<<I don't know that it's the entries in the list that are at issue.>>
I made some generalizations ("my working definition") about what i'd observed about fundamentalists. He said that was bigoted. He didn't say which observations he felt were inaccurately descriptive, he just called me bigoted. So I still don't know anything except that he takes hostile exception to my listing. I don't know whether he considers, for example, that fundamentalists
~do show common sense
~have not devised (they would usually say "divined") "rules," and definitions, that are more important to them than kindness, love, joy, pleasure, happiness, sympathy, or amelioration of suffering.
~do not want to force everyone to live by their rules using the arm of the state, law, punishments; that is, to make their religious law into the civil law.
~don't believe there is a deity to whom they are very special and whose "will" they are positive they represent.
~don't place a low value on reason and evidence
I think the shortfall in your "definition" is that it doesn't allow for any individuals without that set of characteristics to be fundamentalists. Surely at least some fundamentalists are quietly pious. I knew one once.
I had an SI friend who was a born-again Christian. (We've fallen out of touch in the last year.) She is pious, and you might call her "quietly pious" since she doesn't talk much about such policies as taking away funds for family planning from clinics in AIDS-ridden third world countries where orphaned infants will thereby die in agony of starvation and disease if that clinic's physician's talk about (not offer, talk about) abortion to a pregnant woman with AIDS. She votes only for strict right to life candidates, though. She believes those who don't agree with her should be forced against their wills to gestate. She doesn't believe in evolution (she won't even get on the Intelligent Design theory bandwagon, I'm sure. Her children will, of course.) She surely does actively believe that only born-again Christians will take part in the Rapture and thinks it could commence at any moment. She is 50, and has been celibate since she was in her late 30's, ever since she joined her church.
She has a wonderful sense of humor, though. She really knows how to laugh and is very funny.
What would "quietly pious" Islamic fundamentalists believe about, for example, the question of whether Mohammed rode up to heaven on a winged horse? About the set of injunctions guaranteeing the permanent subordination of women? About making Islamic religious law the civil law to some degree, or in whole?
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