{"id":14883,"date":"2012-01-16T18:23:21","date_gmt":"2012-01-17T02:23:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=14883"},"modified":"2012-01-16T18:23:21","modified_gmt":"2012-01-17T02:23:21","slug":"a-pretty-good-working-definition-of-religious-fundamentalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=14883","title":{"rendered":"A Pretty Good Working Definition of Religious Fundamentalism"},"content":{"rendered":"

I found this in Barbara C. Sproul’s introduction to Primal Myths: Creation Myths Around the World<\/a><\/em>. It has been a long time since I have thought of myself as a religious person or had much to do with people who are religious in the orthodox way many of my teachers were when I was in yeshiva. The description below would not fit most of those men and women, whose commitment to their faith I continue to respect and even learn from; but there were others for whom Sproul’s words seem tailor-made; and these others, of course, have brothers and sisters in all faiths.<\/p>\n

Holding literally to the claims of any particular myth…is a great error in that it mistakes myth’s values for science’s facts and results in the worst sort of religiosity. Such literalism requires a faith that splits rather than unifies our consciousness. Thinking particular myths to be valuable in themselves undermines the genuine power of all myth to reveal value in the world: it transforms myths into obstacles to meaning rather than conveyors of it. Frozen in time, myth’s doctrines come to describe a world removed from and irrelevant to our timely one; its followers, consequently, become strangers to modernity and its real progress. Those of such blind faith are forced to sacrifice intellect, emotion and the honesty of both to satisfy their creeds. And this kind of literalism is revealed as fundamentally idolatrous, the opposite of genuine faith.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I found this in Barbara C. Sproul’s introduction to Primal Myths: Creation Myths Around the World. It has been a long time since I have thought of myself as a religious person or had much to do with people who … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[150],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14883"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14883\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14884,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14883\/revisions\/14884"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}