The Remnant
I like these two quotes:
“What most people need to learn in life is how to love people and use things instead of using people and loving things…”
– and –
“You don’t always have to hold your head higher than your heart…”
Enough lovey-dovey bullshit, let’s get to some manstuff, YUCK!…
Windows 7 has a new ad campaign, and it doesn’t suck:
Sesame Street should be replaced:
-
Velcro 2.0: “Engineers at the Technical University of Munich developed the super-strong material which supports a maximum of thirty five tons, and yet can be pulled apart without tools.”
-
This is the only time Chomsky will ever be on my site. Maybe. Probably. Unless it is to slam his malformed views (smartest man in academia, my @$$).
- I don’t know what I think about this 12-year-old being indocrinated with atheism. I think it is probably no worse than the indoctrination given to so many other kids, but the theme is essentially – ‘how far do we go to teach our kids things before exploration is quelled completely?’
I honestly don't think there's anything particularly harmful in a 12-year-old that you might not find in a similar, and truly Fundamentalist (so yes, I'm using my definition, not yours) camp.
THAT SAID, there's lots of kind of scary things that, any persecution she's endured aside, are going to need nuance if she's going to avoid sounding crazy when she gets older.
In particular I'm disturbed by the notion that we religious folk cling to our beliefs because they're comforting–apparently nobody's ever told her about judgment–and the fact that we actually heard, well:
"Morgaine: Do you see any dangers in religious thinking? Dangers to an individual? Dangers to the world at large? And do you see any benefits?
Megan: I think that religion will cause history to repeat itself. As long as there are different beliefs, people will fight and kill for power."
There's the example of a thing that will need much more nuance if she's ever going to be a productive contributor to the exchange of ideas.
You never gave me that definition, did you?
I agree with most everything else you said, though I don't agree with the indoctrination of children when the beliefs can go toward harming another physically or on terms of rights.
Oh, no. I don't either–I didn't meant to give the impression that I did.
There are three definitions of Fundamentalist I'm actually willing to accept now.
1) Anyone who self-identifies as such
2) In Christianity specifically, someone who is identifiable as in continuity with the early 20th Century movement known as Fundamentalism and preaching the Five Fundamentals of the faith as opposed to modernism. (Modernism by the way is a word I'm not even going to try to define, except to say it seems to include lots of things that don't really sit so well with us religious folk, at least if we're even vaguely inclined to theological conservatism.
3) One of the profs at UP gave me a good across-the-board definition once, which if I recall it correctly was something like "anyone who is locked into a particular notion of what a sacred tradition means and is fearful of other interpretations or data that come from outside the circles propagating this notion." This one, it should be noted, can define what fundamentalism means in any religious group (theoretically I suppose it could also define what fundamentalism means in atheism, but I don't think the prof took it that far.)
Does that mean (per definition 2) that Catholics are fundamentalists?
"Does that mean (per definition 2) that Catholics are fundamentalists?"
Dubious at best. On technicality if nothing else, The historical fundamentalist movement may rely on a definition of the Bible as inerrant that is untenable to Catholicism, though certain persons who were associated with the movement did tend to display less-historically-literal views of Scripture. It also appears at least according to Wikipedia that aside from its standard Five Fundamentals the movement also objected to several things that Catholics don't have to object to, that arguably thinking Catholics ought to pay heed to (e.g. form/redactionary criticism.) In other words, being a Fundamentalist even in the sense of believing the Five Fundamentals seems to entail believing in at least one thing specifically taught by Catholicism to be not required, may entail (depending on definition of the Bible as inerrant) belief in something the Catholic Church also does not require and seems in many ways to caution against, and seems to be associated with at least one or two other things which Catholicism cautions or disagrees outright with.
I should mention this, though I haven't found a reference to support this yet; for some reason in my mind Fundamentalism held to perseverance of the saints. Catholics don't hold to perseverance of the saints, which states that if someone's truly saved from hell, there's nothing they can do to lose their salvation. The only persons the Church teaches any assurance of salvation with respect to are the saints, and nobody gets sainted pre-Death as far as I know. This is being treated as a peripheral point, however, because until proven further it's just a notion I picked up from some less-official list of Fundamentals or something.
At the very most the historical Christian Fundamentalism could be a subset of Catholicism in a sense, but that's at the very most and rests on sort of dubious reconciliations of the basic Catholic theological framework with the main ideas of the Fundamentalist movement. It certainly does not mean in any way shape or form that even the staunchest Catholics fall into the set of Fundamentalists.
I'm also not claiming that Fundamentalism is totally monolithic. But many of its defining attitudes and ideas even as it has done some morphing over the years seem to be at the least problematic for theologically correct Catholics, if not untenable. In other words, if a Catholic meets the stricter requirements for being a Fundamentalist, s/he is probably not doing their Catechetical homework.
That was particularly well-said albeit a bit confusing (as is the nature of the discussion). But I agree in totality and have nothing concise or controversial (imagine that!) to say that would be more on point. Thanks Daniel.