THE CHRISTIAN AND ISLAMIC RELIGIONS BEHAVE LIKE LAMBS WHEN IN CAPTIVITY, LIKE WOLVES WHEN THEY HAVE POWER

The best definition of Fundamentalism is that it seeks to put at least one doctrine before people because it sees the doctrine as the simple truth and it does not care about the real truth. Liberals may have some Fundamentalist attitudes too. For example, "Christians" who distort the Bible to make it LGBT friendly are trying to ruin scholarship and call anybody who knows the truth a liar.
 
Fundamentalist religion thrives and often gets away with its crimes when the membership seems too big for the state to eradicate the religion, or when the religion is too powerful and when it is married to the state and maybe providing "services" such as faith based schools or hospitals or whatever. It would be much easier if the state could discern what belief it has is the most harmful and dangerous and dwell on dealing with that.
 
Fundamentalism is always harmful. Fundamentalism can range from very light Fundamentalism to every severe Fundamentalism that may even want to destroy the world for God for example. Suppose somebody says that what the Bible says is final and must never be doubted but simply obeyed. People tend to argue that that person is a Fundamentalist. They are right for that person is putting doctrine before everything else. The person might claim to love the truth. The reality is this is a lie. The answer to that is that our charges are false if the Bible is in fact true!  To call the person a Fundamentalist implies you think that what they believe is nonsense.
 
Despite "progressive" but actually elitist and arrogant attempts to make out that only theologians or mystics can understand the New Testament, the fact remains it was written in marketplace Greek - the koine of Alexander the Great. It meant what it says and is for all and is for the ordinary person not the theologian or mystic nut.
 
Bible believers are quite common in America. Liberals and politicians lie that good Christians and Muslims treat their holy books as symbols and allegories.
 
First that cannot be done for the Bible and Koran ask to be taken seriously instead of people coming up with fanciful readings that are not in the actual text and they do report what they see as history.
 
Second few believers treat (mistreat!) their scriptures that way. 63% of Americans declared the Bible means what it says in the 2005 Rasmussen poll. In 2014, a Gallup poll found that 28% accepted that the literal interpretation is valid for the Bible is actually the word of God. As Christians have declined in number the percentage is still high.
 
Third, if a scripture is just a symbol then historians can find no use for it.
 
Four, it is only a thin cover up for how violent those scriptures are. They think that to admit the truth will lead to religion fueled violence.
 
You will find normal people even in the religions with the worst reputation for being Fundamentalist. No religion can control every member completely. People's human nature will come out no matter what a religion does to thwart it. Each religion has a standard by which we can know what its required teaching is. The official scriptures, documents and leadership is what must be examined in order to declare a religion Fundamentalist or not. If a religion commands murder, and most of its members condemn murder, the religion is still Fundamentalist and the dissidents are just disobedient and not reflective of the religion. They are not real believers but hypocrites.
 
FAITH AS KNOWLEDGE
 
Fundamentalism treats beliefs not as ideas that are thought to be probably true but as facts. In other words, it refuses to admit that there is room for doubt.

True Fundamentalism claims to be an infallible ideology.

Even the most arrogant and bigoted Atheist who says, “I am right and everybody else is wrong”, is not a Fundamentalist for he cannot really believe he is infallible. He would need to believe that some magic power is making him infallible in order to really believe that he is. We all make mistakes in thinking we know something and that can’t make us all Fundamentalists. True Fundamentalism is when somebody claims that there is a God or spirit or psychic power that confers a magical infallibility on him. If the Fundamentalist doesn't claim this, the Fundamentalist certainly feels it.

The Roman Catholic Church gives the world a bad example. It says that faith is knowledge and absolute trust is required. American conservative Protestant Christianity is far worse.

True secularism is the only thing that can never be Fundamentalist. Thus anything that varies from it is Fundamentalism - no matter how liberal or reasonable it pretends to be. Secularism is always open to changing its mind based on the evidence. Thus it is not Fundamentalist.
 
The doctrine that God punishes is a Fundamentalist one. It is dangerous for us. If we do not bother punishing we feel that God will step in. It is wrong to teach any doctrine that may lead us to put faith before people.
 
Mere belief in God endorses Fundamentalism. The notion that belief is the best thing we can ever believe implies that there should be a bias against atheism or agnosticism.
 
Prayer is always a Fundamentalist activity. The praying person is urged to see that prayer works which really means that the person is being asked to remember the times it seemed to work and to forget the times it didn’t or to pretend that it. Prayer is training in Fundamentalism. It is its bedrock. Worse, prayer is done to induce the feeling that you have done good in praying. But you haven't!
 
