Quotes About Fundamentalism

When the obstacles in the world become greater and more complex and seem to be coming from all directions at once, there are two great tendencies in the psyche. One is to simplify and quickly adopt some form of fundamentalism. The other is to accept the multiplicity and the great tension that come from embracing the world as it presents itself.

But it seems clear that an increasing majority are not being helped by traditional religions and belief systems. Many are unable to separate the truth in the old doctrines from the distortions and degradations that time has added, and since they cannot accept error, they reject the truth as well. Others are so desperate for some order that they cling rigidly to whatever belief happens to be at hand—warts and all—and become fundamentalist Christians, or Muslims, or communists.

Regional separatism, xenophobia, anti-immigrant campaigns, and religious fundamentalisms all stand to benefit from the decay of power.

This uncertainty in turn, of course, begets a new and anxious eagerness for certainty: hence the appeal of fundamentalism, which in today's world is not so much a return to a premodern worldview but precisely to one form of modernism (reading the Bible within the grid of a quasi-or pseudoscientific quest for "objective truth

Like its bête noire, Marxism, laissez-faire economics claimed to be scientific, based upon immutable laws of nature, and also like Marxism, it has not stood the test of experience. If it were a scientific theory, it would have long ago been rejected.37 Free-market fundamentalism is an article of faith.

The billionaire investor George Soros has coined a term to describe this perspective: "free market fundamentalism." It is the belief not simply that free markets are the best way to run an economic system, but that free markets are the only way that will not ultimately destroy our other freedoms. "The doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism holds that the common good is best served by the uninhibited pursuit of self-interest,"36 Soros wrote.

It was actually in the Atlantic West that we first witnessed the paradox of religious fundamentalism: that it reflects the weakening of religious conviction.

Bloom wrote, 'there is nowhere else to seek it. I would suggest that fascism has a future, if not the future.' The English political philosopher John Gray warned of the return of 'more primordial forces, nationalist and religious, fundamentalist and soon, perhaps, Malthusian' that the Cold War had tranquillized; he pointed to the intellectual incapacity of liberalism as well as Marxism in this new world order.

There are a lot of Christian fundamentalists there are a lot of Muslim extremists. Every religion - Mormonism - has something way on the side that's completely using the religion as some weird backbone for their twisted faith. It has nothing to do with their religion.

The basic error of fundamentalism is that it overlooks the contribution of the receptive side in the revelatory situation and consequently identifies one individual and conditioned form of receiving the divine with the divine itself.

In this respect fundamentalism has demonic traits. It destroys the humble honesty of the search for truth, it splits the conscience of its thoughtful adherents, and it makes them fanatical because they are forced to suppress elements of truth of which they are dimly aware

If your life is Christ, then your death will be only more of Christ, forever. If your life is only Christlessness, then your death will be only more Christlessness, forever. That's not fundamentalism, that's the law of non-contradiction.