One of the problems with fundamentalism is it leads to book worship. Not reverence for what humans perceive as the word of God, but the actual worship of that book.
There are many problems with that. First. it fences God in. God cannot act in any way except as described in that book. Fundamentalists cannot respond to modern life because modern life was not envisioned in that book.
Second, book worship is the chief manner of subjugation of other people. In Christianity we saw this with the African population, the American Indian population, women, and the GLBT community. The bible is used to justify all sorts of horrible crimes against them.
Another aspect is the worship of the book itself. The words become more sacred than the truths they expound. The words become more sacred than deity. The words themselves become deity.
This has reared it's satanic head once again, and in Pakistan. According to the Catholic Herald a mob angered by rumors that Christian children had cut up pages containing text from the Koran.
How did the book worshipers respond? They killed eight Pakistani Christians, burning some of them alive including at least two young children. This attack has been proclaimed among the bloodiest attacks on Christians in the country's history.
This, folks, is what Fundamentalism and book worship leads to. We've seen it repeated throughout Christian history. In the Roman Church it lead to the Inquisition (an office still round in the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which the present pope headed). It is rearing its head in Anglicism, too, in the form of "the Covenant."
ADDENDUM: I've just discovered a post complimentary to this post over at OCICBW
There are many problems with that. First. it fences God in. God cannot act in any way except as described in that book. Fundamentalists cannot respond to modern life because modern life was not envisioned in that book.
Second, book worship is the chief manner of subjugation of other people. In Christianity we saw this with the African population, the American Indian population, women, and the GLBT community. The bible is used to justify all sorts of horrible crimes against them.
Another aspect is the worship of the book itself. The words become more sacred than the truths they expound. The words become more sacred than deity. The words themselves become deity.
This has reared it's satanic head once again, and in Pakistan. According to the Catholic Herald a mob angered by rumors that Christian children had cut up pages containing text from the Koran.
How did the book worshipers respond? They killed eight Pakistani Christians, burning some of them alive including at least two young children. This attack has been proclaimed among the bloodiest attacks on Christians in the country's history.
This, folks, is what Fundamentalism and book worship leads to. We've seen it repeated throughout Christian history. In the Roman Church it lead to the Inquisition (an office still round in the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which the present pope headed). It is rearing its head in Anglicism, too, in the form of "the Covenant."
ADDENDUM: I've just discovered a post complimentary to this post over at OCICBW
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