The Author – Bart Busschots
Creative Commons
Unless otherwise stated, the content on this site is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution, Noncommercial, No Derivative Works 3.0 License
May
21
The Hidden Danger of Fundamentalism
Filed Under Polemics & Politics on May 21, 2008 at 9:47 pm
This evening I watched the episode of Channel 4’s Dispatches program entitled “In God’s Name”. It scared the hell out of me. When you see kids being brain-washed right in front of your eyes you worry for the future of our society. Surely this kind of brain-washing is in direct violation of those children’s human right to freedom of thought and belief? The intolerance and the hate being spread by Christian Fundamentalists in the name of a supposedly loving God terrifies me. Because they hide their message of hate behind a veil of religiosity they get away with far more than any other hate mongerers can. Hate in the name of love gets treated very differently to plain naked hate. Why should it be OK for a Christian organisation to promote racism? The actual views are no different to white supremacists or indeed neo-Nazis, it’s just the justification that’s different. Christians protesting against Mosques is tolerated, but just imagine the out-cry if Muslims started to protest the building of Churches! It’s OK to harass gay people at their events, but just imagine the out-cry if gays were to start protesting at Christian Churches handing out hate-mail and disrupting services! Because these people hate in the name of God they get away with more than any other hate mongers can.
[tags]fundamentalism, hate, racism, homophobia, God[/tags]
The reality is that those who have a strong faith in a particular god or gods will not be swayed from that belief. They will literally die to protect their faith. Whether we like it or not that is a fact borne out time and again throughout History. That’s why freedom of belief was included in the UN Charter of Human Rights. This level of faith is the same in all religions. This gives fundamentalists a stark choice, they can persue an agenda of tolerance, or of conflict with the ever looming threat of war. There is no other way.
You cannot force any one set of beliefs on an entire nation let along an entire world. If you try then you will be met with resistance every bit as strong as your oppression by people who believe they are right every bit as much as you do. If you do not respect the rights of others to hold their own beliefs then you are on the side of never-ending conflict and war. The only way to get a peaceful society is to have everyone agree to respect everyone’s human rights. You can’t have a peaceful and free society if any religion tries to force it’s beliefs on an everyone. That’s what fundamentalists are doing and that’s why they scare me so much.
Every time you see members of any faith attempting to force their views on an entire nation, remember that’s the road to oppression, conflict and war.
I cannot agree more bart. It really is the road to war those fundamentalists are building. Sadly however it also seems that there is a hidden part in the brain of most people who makes them stand in with all might for what they think is right… and try to force their opinion on others. You not only find this with religions, you can spot it on every day to day happening. Most of those ‘forcing’ however is stopped somewhere on the road by common sense. What now if common sense is waiting to long? What if you get onto someone who knows how to manipulate you? Born is a new fundamentalist, that is…
Yea — so what? You have stated an obvious problem that anyone who is not a True Believer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_True_Believer
and has more brains than a potted plant knows about.
A much more important question is how to address the problem, and this can not be realistically tackled unless one knows the nature of the various humans involved, in particular the leaders.