Fundamentalism
In the book The Best American Science and Nature Writing I was reading an interesting article about the total lack of actual fact from the Pentateuch in the Bible from an archaeological standpoint: it turns out that Abraham might not have been a real person, that the Israelites weren’t thrown out and didn’t come back, that Solomon and David weren’t fantastic kings who ruled the Fertile Crescent but were, more likely, chieftans who ruled the nearest few hills… and on and on. You get the picture here.
I am disturbed that we are having to prove in scientific literature that our religious writings (in this case, the Torah/Bible/Quran) are not the literal truth. Get a grip. These are metaphors about how we should strive to behave better towards each other—they are not historical documents depicting necessarily real people and the daily events of their lives. I believe that Jesus and Moses and Abraham and Mohammed all existed… but did their respective holy books capture the minutiae of their lives? Heck, did those holy scriptures capture even the essence of their lives?
Probably not.
To veer off in a more historical direction… when I was 14 I thought I was in love with this girl. We were telling each other everything, having all night conversations, that kind of thing. We started talking about faith. She was a Born Again Christian; I’m a lapsed Catholic with an orthogonal spiritual leaning. We had some clashes. Right about the time we started having the “What about the dinosaurs/God is testing us/What about evolution/No no that’s just a theory” I realized that I was doomed to never be able to fully love this girl as she was clearly mentally disturbed. I was deeply shaken and scared. How could someone who was so intelligent believe this? I just couldn’t understand it.
I am, by turns, less scared of fundamentalism and more scared of it now. Less scared because I believe that I can feel a measure of sympathy for people who have different spiritual beliefs that can lead them contrary to everyone around them while they know, know, that they are right. I’m more scared these days because I can feel a measure of empathy for these people and know that someone who has the conviction of their beliefs to fully fly in the face of established fact and common sense is someone that I do not want too close to me.