People like to make fun of religious fundamentalists for seeming to spend half their waking hours preaching on Facebook, in person, via e-mail, etc., to people who they barely even know telling them about the evils of homosexuality, abortion, Muslims, and women wearing pants. The natural response, of course, is to laugh at them, to wonder how someone could possibly be so deluded, and to wonder why they seem to spend all their time obsessed about these things; in some cases, people might even speculate that their obsession is due to a kind of repression, such as people who are constantly obsessed with the ‘evils’ of homosexuality possibly being in the closet themselves. You laugh, you maybe feel sorry for them; if you’re feeling particularly brave, you even reply to them and try to show them (and possibly others) the error of their ways, and then you move on.
But… step back and think about it. Put yourself in their position, and suppose you were a fundamentalist Christian who constantly sees the world in terms of good and evil, who perceives everything around them as part of this epic struggle between the forces of good and the forces of evil. Every single person you see that doesn’t follow your particular brand of Christianity is doomed by God to an eternity of brimstone and hellfire, when if only they would accept that you’re right and listen to you, they would instead be enjoying an eternity of unimaginable happiness when they die. And to make it worse, the signs that you’re right are all around you! It’s just common sense, why won’t they listen to you? So you spend as much time as you can afford to proselytizing to the unwashed masses, telling them about your Lord and savior Jesus Christ, all in hopes that at least one person will see the light and be saved from Satan and his minions. And in fact, it would be extremely bad of you to not try your hardest to convert these poor lost souls (not to mention Jesus’s command to be fishers of men).
This isn’t me trying to say that people should stop doing what they do when confronted by the aggressively religious; by all means, confront, debate, ignore, troll, whichever you choose to do. Just don’t assume that they’re acting out of irrationality; to them, it make perfect sense.
Kevin Riggle
/ February 27, 2010But… step back and think about it.
You assume we haven’t done so already. I grew up among Christian fundamentalists — I assure you I have thought about it at length.
Just don’t assume that they’re acting out of irrationality; to them, it make perfect sense.
I don’t. Sometimes it makes perfect sense to them. Sometimes they just avoid thinking about the contradictions at all costs. The difference between a Christian fundamentalist and myself boils down a difference in the axioms we’ve chosen to build our worldviews around. The central axiom for fundamentalism, as near as I can figure it, is “The Bible is literally true.” Which actually ramifies out into “One particular interpretation of (usually) the King James translation of the Bible into English is literally true,” because there are contradictions inherent in the text, and they have to be resolved to produce a coherent worldview.
The central axiom of my life, I suppose, is that the universe exists independent of my observation of it — that there is some objective truth — and that humans can know that truth, to within error bars. I can no more prove that than a Christian fundamentalist can prove that their privileged interpretation of the KJV Bible is literally true, but I do find I have a much harder time finding examples that falsify my axiom than I do finding examples which falsify the fundamentalists’ interpretation of the Bible. (I haven’t found an example of the former yet, though I’m open to suggestions. The latter are a dime a dozen, and the reader can no doubt conjure up their own examples.)
Patrick
/ February 28, 2010I don’t think that you were necessarily the target audience of this post; I think that talking to you about this would have been like preaching to the metaphorical choir. The people I was writing this ‘to’ are the people on the internet who simply cannot understand why fundamentalists believe what they believe, and it sounds like you’re not in that set.