“Mark Tindall” <> wrote in message news:<>…

from Peter Cameron’s “Heretic” (Doubleday; Sydney: 1994)

p. 38 I regarded Fundamentalist students as defective Christians who, I hoped, might eventually grow up.

p. 70 … [Fundamentalists] like the Donatists, of whom Augustine said: ‘The

clouds roll with thunder, that the House of the Lord shall be built throughout the earth: and these frogs sit in there marsh and croak, “We are the only Christians”‘.

p. 174 -175 The intellectual shortcomings of the Fundamentalist are both obvious and notorious. … the dominant motivating force behind Fundamentalism

is a hunger for power and authority. This is the real reason for ascribing absolute and literal authority to the Bible: the Fundamentalist minister derives back from the authoritative Bible his own relative authority. It is the classic ploy of the priestly class,

to bolster up the system which supports it – except here it is not the

system which is elevated, it is the scripture. Of course ideally the Fundamentalist wants absolute power; he would like to turn the state into a theocracy, and sometimes, for example in the Islamic world, the

dream comes true. … In the church his main concern is to impose his understanding of the Bible. The Bible is seen as a statute book, the proper response to which is obedience. Essentially this means obedience to the minister. (The attraction, particularly to some young people, is the security and certainty such an attitude brings: you know where you are with God, and you know where God is. the trouble is of course that it is not God at all, it is an idol.) A literalism that begins with being merely ridiculous gradually becomes more and more puritanical and lacking in compassion. Stained-glass windows are destroyed because they are idolatrous, and women are excluded from the ministry because they threaten to undermine both the

power and the vanity of the male minister.

p. 176 [Fundamentalism] seems to me to constitute a considerable threat to both the church and society. And those in the church who are of a different persuasion have a duty to both the church and to society to resist it. There is a great deal at stake. In some ways the gravest objection to the Fundamentalists is not that they instil in some young

people a perversion of Christianity, but that they turn away many more

young people from the whole idea of Christianity.

p. 194 [Fundamentalism] represents a kind of totalitarian attitude to life, which permeates the whole of civilisation and society, and unless we can challenge it and meet it at the local level, then the prospect, as

I’ve said, is an Orwellian nightmare. It undermines independence of thought, the freedom of the individual, and imposes a kind of rigid uniformity to code book – which of course is its attraction, because you feel safer with rules and you feel safe with an authoritarian God telling you what to do: you know where you are with him. But that’s not my understanding of God.

p. 196 … the sort of God that the Fundamentalist puts across, the authoritarian God who tells people what to do, and is pleased with them when they obey and punishes them when thy don’t – that to my mind

is the sort of God that, if he exists, I don’t want. As Dostoevsky said, I would be happier to return my entrance ticket to heaven.

p. 200 When I add to God the words ‘if he exists’, I have in mind the saying of a German theologian: Gott existiert nicht, er geschiet. …God doesn’t exist, he happens. … There is another German theological slogan: Die Sache Jesu geht weiter. Christianity is on the move. The

Jesus affair goes on: it develops, it has a future. Fundamentalism doesn’t move, it will never get any further. It lies petrified in the

past, although it tries to persuade people that it is eternally valid.

There are of course innumerable logical and historical arguments against it. But the best argument against it is simply this, that it contradicts the spirit of Christianity: the God of Fundamentalism doesn’t exist because he doesn’t happen, and the Jesus of Fundamentalism doesn’t move forwards because he has no future.

p. 207 … Fundamentalism is wrong and can be shown to be wrong: and by ‘wrong’ I mean illogical, unhistorical, a perversion of Christianity –

in a word, a lie. …if they hold to a position that is demonstrably false, then if they know that it is demonstrably false they are dishonest, and if they do not know that it is demonstrably false they are stupid. A scientist after all would not hesitate to call either dishonest or stupid anyone who believed the earth a flat. Why should theologians and ministers be so mealy-mouthed about Fundamentalist Christians? … is that the purpose of Christianity – to offend as few

people as possible? And, in doing so, to look as if you can believe as many a six impossible things before breakfast? What is at stake the, in this tale, is not freedom of speech, but freedom from Fundamentalism, freedom from a lie.

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… quoting from James Barr’s book “Fundamentalism” on the three distinguishing features of the Fundamentalist ‘… an assurance that those who do not share their religious viewpoint are not really true Christians at all.’ – Peter Cameron “Heretic” (Doubleday; Sydney: 1994) p. 178