(November 17, 2021 at 4:50 pm)vulcanlogician Wrote: Liberal theists not so much.
As I understand it, fundamentalists believe in biblical literalism, inerrancy, and infallibility. It’s a late 19th - early 20th century movement in reaction to biblical liberalism.
But I think when we talk about it, and especially when we say how harmful it is, we’re talking about more than that. Because even literal interpretations of the Bible can differ widely, and some literal takes — like when they say to love everybody, feed the hungry, comfort the sick, and give everything you have to the poor — are not things that most atheists disapprove of. What we dislike about fundies has more to do with the ideological and political efforts they tend to be associated with, and also with their unpleasant behavior when they encounter people unlike themselves.
(There’s a very left-wing commentator, who was fired from the New York Times for telling the truth about war, and was active in Occupy Wall Street, who takes many things in the Bible literally. For example, he spends one day a week teaching at a prison, just because the Bible says to do it. He is a good guy. He just published a book about his teaching experience. Our Class, by Chris Hedges. All his books are worth looking at. https://www.amazon.com/Chris-Hedges/e/B0...594&sr=1-1)
So here is my take on the kind of person we call a fundie, and what qualities make him annoying. (Please excuse the gendered language; substitute pronouns as desired.)
~ He thinks that people who disagree with him are not only incorrect, they are bad people.
~ His main way of interacting with people in discussion is by judging them, which he then expresses as approval or disapproval.
~ After he has passed judgment on you, if he feels you are wrong and bad, he no longer feels a responsibility to be kind or courteous. He feels justified in being vulgar and insulting.
~ His view of the world is almost certainly very very narrow, based on a tightly restricted intellectual range. He is uninterested in and uneducated about cultures unlike his own, which allows him to keep his own views unchallenged. He has almost certainly never read any book which wasn’t guaranteed in advance to reinforce his status quo.
~ He is unaware that ideological and metaphysical commitments are unprovable and unfalsifiable, and that therefore he is entitled to less certainty than he feels.
I’m not sure what “liberal” means any more. I used to think I was a political liberal, but now people say the Clintons and Obama are liberals, and they are obviously evil, so I don’t know what word to use. But if we use “liberal” as the opposite of the “fundie” I described above, then this is a liberal:
~ He knows that good people may disagree.
~ He interacts with people in non-judgmental ways, and tries to see the good in them.
~ He feels that being kind to people is a good thing; how we behave toward others says something about ourselves, and is not something that changes depending on whether we judge others deserving or not.
~ He is interested in and curious about people unlike himself.
~ He knows he may be wrong.
And of course both sets of criteria don’t apply to only Christians. There are plenty of atheists of both the fundie type and the liberal type, as I’ve described them.
How about this: a fundamentalist makes the world smaller by circumscribing it in his ideology. He hates and denies everything outside his tiny circle. A liberal loves the big world with all its complexity, and affirms things unlike himself.
As an example of a fundie atheist, there was a guy on this forum who recently said that rational people should still be learning, and if they are still learning they should eventually agree with him and become atheists. Anyone who could make a statement like this must live in a very narrow intellectual world. He must be completely unaware of all the rational, brilliant people — way smarter than he is — who are still religious, or who became religious. The idea that a person can just beg the question like that, and assume that “rational” equals “will agree with me” seems unjustifiable to me.
