Sarah Palin appears to have no testable core conviction except the belief (which none of her defenders denies that she holds, or at least has held and not yet repudiated) that the end of days...

At its most basic, the allure of fundamentalism, whether religious or ideological, liberal or conservative, is that it provides an appealing order to things that are actually disorderly.

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...

I am not well-versed in theory, but in my view, the cow deserves her life. As does the ram. As does the ladybug. As does the elephant. As do the fish, and the dog and...

Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan were self-proclaimed atheists.

it’s only Muslims who use the term ‘innovation’ to mean something bad.

And I wonder, therefore, how James Atlas can have been so indulgent in his recent essay ‘The Changing World of New York Intellectuals.’ This rather shallow piece appeared in the New York Times magazine, and...

The enemy for the fanatic is pleasure, which makes it extremely important to continue to indulge in pleasure. Dance madly. That is how you get rid of terrorism.

Misstraue jedem Politiker, jedem Regierungs- oder Staatschef, der seine Religion zum Instrument macht. Halte Abstand von solchen Politikern, die ihre auf das Jenseits orientierte Religion und ihre diesseitige Politik miteinander vermischen.

So you raise up a few generations of young girls, telling them that they should step to the back of the bus, ingrain that in their psyche, preach it to them from the pulpit, hold...

… from our vantage point it is now clear that the only thing the population had to fear was fear itself.

…I realized how naive I was. My aunt Tina was right: this stuff does exist, and it does hurt people, and although there are lots of people at Liberty who condemn violence against gays–including Dr....

I don’t want to see religious bigotry in any form. It would disturb me if there was a wedding between the religious fundamentalists and the political right. The hard right has no interest in religion...

I bet you’ve seen the fundamentalist bumper sticker that says, “God said it! I believe it! That settles it!” It must be a typo because what the driver really means is, “I said it! God...

With its continued dismissal of the law of God in ethics, Fundamentalism expressed both a “spiritualized” form of situational ethics and a “Christianly submissive” statism.

A fundamentalist is someone who wants to substitute what he believes for what you believe,” Max said. “And someone who thinks he knows the will of God better than anyone else.

And even those who claim to read the Bible literally and to lead their lives according to its precepts are, in actual practice, highly selective about which parts of the Bible they live by and...

…’fundamentalism’ and ‘liberalism’ and terrorism.’ These labels only tell us partial truths. We must use them humbly, guardedly, Niebuhr would say, aware of the limitations of our own vision and of our own capacity for...

It is often said that mankind needs a faith if the world is to be improved. In fact, unless the faith is vigilantly and regularly checked by a sense of man’s fallibility, it is likely...

Real morality is not the product of fearing a spanking. But what does fundamentalist hell-belief encourage? It retards any developing moral judgment by freezing moral maturity right at the most primitive, most childish, stage: the...

There are many instances in history of people who allow their skepticism to cut the nerve of moral effort, and there are numerous people, on the other hand, who are fierce crusaders at the price...

When the Bible is understood in its literary and historical context; errors, contradictions, and inconsistencies pose no threat to spirituality, whether that spirituality is theistic, non-theistic, or even explicitly Jesus-centered. The graver threat to what...

Have you ever thought what a God would be like who actually ordained and executed the cruelty that is in [the biblical Book of Revelation]? A holocaust of mankind. Yet so many of these Bible-men...

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...

Mis-information is rampant in this great age of mass-information. While we have more access to learning than ever before in the history of the world, we’re actually getting dumber it seems. The amount of (mis)information...

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...

It strikes me often while I am in Iran that were Christian evangelicals to take a tour of Iran today, they might find it the model for an ideal society they seek in America. Replace...

There was one thing the experience had taught him. He said he’d learned that when millions of people, a whole political system, countless numbers of citizens who believed in God, said they were going to...

Many [Tudor-era religious radicals] believed then, exactly as Christian fundamentalists do today, that they lived in the ‘last days’ before Armageddon and, again just as now, saw signs all around in the world that they...

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!...

But Curtis had come to the table with something they’d never expected, something they would have thought outmoded and out-lived in the modern age: a kind of fundamental righteousness that only the fundamental possessed. Unfettered...

The truth, however, is that most Muslims appear to be “fundamental-ist” in the Western sense of the word—in that even “moderate”approaches to Islam generally consider the Koran to be the literal andinerrant word of the...

We fundamentalists are a pack of mood-loving showoffs. I’m sure the Minor Prophets would have found subject for correction.

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,...

There are few things more dangerous than inbred religious certainty.

Looking at Great-Great Grandpa Baldwin’s photograph, I think to myself: You’ve finally done it. It took four generations, but you’ve finally goddamned done it. Gotten that war against reason and uppity secularists you always wanted....

People debate over whether or not there is a literal Hell, in the literal sense often described as fire and eternal torture, which, to many, seems to be too harsh a punishment. If men really...

Dogmatism of all kinds–scientific, economic, moral, as well as political–are threatened by the creative freedom of the artist. This is necessarily and inevitably so. We cannot escape our anxiety over the fact that the artists...

Larsson was an active and lifelong feminist, partly for personal reasons but also because he saw that ending gender slavery was as crucial to next-stage evolution as ending race slavery was to the last stage....

So this is where all the vapid talk about the ‘soul’ of the universe is actually headed. Once the hard-won principles of reason and science have been discredited, the world will not pass into the...

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.

To understand our faith — to theologize in the Catholic tradition — we need philosophy. We must use the philosophical language of God, person, creation, relationship, identity, natural law, virtues, conscience, moral norms if we...

Without the voice of reason, every faith is its own curse.”(History Will Teach Us Nothing)

Wer ein Feindstrafrecht zu brauchen glaubt, der glaubt nicht an die Überlegenheit des Rechtsstaates über den Fundamentalismus.

Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar. They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace. But we...

If your life is Christ, then your death will be only more of Christ, forever. If your life is only Christlessness, then your death will be only more Christlessness, forever. That’s not fundamentalism, that’s the...

A mature heart for Christ would much rather spend its time praising him than condemning his fanatics.

It’s rather simple. God deliver us from people who know so little that they will kill for what little they know.

You didn’t learn the Bible as a Fundamentalist. You learned fragments of Old Testament legalism mixed with Behaviorism & Nietzschean ethics

How dismal it is to see present day Americans yearning for the very orthodoxy that their country was founded to escape.