People say they have no problem with a person engaging in Fundamentalist thinking as long as they don’t try to ram their ideas down the throats of others either by force or by use of the written word. They should. Fundamentalist thinking will lead to that if the Fundamentalists get enough money, power and support.
 
We must remember that if there are Christian theologians who honestly look at rational arguments against the faith (I said if - this is hypothetical) it is sometimes said that they are not dogmatic, not proud and not arrogant and not know-alls who misguidedly think they know it all. But the same cannot be said of priests and laity who are not theologians. They do not have the same knowledge and yet they insist on obedience to a revealed faith and are proud of it. They are definitely Fundamentalists.

The Church uses its proclamation that its faith is a kind of knowledge as an excuse to justify hurting people in the name of faith. It uses this as excuse to justify ideas such as abortion being wrong even to save the mother’s life despite how much harm may ensue. The reality is that if you depend on nothing but random nature, then you may have to be a step ahead of it and have an abortion for nothing is looking after you. That is one example. There are many others.

Fundamentalist Christians claim they believe that only the Bible has authority in matters of religion. This is a lie. They treat their own assumptions as the word of God as well. For example, when Jesus asked people to hate their parents and children to serve him they say "he didn’t mean it literally. It is hyperbole. By hate he only meant that parents and children must come second to him." And even if they didn't engage in rationalising, they only believe the Bible is the word of God because they assume that it is. In other words, it strictly speaking, not the Bible they consider to be the voice of their God but their own prejudices, desires and assumptions.
 
The Fundamentalist's faith makes a virtue out of arrogance that is dressed up to look like humility. We see this in its claim that faith is knowledge. If faith is knowledge, then what use is science? Why should we attach any importance to science?

A religion that makes way for Fundamentalism is to blame for the evil done in its name even when it protests against the evil.

The worst Fundamentalist is the one who claims to know their faith is true. What they really mean is that they feel it is true and that amounts to knowing! The Fundamentalist who becomes a believer because of thinking that the evidence for faith is wonderful and excellent is actually less of a Fundamentalist than the former. This person is really a rationalist who has made big mistakes or been misinformed.
 
To say I know my faith is true because I can feel it is the height of arrogance and intolerance. Those are the people who will read and understand the proofs that their faith is lies or wrong and seem unaffected by them. They are being unfair to the proofs and to those who have discovered and who stand by the proofs.
  
LIBERALS ARE FUNDAMENTALISTS TOO!
 
Fundamentalists are defined as being extreme, guilty of putting beliefs before people and of being narrow in their thinking.
 
Liberals like to accuse Fundamentalists of taking the Scriptures literally. That accusation is surprisingly a sign of the liberal's narrow mentality. In fact, Fundamentalists say that all scriptures use symbolism and clearly indicate when a symbolic understanding is called for. For example, a Jew and Muslim might talk about the hand of God and see the expression in their scriptures. But they do not mean that God really has a hand or a body. But when a scripture says all things were made in six days and science refutes that, they stand by scripture. Liberals will pretend that the six days is a metaphor. But that is really saying, "If science seems refute our scriptures, it is our understanding that is wrong." Translation: "If our Bible is proven wrong we will pretend that its tales are not literally true and were meant to be only stories to inspire us." Such an approach is dishonest. They lie to people in the name of religion as much as Fundamentalists do. They are Fundamentalists themselves under all the cosmetics.

A Fundamentalist who has made errors of judgment or who has been misinformed and who thinks the Bible is the absolute authority even if it commands murder is less of a Fundamentalist than the liberal. The liberal says there is a God and then he himself makes his own words the word of God.

Both liberals and Fundamentalists state that God or some supernatural being comes first.
 
RESPONSE: The people and creatures you share this earth with matter. Leave beings whose existence you can’t see or prove out of it. You are a Fundamentalist in spirit even if you are a "liberal."

 
PICK AND MIX CATHOLICISM

The true Catholic refuses to deliberately reject the Catholic faith and what it teaches. He is a member of the Catholic belief community. He is a member of the believers. He is a member in Church law as well. Those "Catholics" who reject the view that the shepherds of the Church the bishops and the popes know best and can exercise infallibility are not acting as Catholics even if they are Catholics. The believing Catholics accept that there is only a single and united and sacred and apostolic and Catholic Church through which Jesus teaches us the truth today. Even atheists must agree with that. If you want to speak as a Mormon then you must speak in line with what your religion teaches. Your religion is bigger than you.

