Suppose you are taking a walk downtown and on a busy corner you see a "guru" with a long beard and a sign reading "Doom, the End is Near . . ." followed by various commands --- 'flee to the mountains', perhaps, or 'partake no more of demon rum'. It's all amusing. The guy is some kind of nut case, you surmise, and there are plenty of those around, some in Congress. Then you read further: 'kill all unbelievers. They are infidels'. Suddenly it's not funny any more. He may be a nut case but if he has followers he's a very dangerous and threatening nut case.
Then you discover that he does have followers --- a bunch of bearded weirdos with turbins running around yelling "DOOM, DOOM, DOOM" with guns blazing, BANG, BANG, BANG and bombs (appearing at first to be bowling balls) going BOOM, BOOM, BOOM. No it's certainly not funny any more. So you go up to one of these violent kooks who appears to be suffering from an attack of rational thought and ask "Why are you following this guru? Can't you see that he's a violent nut"? "No, no, no, this is the Great Gumbo Ya Ya, just in from the Louisiana swamp country, you infidel". Returning to normal he weaves away screaming something which sounds like "Off with his head" and "So sayeth the Great Gumbo Ya Ya whose every command must be followed". You run for shelter, just evading the three equally weird, turbin-wearing homocidal crazies, who are even more dangerous because they carry swords and appear for all the world to mean business. Each one is carrying the Mystical Book of Mumbo Jumbo, the authoritative mystical, magical book of commands which must not be violated or disobeyed on pain of death.
And that is where fundamentalism ultimately winds up when it isn't checked by rational thought. It may go from obstinate insistence on some set of doctrine to burning other peoples' holy books to shouting insults at soldiers' funerals because of a distaste for gay rights. In a society which is strong enough to resist its encroachments it doesn't go much further. Otherwise you get scenarios not so different from the foregoing tale. The essence of fundamentalism which leads into fanaticism and from there to madness and violence is that it is based entirely on command --- the commands of some priest, rabbi, ayatollah or holy man who scratched out some sacred book which can now be "interpreted" by other gurus who then write their own books --- and away we go, without any thought, or much thought, of honesty, personal integrity, honor, charity, kindness, forgiveness or even a forgiving spirit. All of that is swept away because we have THE BOOK.
That is what Christianity is up against, that and apathy which serves the purposes of fanatics.
Christianity is rational. In the New Testament we meet a Saviour who explains Himself to His followers. We have an historical bases for accepting it as fact and believing it as truth. When we understand His commands we find that they are reasonable, and that validates those which we may not understand. We know that if we hear a "voice" commanding us to go murder someone, it isn't His voice. We value tolerance while maintaining Christian principles (though we practice them imperfectly, something a fanatic will not admit about his own principles --- his sacred commands). As Daryl Donovan, the astute and widely respected preacher at the Sanibel Community Church in Florida, wrote recently "Tolerance is a virtue, and so is passion . . ." and the two strains of faith converge in Christianity.
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