Religious Fundamentalism: The Zenith of Moral Bankruptcy

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

During an interview with a refugee from Iran, the topic of religious fundamentalism came up. The Iranian used a Sufi image as he depicted fundamentalists as "growing on the same hedge." Plato left us with a priceless body of literature that skewers the fundamentalists of his time and place. His work served as the inspiration for Galileo Galilei's seminal dialog debunking the dogma of his contemporaries. Michele Bachmann's recent jabs at Obama's execution of the Bush administration's Iraq withdrawal schedule gives us a shining example of the essence of the fundamentalist mind: it is a cesspool of contradictory concepts.

Mark Juergensmeyer describes his experience interviewing one of the Muslim fundamentalists involved in the assassination of Meir Kahane and involved in the first bombing of the World Trade Center. The man describes his experience with "secularism" as being like a pen without ink. His spiritual emptiness led him to pursue a path into the abyss of religious fundamentalism and self-defeating hate criminality. As he filled his spiritual void with the ink of human blood, he grew into the imbecile ridiculed by both Galileo and Plato. He embodied the vicious moral bankruptcy of human degradation at its most refined. He followed the path of the Carrier of Light as it led him deeper into the pit of depravity.

Muslim fundamentalists attack Sufis the way that Christian fundamentalists attack anyone with insight into the life and work of Jesus. If a Muslim fundamentalist met Mohammad on the road, Mohammad would meet his end at the hands of the fundamentalist. Like their Christian counterparts, Muslim fundamentalists have no clue that their piety comes across as pure, unadulterated horse manure.

The fundamentalist value statement is simple: "There is one God and we control him." The Sufi presents a counter example to this assertion in Islam the way that Socrates presented a counter example to the fundamentalists of ancient Athens and the way Jesus presents a counter example to Christian fundamentalists. The irony of someone professing to a monopoly on the divine is lost to the sorry saps who practice the vicious craft of religious fundamentalism.

My personal value statement is that a secular path is difficult, but that it is worth the pain and sorrow. Without the pain of falling down and breaking a bone we cannot experience the pleasure of recovery. There is an ink more sublime than that of sacrificial blood.

What do you consider to be your personal value statement?

Comments

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

Are you asking me what is best in life?

We already know...

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

... what your personal value statement is: humor is the best medicine.

The movie with the best quotes in all movie history

[sealwhiskers.livejournal.com]

...and hear the lamentation of their women! :p

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

To eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we wind up with a stomachache, a hangover, and a stranger knocked up from a one-night stand-die?

[pastorlenny.livejournal.com]

"Dirty deeds done dirt cheap."

Oh, sorry. That's my personal value proposition.

I love that song.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

That is a blast from the past. It takes me back to my college years.

[oportet.livejournal.com]

Alcohol doesn't change who you are, it reveals who you are.

Same can be said for religion - it doesn't make you ignorant or hateful. People for and against it just use it as an excuse, so they don't have to address the true, obvious explanation - that some people are just fucking mean.

Gee...

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

... that is sort of like saying that religion has an opiating effect. I can sympathize with the idea, especially when people choose a religious leader who resonates with their personal sentiments. In the case of Catholicism, if the current pope is too fundamentalist, one can always find a priest who will dissents from the official line.

[surferelf.livejournal.com]

I must say I disagree with this. (Not the alcohol part, because we are all complete fools and alcohol reveals that.) While some "mean" people may use religion as an excuse for evil deeds they were inclined to do anyway, fundamentalism cultivates the evil that is a part of all of us by portraying it as virtue.

[paedraggaidin.livejournal.com]

Extremism in any form, be it religious fundamentalism, militant atheism, anticlerical secularism, political tyranny, patriarchal misogyny, or anything else, is alien to the God-given free will that, basically, makes humans what we are.

But...

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

... which God confers the will to violence?

Where do you stand on the idea that people do vicious things out of personal choice rather than as a result of external inspiration?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Sigh, the problem with this is that it creates a dichotomy between Sufism and the less pleasant sides of Islamic culture that doesn't really exist. Traditional Islam included plenty of devout, educated Sufis who were quite extreme fanatics in the sense of medieval crusaders, and the Sufi mystics could have as much power and influence in all the wrong ways as a Christian religious order did.

