I hate the word tolerance. Tolerate is what I do to a 3 year old. But that being said what the fundamentalist lack is tolerance.
Fundamentalist do not have the thought that “even though what I believe is correct, as long as I can believe it, you can believe whatever you think is right." Fundamentalist think that “what ever it is they believe is right is so right that everyone else must be forced to believe it too.”
Tolerance as a Western “virtue†came about in the enlightenment only after 30 years of the bloodiest wars that Western Europe knew. (And some Westerners still do not accept it.)
Maybe the only way of making tolerance a world wide “virtue†is to suffer thru 30 years of terror.
OK. It’s better to have an idea than a belief. ( thank you, “Dogma”) The dilemma is that our ideas become our beliefs, rational or not. Further, our beliefs then are made known in how we act upon the world.
Yes, Harris asks for rationality. I’m not sure this make’s him a fundamentalist, at least in the way we have been using the term. If I had to provide a ‘label’, it would probably be “social utopian”. I’d have to go back and look at his scheme on ‘ethics’. Taken to its’ logical conclusion it might just be ‘fundamentalist’.
I do agree that much of the problem is that the extreme ends of the spectrum fail to see that they are connected to one another, and that they are at war with themselves. But this has always been the case when man has used the parts to define the whole. Exclusiveness is its’ own devil.
didnt’ think about it from that perspective but of course you are right. What we need is what you talked about in the other thread, a combination of rational, religion and humanity. Like we shouldn’t let a belief plant itself so firmly in our heads that other ideas seem like attacks. So in that sense, an idea is like a seed. A seed that can if we let it grow into a potted plant, that is easily controlled, or a destructive ivy that entangles your rationality.
This has two steps:
question what you know.
don’t tell someone they are lying when they present an alternate belief to you. investigate the claim, and then with rational, tell them that their ideas of life do not match you own.
I’m sure there are others as well.
perhaps not that alone, but he goes for the throat of all religion even moderate ones, I think moderate and liberal religion is the key to getting rid of fundamentalism.
yeah, utopiast probably fits much better. But I think a utopiast at it’s very core is a fundamentalist ideal. The christian fundamentalists would love it if the USA was a theocracy so that abortion and homosexual marriage could be perma banned.
Exclusivity, you mean when a person or group thinks that their idea is best?
I don’t think we can. Even if we show that the bases for all three of the monotheistic religions are no more than embelished fairy tales there will still be fundamentalists swearing that black is white. And you will have removed a crutch from many decent peoples lives.
If you tell yourself that anything is a fact three, five, seven, or whatever, times a day you will undoubtedly believe it to be so, no matter how outlandish the idea. This is just what the fundamentalists do.
I suppose that we could, at least, make a start by outlawing any form of religious sponsored schools. You would have to do it world-wide though, and I can’t see that happening.
Yes, being exclusive is a denial of our most basic state of being. When we allow ourselves to feel (be) exclusive we have abstracted ourselves away from our humaness, and then up pop’s the devil. Jesus of Nazareth didn’t fight with the devil for his ‘godliness’, but for his humanity, which coincedentally was his godliness.
It is our abstractions that draw us away from ourselves and our connectedness with that which is creation.
Avocet,
You’re right. Ridding the world of fundamentalism is a fool’s errand. There will always be those who cling to life and therefore find death.
i-zachariah,
What are you thinking? If we should go back to fundamentals this forum would disappear in the blink of … well, something.
well that’s something that christians as a whole try to deny is that the ultimate goal that christ was going for in setting his examples was to make us more god like.
when you think about religion in that way, it makes your responsibility much greater. None of this lazy “grace by faith.”
True, but neither “grace by works”. The problem still lie’s in our abstracting ourselves away from that which is creation, and that is precisely the role of religion. Instead of pointing us back into ourselves, it set’s up the golden idol called ‘god’. You may have caught my complaint in other threads that we take the first commandment, “Thou shalt have no other god’s before me.” and ignore it completely. To say the word “God” is to abstract myself away from creation (or creator) and is the first and fatal flaw. The mind, in all it’s arrogant superiority, make’s the illusion of separation possible. The myth of Adam and Eve point’s directly at our failure. Man was of his true nature until he ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. ‘Knowing’ destroyed our intuitive relationship with creation, and now we’re stuck ‘explaining’ everything.