For the past five years, this blog has been inactive. My writing and editing skills have been in demand at my church, where I spent four years helping to write the high school Sunday school curriculum and editing, formatting, and printing a series of akathist booklets that my parish uses at our Thursday evening services. Currently, I serve as president of the parish council and as a member of the new adult education committee.
That does not mean I have not been writing anything on-line, however. I participated in a number of on-line news and political forums. For various reasons, I am no longer welcome at those forums. As a charter member of the conservative NeverTrump movement, I have been falsely tagged with just about every label on the political spectrum. So, lately I have been posting comments mostly on Intellectual Takeout, which is subtitled, more or less accurately, a refuge for rational discourse. What follows is an edited form of a post that originally appeared as a comment on the IT article, Why Atheists Read the Bible Like Fundamentalists.
Fundamentalism and atheism both share a common foundation in modernism. Therefore, they operate from a common set of premises and, for the most part, a common worldview. They both tend to embrace rationalism, individualism, and iconoclasm – i.e., the central tenets of modernism. They might line up at opposite ends of the field, but they are playing the same game, by the same rules, within the same agreed boundaries. Religious traditionalists, by contrast, are playing a completely different game.
Most followers, as well as critics, of fundamentalism imagine it to adhere uncritically to inherited tradition, but nothing could be further from the truth. Every fundamentalism begins by rejecting tradition (“the traditions of men”, in fundamentalist parlance) as corrupt. So they cut themselves off from the stream of inherited tradition, and attempt to graft themselves directly onto their religion’s founder(s). The problem is that they re-imagine the founders’ concerns in terms of their own, so they project their modernism back onto the founding generation. Thus, they end up creating a new religion, which they imagine to be old.
Fundamentalists tend to bring modern concerns (e.g., science and history) to the reading of their scriptures. Since their concerns align with those of their atheist interlocutors, they can agree on the subject of their argument, even if they take opposite sides. Fundamentalists agree completely with the modernist criteria for evaluating scripture; they just imagine, somehow, that their scripture is true because it meets the modernist criteria of scientific and historical accuracy. We traditionalists, who bring different criteria to our reading of scripture, have trouble communicating with both types of modernists. (Interestingly, we tend to have more interesting conversations with certain types of post-modernists, who approach scripture from a literary standpoint.)
While the term “fundamentalism” arose among English-speaking Protestants a little over a century ago, this pattern is not exclusive to Christianity. One sees the same pattern in the Islamist and Hindu nationalist movements, for example.
That does not mean I have not been writing anything on-line, however. I participated in a number of on-line news and political forums. For various reasons, I am no longer welcome at those forums. As a charter member of the conservative NeverTrump movement, I have been falsely tagged with just about every label on the political spectrum. So, lately I have been posting comments mostly on Intellectual Takeout, which is subtitled, more or less accurately, a refuge for rational discourse. What follows is an edited form of a post that originally appeared as a comment on the IT article, Why Atheists Read the Bible Like Fundamentalists.
Fundamentalism and atheism both share a common foundation in modernism. Therefore, they operate from a common set of premises and, for the most part, a common worldview. They both tend to embrace rationalism, individualism, and iconoclasm – i.e., the central tenets of modernism. They might line up at opposite ends of the field, but they are playing the same game, by the same rules, within the same agreed boundaries. Religious traditionalists, by contrast, are playing a completely different game.
Most followers, as well as critics, of fundamentalism imagine it to adhere uncritically to inherited tradition, but nothing could be further from the truth. Every fundamentalism begins by rejecting tradition (“the traditions of men”, in fundamentalist parlance) as corrupt. So they cut themselves off from the stream of inherited tradition, and attempt to graft themselves directly onto their religion’s founder(s). The problem is that they re-imagine the founders’ concerns in terms of their own, so they project their modernism back onto the founding generation. Thus, they end up creating a new religion, which they imagine to be old.
Fundamentalists tend to bring modern concerns (e.g., science and history) to the reading of their scriptures. Since their concerns align with those of their atheist interlocutors, they can agree on the subject of their argument, even if they take opposite sides. Fundamentalists agree completely with the modernist criteria for evaluating scripture; they just imagine, somehow, that their scripture is true because it meets the modernist criteria of scientific and historical accuracy. We traditionalists, who bring different criteria to our reading of scripture, have trouble communicating with both types of modernists. (Interestingly, we tend to have more interesting conversations with certain types of post-modernists, who approach scripture from a literary standpoint.)
While the term “fundamentalism” arose among English-speaking Protestants a little over a century ago, this pattern is not exclusive to Christianity. One sees the same pattern in the Islamist and Hindu nationalist movements, for example.