You're one of the premier Catholic-bashers in this community yet Catholicism has plenty of its own pacific, peaceful mystics like St. Theresa of Avila and nobody tends to say that the Teresas outweigh the Donahues.

Too, Socrates was executed because he was tied to a group of tyrannoi that oppressed the Hell out of Athens and were all students of his, just as his disciple's disciple Alexander the Great went on to blaze Greek civilization across Asia very literally, burning down cities, libraries, and the like and renaming the ashes after himself.

Jesus also provides a counter to Christian fundamentalists only in that Jesus's teachings are always about God and Other-World, the fundamentalists focus on a narrow, limited God of This World. In terms of that focus on Other-World Jesus is just as fanatical to degrees that people tend to overlook when it comes to Jesus's own words in the Gospels themselves.

I disagree.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

One of the best sources for Sufism is Idries Shah. He points out that there is no such thing as a monolithic Sufi order. There are as many variations as there are Sufi practitioners. The greatest influence the Sufis had on the Crusaders was in training the Knights Templar and possibly some other military orders.

Your spin on the trial of Socrates is interesting, but it does not jibe with what I have read. Yes, he got some blowback from the antics of Alcibiades, but his own nose thumbing at the authorities was probably more crucial in his prosecution.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

Aristotle taught Alexander the Great, who was Macedonian. I don't think Greece was under the heel of Macedonia when Socrates was oot and aboot.

[onefatmusicnerd.livejournal.com]

τόν σοφιστήν

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

What do you consider to be your personal value statement?
Spiritual schmiritual. Give me some bread.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

Jesus v. Christian fundamentalists

[russj.livejournal.com]

Jesus presents a counter example to Christian fundamentalists.

Will you please cite this counter example, that Jesus made to a group of his followers that did not yet exist?

Re: Jesus v. Christian fundamentalists

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

For example, fundamentalists pray in public. Jesus recommended against the practice. Fundamentalists practice hate with the subtlety of serpents. This is not something that Jesus seems to have advised.

[mijan.livejournal.com]

Values? Rationality, cooperation, humanism, social justice, personal responsibility, and "infinite diversity in infinite combinations."

With that kind of value statement...

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

... you are likely to be gunned down in the street by a crazed fundamentalist.

Values?

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

If it cannot be empirically proven or at least inferred, it's worthless. Move on.

Insisting on dogma to run your life interesting consequences (http://www.tumblr.com/photo/1280/9707724121/1/tumblr_lqwjokBrOP1qii52v).

Re: Values?

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

Even Galileo understood the limits of empiricism. Some of the best experiments in the history of science are thought experiments.

[onefatmusicnerd.livejournal.com]

"Cracker puhlease..."

[devil-ad-vocate.livejournal.com]

"If your map says that you're on the mountain over there, then you're lost"

[kardashev.livejournal.com]

What do you consider to be your personal value statement?

Something like this:

Morality is subjective, a lie, and a propaganda tool invented first by ancient religionists and then taken up by modern secular humanists. It is mainly used for brainwashing the masses away from what humans would naturally do when freed from all forms of thought-policing: Live for themselves.

Be wary of anyone who says "We're the good guys!" Mass murder, rape, and slavery may be imminent.

And this...

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

... from a misanthrope. If you only lived for yourself, you would not share your thoughts with others.

[mrbogey.livejournal.com]

'Without the pain of falling down and breaking a bone we cannot experience the pleasure of recovery.'

How is any fracture recovery pleasurable?

I take it...

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

... you have not recovered from a broken bone.

[montanaisaleg.livejournal.com]

What do you find difficult about the secular path?

The secular path...

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

... requires more discipline than the path of blind faith. It challenges a person to go in a direction where few have trod.

[harry-beast.livejournal.com]

Secular fundamentalism is just as bad as religious fundamentalism. In fact, it is worse, because it has few of religion's redeeming virtues.

My personal value statement probably be: think for yourself, pursue worthwhile goals, have faith and don't expect too much from people.

I have met...

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

... secular fundamentalists. I would not distinguish them from religious fundamentalists. They simply practice a different form of rigid impiety than do traditionalists.