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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KLP who wrote (89681)	12/8/2004 8:07:18 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793912

True, karen, BUT, have you heard of a single sect of "fundamentalist Christians" killing, murdering, raping, 500,000 to millions of people in the last century? No, of course not. I don't know why people react to this fundamentalist/fundamentalist comparison with hyperbolic notions of moral equivalence. This reminds me of the discussion the thread had about moral equivalence during the Abu Graib incident. If something is a problem it's a problem. That there may be something else out there along the same lines that's a dramatically bigger problem doesn't make the first problem not a problem. When we get an infected finger, we don't dismiss it because it isn't cancer. Infected fingers are problems albeit not as as likely catastrophic. There is one further thing that needs to be explored IMO. ANY MSM who uses the term "right wing anything", or "fundamentalist Christians" should be held to task to account for exactly which groups they are including in these terms, and how many people they believe is in each. I struggle a lot with labels as you know. No one has come up with a taxonomy of religious beliefs or behaviors let alone applied numbers to the categories. There are a number of head counts out there of various sects but none of them is definitive about which sect belongs in which category. This is a mine field. And if you're looking at Christianity from the outside as I am, it's even harder. In the conservative Christian space people tend to talk about fundamentalists and evangelicals. My understanding is that "fundamentalist" deals with a literal-Bible belief set and "evangelical" deals with proselytizing. Not all fundamentalists are evangelical and not all evangelicals are fundamentalists. Anyway, that's how I use the terms. They are useful for conveying some ideas but not others. To the extent that they are taken as labeling rather than communicating those ideas, they are counterproductive. I use other labels, too, trying to convey different ideas. I was using the word, purist, during this discussion to try to convey those Christians who think that liberal Christians aren't real Christians. I'd never used that word before because I never tried to convey that idea before. If there's an accepted label for it, I don't know what it is. I've used "orthodox" before. If that word is commonly applied to Christians, I'm not aware of it but to me it is better than "conservative Christians" as distinguished from "liberal Christians" because of confusion with "conservative" and "liberal" as a political labels. I don't think the MSM have an easier go of it than I do. There is no taxonomy or census that they have access to that we don't. Do you think that the MSM should have to commission a study to come up with that taxonomy and census before they can use those words? Do you think that I do? How would you count fundamentalists? Would it be members of sects categorized as fundamentalist? You'd get a much larger number if you used the survey that showed that 45 percent of us believe that God created humans in their present form. If that ain't fundamentalist, I don't know what is. But maybe those 45 percent don't have other fundamentalist beliefs. I'd love to see someone tackle your taxonomy and census so we'd all know what we're talking about. Do the MSM have a responsibility to commission one just so they can use words? I don't think so. We all use words the best we can based on their definitions by appropriate authorities and based on evolving common usage. [As for "right wing," that's a political categorization, not a religious one.] In the post to which you replied I was talking about authoritarian fundamentalism. I was trying to convey the application of the fundamentalist belief set and an authoritarian or theocratic political approach. There are several threads that appear at least in some parts of orthodox Christianity that are potentially problematic in the modern world. One of them is proselytization. As we share the commons in our ever more globalized world, proselytization is in conflict with respect for the space of others. Since proselytization is a key religious mandate for evangelicals, they cannot exercise their religious freedoms without the risk of bumping into someone else's religious freedom. Another thread is the literal Bible. This is inconsistent with the modern world where it conflicts with science and learning. And where it produces the absolutist thread. The latter rigidity inhibits the evolution of values over time and the flexibility of it's practitioners to compromise and tolerate as they encounter other belief systems in the modern world. Closely related is the authoritarian thread. Authoritarian-style religiosity can foster an authoritarian approach to human structures such as family, workplace, and government. And lastly there's the salvation thread, which puts a higher priority on achieving salvation than on getting along in this world. I haven't a clue how many proselytizing, literalist, absolutist, authoritarian salvationists there are out there. I seriously doubt there is a label that subsumes someone who's an all-fiver. I don't think it matters. It's the individual threads, the ideas and their practice, that need to be reconciled somehow with with the modern world. Through a process of give and take, preferably, since that's the modern way. The alternatives are war or surrender. Re your reference to jihadis, you can see that our "orthodox" and their "orthodox" have all of these elements in common to some extent. The differences are more in degree than in kind. The most dramatic differences in degree are in the proselytizing and salvationist threads. Christianity has managed to reconcile getting into heaven with loving rather than killing one's fellow men and learned to convert by enlightenment rather than by conquest. Which is a blessing.