If Catholicism is Fundamentalist, the liberal Catholics are drawing people to it. The liberal Catholic converts find out that the liberals are dishonestly watering down and inventing their own standards. They want to be really Catholic and they end up Fundamentalist.

That is an example of how liberalism is the friend of the Fundamentalism it abuses.
 
CHARACTERISTICS OF FUNDAMENTALISM

Some authority must be believed and followed. We never get away from it. Even the individualist thinks that individualism is his authority.

Fundamentalism may enrol you as a member and tell you that you are obliged to obey it when it hasn’t given you sufficient evidence that you should do so. For example, the Catholic Church manipulates young children who cannot understand Catholicism properly to believe they are members of the Church and bound to obey it.

Fundamentalism may advocate hatred against sinners and heretics and unbelievers openly or it may hide it under the doctrine of loving the sinner and hating the sin. Can you hate human life but love all people? Sins are not things. Sins describe not what people do but what kind of people they are. To hate anybody or their actions for religious reasons is putting faith before people. I should not hate John's adultery because it breaks God's command. But I should hate its role in bringing him pain. See the difference?
 
Fundamentalism says,

My religion is right.

RESPONSE: You may believe it is right but that is all that you can say. You cannot talk as if it is right when you only believe that it is. You cannot talk as if you are certain when you are not.

We do not understand why God forbids us to do this thing for example plan a family responsibly through contraception. He knows better than us that doing it will not be for the best.

RESPONSE: All people need to do for vicious Fundamentalism to thrive is to "respect" and tolerate that belief!

RELIGION YOU ARE NOT OFF THE HOOK!
 
The Church cares more for its doctrine than the truth – like most religions it refuses to change its mind when proved wrong. Such a faith cannot expect anybody to take it seriously when it forbids anything. The Roman Catholic faith represented by the priests and the bishops and especially the pope are ultimately to blame for all the harm done by Roman Catholics.

The Church uses science and pretends to be compatible with it. But how could science which is based on the notion of looking for evidence all the time and changing your mind if the evidence justifies it be agreeable with religion which instead of changing its mind refuses to listen to the evidence or proof that it is wrong? Science is about seeking disproof.

Some Catholics fall away. Many Catholics that do evil in the name of religion are accused of being disobedient and of being bad Catholics. But are they when their religion makes them feel and believe they ought to do these evils? Whose the bad guy?

If Catholicism starts producing religious terrorists, it will say they are dissidents and not representatives of true Catholicism. But unless it excommunicates them – and it won’t – they are representatives of true Catholicism. The excommunication could last until they are released from the excommunication in confession by a priest. An irrational religion cannot complain if some members go very far in that irrationality even to the point of genocide or murder.

There is more. The Catholic Church teaches contradictory doctrines and excuses the contradictions by pretending they are mysteries. A religion that teaches contradiction and practices it is implicitly endorsing the activities of those who do deeds forbidden by the Church in the name of religion. For example, if you ask people to contradict themselves and not to admit it, you cannot complain if they start torturing heretics to death on the basis that it contradicts your message. You are to blame for putting the feeling that they do right into them as much as they are.
 
Catholicism has refused to take responsibility for much evil done by the Church. And the evil is hellish to even read about. A healthy system will not produce evil of that potential. What is the real state of the forest that produces such bad trees? Also the faith increases the intent to be evil.
 
An atheist who murders does great harm to another and society and perhaps his own family. Religion makes the evil he intended far worse by saying he intends to insult and break with the God who loves him and who died for him and that he intends to reject his loved ones for all eternity by calling the punishment of Hell on himself. Religion puts extreme evil in the heart. If we are going to do evil, it is better for us to be atheists rather than believers.
 
Conclusion
 
All religion, even if it is not blatantly Fundamentalist, IS Fundamentalist! The intolerance and bigotry become secrets of the heart. They are the seeds of violent actions and strife. Religion of all kinds is the sea in which Fundamentalism swims and often a Fundamentalist is only an obedient believer in the religion. Conservative Muslim and Catholic and Christian groups that emphasise an infallible source of truth, such as a prophet or scripture, always grow and get strong. Such groups develop even in the midst of liberals so it is safe to say that liberalism loses its appeal and that paves the way for Fundamentalism. The last thing we need to say that religion and Fundamentalism are two sides of the one problem and often they are really the one side.