(September 24, 2019 at 11:17 am)Fake Messiah Wrote: The truth is that there is a lot of deism, especially when a religious person is losing an argument. Like when a Christian claims that there is evidence that God exists because most of the people believe in God, and yet, the reality is that 70% of all people in the world don't believe that Jesus Christ is a God. Majority of people worships cows and stones, but to that Christian at the moment that doesn't matter because he's a deist at the moment and "as long as someone believes in something" it proves his point and his point is nothing more than an ad hoc fallacy.
Very, very true.
Fundamentalists consider themselves the keepers of the pure (or, at least purEST) faith, the most Important Truth, which is to them that faith in the salvific "finished work" of Jesus is the ONLY possible way to be right with god. By this standard, let us run a few numbers.
Roughly one-third of people currently alive are, by the loosest cultural definition, self-identified Christians.
Depending on who you believe, 1/6 to 1/3 of those are evangelicals. Let us take the 1/3 figure.
"Evangelicals" is a somewhat imprecise term these days, but we can fairly say that not all evangelicals are fundamentalists and strict literalists / inerrantists / dominionists. I can't find any hard numbers but by inferring the % of the US population that belong to evangelical or black churches vs the % that belong to the more conservative fundamentalist strains of those churches I infer that roughly 1/3 of evangelicals are fundamentalists. Let us be charitable however and say 1/2.
Half of a third of a third of the world population equates to about 5% of the world population. And remember, I'm being generous in my estimates here.
By a fundamentalist's reckoning, everything is about being right (as in RIGHTeous), not being good or kind. So those who are not fundamentalists are somewhere between questionable and just plain wrong as to their eternal destiny and thus their membership in the club. "All our righteousness are as filthy rags to god".
The current world population is about 7.7 billion. If only 5% of those have a "saving knowledge of Christ" then about 385 million are heaven-bound and about 7.3 billion are hell-bound.
Let that sink in for a minute.
And then stop and think of the even bigger implications.
Per current UNICEF estimates about 130 million people are born every year worldwide, which means about 123.5 million hellbound and 6.5 million new converts.
All of which has been going on since the beginning of time in some form or other, but let's just consider the past two thousand years and gloss over how people made the grade or didn't, prior to that.
Remember that Christianity was never more of the world population by percentage than it is now, but rather less. So the rate of perdition was higher in the past.
Rough estimates are that 105 billion people have lived on the earth since the upper Paleolithic. Even assuming the "rate of salvation" was a steady 5% the whole time, the Fundamentalists are willing to consign almost a hundred billion people to eternal torment in the service of their god's righteous anger.
Faced with these estimates, assuming they would ever admit they are reasonable or accurate, in my observation and experience, fundamentalists tend to suddenly become liberal or deist-leaning to try to soften the harshness of this reality. They have invented the "Age of Accountability" out of whole cloth so they don't have to tell their own bereaved parents of younger children than their deceased children are burning in hell because they had not yet made an overt "profession of faith". They would follow a similar line of "reasoning" concerning, e.g., primitive tribes who are wholly ignorant of the Bible or of Jesus, opining that any sincere seeker for truth in such a culture would find god revealing himself to them directly in some fashion, or just accepting them as too "primitive" and "ignorant" to "willfully rebel". This is why their organizations such as Wycliffe Bible Translators exist, to make sure every hunter-gatherer culture on earth has the gospels in their native tongue (and if they don't have a written language they will concoct one for them). They believe that once they have completed that task they will usher in the second coming.
But this is all lipstick on a pig. It doesn't change that fundamentalists see themselves as a privileged minority, a "remnant" that will be saved at the expense of those outside the "tribe". It is just an extension of the "chosen people" narrative. It is small, mean, nasty and cruel in the extreme. It encourages a sort of indifference to human suffering, cloaked from the believer in various diversions but nevertheless at bottom it is still the opposite of that "agape love" they are always talking about, namely, indifference.
And that's on a good day. In the past, fundamentalist firebrand writers and pastors have spoken of how the righteous in heaven will be filled with glee at the plight of the wicked who were too stupid to turn from the wrath to come. Some of them openly embrace such notions, many more privately harbor them.
It's hard to argue that Christian fundamentalism isn't the worst of the worst in this regard -- morally and ethically and empathetically bankrupt and emotionally somewhere between empty and toxic depending on the individual.
