Fundamentalist Threat

Now that America has kicked the Republican party to the curb we can expect less legislation threatening our constitution, our liberties, our environment and our economy.

But a grave threat to progress and liberty remains--the cancer of fundamentalism.

Though many Islamic fundamentalists want to do us harm from without, certain Christian fundamentalists remain committed to destroying America from within.

For many fundamentalists, like Dr. James C. Dobson, founder of Focus On The Family, the loss of Republican control of Congress won’t stop them from pushing their radical agenda on Capitol Hill and elsewhere.

As David D. Kirkpatrick noted in the New York Times today, Dobson and other Evangelical Christians have become strong supporters of Israel, both politically and financially, because somewhere in the Bible it mentions something that can be interpreted to mean that a Second Coming of Jesus can only occur if Israel is safely in the hands of the Jews.

So despite the fact that Evangelicals blame the Jews for killing Jesus, they want to help Jews control Israel now...so the Jews can be sent to hell later when Jesus returns.

Notwithstanding the fact that much of this “theory” comes from the book of Revelations, which is a delusional, magical tome of blatant nonsense, it is both sad and horrifying that so much energy and passion are being directed toward such fantastical, abstract and wasteful goals.

Consider the case of the red cow. Apparently, another interpretation of some Biblical passage suggests that Jesus will return around the time that a red cow appears. So fundamentalists have been funding a bovine breeding team to try to come up with a red cow. Forget about Cancer, AIDS, Parkinsons--let’s spend millions to breed a red cow!

Behind the desire to usher in a Second Coming, fundamentalists hope to gain greater and greater control of the society surrounding them. Not content to live according to their own restrictions, they strive to force the rest of us to live by their mores, even if they have to scrap the constitution and democracy to do it.

But as long as preachers claim to be emissaries of the creator of the Universe, corruption is soon to follow. And as long as those same preachers claim that ancients books were written by the creator of the Universe, and are thus perfect and infallible, destruction and misery will eventually result.

For proof, just look at the Middle East. Terrorism based on religion is simply a cousin of tyranny based on religion. One uses physical violence while the other uses emotional and mental violence. Both are lamentable and antithetical to democracy and liberty. Both embody intolerance, arrogance and division.

Until people embrace a spirituality that isn’t predicated on ancient, static, fallible books, our laws, liberties and environment will remain in jeopardy. And until we Americans pluck the beam of literal religion from our own eyes, we can never hope to remove the splinter of fundamentalism from the eyes of anyone else in the world.

- JT Compton