, whatever) is directly correlated to the extent to which you have sunk into sin? Yep. I mean, look at the drawings of the ancient Egyptians, and look at how they treated God's Chosen People the Israelites! And look at all those Damn Foreigners (see previous blog entry today) and how many of them have dark, shadowed eyes! It's obvious.

And, P.M. added matter-of-factly, the eyes play a big part generally, in sinning. I mean, homosexuals often say they can tell with a glance of the eyes if another person is gay. P.M. pointed out that of course this would follow, because the eyes change when you're sinning, and sinners are attracted to each other and those sinful eyes get drawn to sinful eyes, and pow! Down you go.

2004-02-02T11:00:00.000-08:00

This, from instructors at the Bible school I went to (Prairie Bible Institute) from 1975-1978.

We should try to keep immigrants out of our country. Why? For economic reasons, or to protect our own citizens when it comes to jobs etc? Nay.

All those damn foreigners coming in and bringing their foreign gods with them! It'll change our Christian country into an evil, pagan country. We can't let the heathens outnumber us. We must keep ourselves (good Christians all) in the majority so that our loving God won't get mad and, you know, destroy the country.

2004-01-31T11:56:00.000-08:00

I expect the entries in this blog to be perhaps shorter and more pithy than in my other political blog, "Designated Driver of North America." This one will be all about the things the fundamentalists taught me to believe about people, society, the world, and politics, before I started comparing their teachings to the actual facts, and noticed so many discrepancies (and outright lies) that I had to abandon that philosophy.

It should be fun. It should also be appalling.