This religious fervour shows no sign of abating. ibid.
Why are American fundamentalists so defensive? ibid.
Many use the word evangelical instead. ibid.
The F word was rarely invoked by Westerners with reference to the Islamic world until events in Iran. ibid.
The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women’s rights, pluralism, secularism, short skits, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex. There are tyrants, not Muslims.
United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said that we should now define ourselves not only by what we are for but by what we are against. I would reverse that proposition, because in the present instance what we are against is a no brainer. Suicidist assassins ram wide-bodied aircraft into the World Trade Center and Pentagon and kill thousands of people: um, I’m against that. But what are we for? What will we risk our lives to defend? Can we unanimously concur that all the items in the preceding list – yes, even the short skirts and the dancing – are worth dying for?
The fundamentalist believes that we believe in nothing. In his world-view, he has his absolute certainties, while we are sunk in sybaritic indulgences. To prove him wrong, we must first know that he is wrong. We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world’s resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love. These will be our weapons. Not by making war but by the unafraid way we choose to live shall we defeat them. Salman Rushdie, Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002
Fundamentalism isn’t about religion, it’s about power. Salman Rushdie
Since Jimmy Carter, religious fundamentalists play a major role in elections. He was the first president who made a point of exhibiting himself as a born-again Christian. That sparked a little light in the minds of political campaign managers: Pretend to be a religious fanatic and you can pick up a third of the vote right away. Nobody asked whether Lyndon Johnson went to church every day. Bill Clinton is probably about as religious as I am, meaning zero, but his managers made a point of making sure that every Sunday morning he was in the Baptist church singing hymns. Noam Chomsky
People wrap themselves in their beliefs. And they do it in such a way that you can’t set them free. Not even the truth will set them free. Michael Specter
The Right thinks that the breakdown of the family is the source of crime and poverty, and this they very insightfully blame on the homosexuals, which would be amusing were it not so tragic. Families and ‘family values’ are crushed by grinding poverty, which also makes violent crime and drugs attractive alternatives to desperate young men and sends young women into prostitution. Family values are no less corrupted by the corrosive effects of individualism, consumerism, and the accumulation of wealth. Instead of shouting this from the mountain tops, the get-me-to-heaven-and-the-rest-be-damned Christianity the Christian Right preaches is itself a version of selfish spiritual capitalism aimed at netting major and eternal dividends, and it fits hand in glove with American materialism and greed. John D Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct? The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church
Religious people claim that it’s just the fundamentalists of each religion that cause problems. But there’s got to be something wrong with the religion itself if those who strictly adhere to its most fundamental principles are violent bigots and sexists. David G McAfee
In order to carry out the fundamentalist program in practice, one would need a perfect understanding of the ancient language of the original text, if indeed the true text can be discerned from among variants. Furthermore, human beings are the ones who transmit this understanding between generations. Even if one wanted to follow the literal word of God, the need for people first to understand that word necessitates human interpretation. Through that process human fallibility is inextricably mixed into the very meaning of the divine word. As a result, it is impossible to follow the indisputable word of God; one can only achieve a human understanding of God's will. Elliot N Dorff (co-author Arthur Rosett) ‘A Living Tree: The Roots and Growth of Jewish Law’ 1988
I say that creeds, dogmas, and theologies are inventions of the mind. It is the nature of the mind to make sense out of experience, to reduce the conglomerates of experience to units of comprehension which we call principles, or ideologies, or concepts. Religious experience is dynamic, fluid, effervescent, yeasty. But the mind can’t handle these so it has to imprison religious experience in some way, get it bottled up. Then, when the experience quiets down, the mind draws a bead on it and extracts concepts, notions, dogmas, so that religious experience can make sense to the mind. Meanwhile religious experience goes on experiencing, so that by the time I get my dogma stated so that I can think about it, the religious experience becomes an object of thought. Howard Thurman, interview BBC
I cannot comprehend fundamentalism. It’s fundamentally wrong. John Lydon
One of the reasons why fundamentalists are so aggressive in trying to promote fundamentalism is because deep down they know it’s arbitrary. If you’re comfortable with your belief you don’t need to convince other people to agree with you. Moby
A fundamentalist can’t bring himself or herself to negotiate with people who disagree with them because the negotiating process itself is an indication of implied equality. Jimmy Carter
Some people, both scientists and religious people, deal with uncertainty by being certain. That is dangerous in the fundamentalists and it is dangerous in the fundamentalist scientists. Robert Winston
I’m a fundamentalist in the true sense. That is to say, I follow the fundamentals of religion ... But for over 1,400 years people have been interpreting and re-interpreting the religion to suit their own purpose! ... These are not Islamic fundamentals any more than the Christians who burned people at the stake are fundamentalist. They are actually deviating from the teachings of the religion! Mahathir Mohamad
If Donald Trump gets a little bored on his flight home from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he can always page through a book handed to him by a delegate not long after he arrived: God and Donald Trump.
The volume, written by Stephen Strang, a leading Pentecostal figure and the longtime publisher of Charisma magazine, is an easy read – part spiritual hagiography, part Fox News bulletin and part prophecy. It ultimately says far less about Trump than about the charismatic Pentecostals who were some of his earliest religious supporters and who now view his election as the fulfillment of God’s will …
From early in Trump’s presidential candidacy, his biggest religious supporters — indeed, his only religious supporters for a while — were charismatic Christians like pastors Paula White and Darrell Scott …
Other religious conservatives, Strang argues, supported Trump in 2016 for reasons familiar to any Fox News viewer: a fear of globalism, the deep state, George Soros the former Nazi collaborator, wide-scale election fraud. They liked Trump because he said he liked them, told them they were persecuted, and vowed to stand up for them. He said he would bring back ‘Merry Christmas’. He told them they were important.
But there were other, more spiritual reasons as well. Strang outlines a string of charismatics who had visions — or who now retroactively claim to have had visions — that Trump would one day win the White House. A Catholic holy man named Thomas Zimmer who spent much of his life in Italy even claimed to have received a prophesy in the 1980s that Trump would ‘lead America back to religion’. And the book is filled with testimony after testimony from Christian leaders who were amazed to find themselves supporting Trump in 2016, who each claim that he was their very last choice up until he won the Republican nomination. Politico magazine online article 27th January 2018, ‘Millions of Americans Believe God Made Trump President’
In the United States an estimated fifty million right-wing fundamentalist Christians believe in some form of end-time theology. Mind Cults
Nobody has the absolute truth. American Heretics, Reverend Robin Meyers, author Why the Christian Right is Wrong, Amazon 2019
Oklahoma: We are Southern Baptist in our orientation. ibid.
This gets to be called the Bible Belt largely because the kind of religion that was in the South created in the Civil War and came out of the support of slavery. It’s the kind of a religion that’s stark. ibid. dude
Social justice churches will thrive. Especially now. ibid. Myers
You won’t get many comedians, in fact any comedians, satirising the essential cruelty and repressiveness of fundamentalist Islam. And you can bet I’m not going to be the one that starts. The All New Alexie Sayle Show s1e1, BBC 1994