Sunday, February 20, 2005

The fundamentalist mind....


This post, from RazorsKiss, illustrates the fundamentalist mindset rather well, and is rather chilling precisely because the writer simply has no idea of how his words read to another...

Some key features of this post:



  • OK, he's aping C.S. Lewis, and it's highly unoriginal, but the fact that this writer can attempt to adopt the persona of Satan, well, to me says that this person is well at home adopting a persona of evil. That in itself is chilling. How can I say it?

    It is truly a masterpiece of self-deceit and ambiguous outrage against he knows not what.



  • What is striking is the presumption that he's in the "right" camp and the other guy isn't. This type of hubris is close to what real Christians would call "sinning against the Holy Spirit," especially since he's directing it against an individual who is making a charge based on the immorality of the religious hypocrites he has witnessed.

  • This bit of babbling bears repeating for its sheer essence as a sequence of non sequiturs - especially in light of the fact that there's folks like Kierkegaard and Barth who have in essence defined Christianity as subjectivism of the most important and fundamental kind. But then this is the rub that these types of fundamentalists don't get - preciesly because if they did they'd bump up into true Christianity. By denying and denigrating the subjective, they deny and denigrate the very authority - theirs- to accept the premise of Christianity.

    From there, he makes the leap from “since I have said you lost all moral claims” to “thus, you have no claim to morality". Infernal! Do you see what fruits our patient work in the “subjectivism” field have brought? There is no “ethics” - there is “a” set of ethics!




This is what is apparently encouraged in fundamentalist congregations. And it's so foreign to anything I remember Christianity being. I thought they had gotten over the hate.

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