Fundamentalism Quotes

I don't find any difference between Islam and Islamic fundamentalists. I believe religion is the root, and from the root fundamentalism grows as a poisonous stem. If we remove fundamentalism and keep religion, then one day or another fundamentalism will grow again. I need to say that because some liberals always defend Islam and blame fundamentalists for creating problems. But Islam itself oppresses women. Islam itself doesn't permit democracy and it violates human rights. ~ Taslima Nasrin

There are six billion egos living on this planet. Can you not see why the world is in such a sorry state? Can you not see why we are destroying Heaven on Earth for our own short-term gain? Can you not see why the tiger and the gorilla are facing extinction, along with countless other species? Can you not see why there is so much injustice, abuse, greed, cruelty, and inequality upon this planet? We get along with those who share the same set of illusions. It is called collusion. They are our friends. We declare war on those who dare to believe in another set of illusions. They are our enemies. Religion, and particularly religious fundamentalism, is the most obvious and dangerous example. Nationalism is another. "Me! Me! Me!" "Mine! Mine! Mine!" "I'm right. I'm right. I'm right." "How can I use this or make use of this?" "What's in it for me?" You ~ Mary Bruggeman

If intellectual life involves a certain amount of self-awareness about alternative interpretations or a certain amount of tentativeness in exploring the connection between evidence and conclusions, it was hard to find any encouragement for the intellectual life in the self-assured dogmatism of fundamentalism. ~ Mark A. Noll

My religion is the best - my nation is the best - my language is the best - my skin color is the best - and so on. One may feel proud saying all these things, but that very pride ends up becoming the cause of all interhuman conflicts in the human society. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Hindu fundamentalism," because Hinduism is a religion without fundamentals: no organized church, no compulsory beliefs or rites of worship, no single sacred book. The name itself denotes something less, and more, than a set of theological beliefs. In many languages - French and Persian amongst them - the word for "Indian" is "Hindu." Originally "Hindu" simply meant the people beyond the river Sindhu, or Indus. But the Indus is now in Islamic Pakistan; and to make matters worse, the word "Hindu" did not exist in any Indian language till its use by foreigners gave Indians a term for self-definition. ~ Shashi Tharoor

A spiritual teaching is a finger pointing toward Reality; it is not Reality itself. To be in a true and mature relationship with a spiritual teaching requires you to apply it, not simply believe in it. Belief leads to various forms of fundamentalism and shuts down the curiosity and inquiry that are essential to open the way for awakening and what lies beyond awakening. A good spiritual teaching is something that you work with and apply. In doing so, it works on you (often in a hidden way) and helps reveal to you the Truth (and falseness) that lies within you. ~ Adyashanti

I have no religious belief myself, but I don't think we should fight about it. In particular, I think that we should not rubbish moderate religious leaders like the Archbishop of Canterbury because I think we all agree that extreme fundamentalism is a threat, and we need all the allies we can muster against it. ~ Martin Rees

In describing the ways that religious and other types of communities appropriate and understand their histories, among both fundamentalists and non-fundamentalists, the sociologist Anthony Giddens utilizes the term "reflexivity" and states that it is the characteristic of "all human action." Reflexivity takes place when individuals and/or communities utilize their perceptions of their histories as a way of guiding their present and future actions. For Giddens, tradition is a means of "handling time and space, which asserts any particular activity or experience with the community of past, present, and future, these in turn being structured by recurrent social practices." In light of this, tradition is a set of entities which religious communities and cultures continually reconstruct within certain parameters. Religions are not completely static in that almost every new generation reinvents the religious and cultural inheritance from the generations that preceded it. ~ Jon Armajani

These preachers and priests are no more religious and wise than the parrot that keeps repeating the same words over and over again, because it is incapable of original thinking. ~ Abhijit Naskar

These are the elements of an emerging order that may prove to be as dangerous as any fundamentalism that history has produced. For in a world where anything or anyone can be owned, manipulated, and exploited for profit, everything and everyone will be. ~ Joel Bakan

A fundamentalist is someone who wants to substitute what he believes for what you believe," Max said. "And someone who thinks he knows the will of God better than anyone else. ~ Robin Wasserman

Human beings cannot endure emptiness and desolation; they will fill the vacuum by creating a new focus of meaning. The idols of fundamentalism are not good substitutes for God; if we are to create a vibrant new faith for the twenty-first century, we should, perhaps, ponder the history of God for some lessons and warnings. ~ Karen Armstrong

The Bible is not religion, nor are the Vedas. The Torah is not religion, nor is the Quran, or any other scripture on earth. ~ Abhijit Naskar

So where will the children of the future come from? Increasingly they will come from people who are at odds with the modern world. Such a trend, if sustained, could drive human culture off its current market-driven, individualistic, modernist course, gradually creating an anti-market culture dominated by fundamentalism - a new dark ages. ~ Philip Longman

It seems to be almost a law of physics, that the winds of change awaken fear and fundamentalism. ~ Elizabeth Lesser

I have the deepest respect for those who rise above the bigotry of their families. ~ Wayne Gerard Trotman

Brutality goes hand in hand with orthodoxy, be it Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, Atheistic or any other. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Regardless of whether one subscribes to the aims of the four movements whose stories we have told, there is much to appreciate about them as movements. They have overcome schisms; disbandment; leadership scandals; and/or the deaths of their founders. They have developed a highly innovative strategy - bypassing the state - to overcome the obstacles that their ideological strictness; ambitious agendas; and reluctance to compromise present. They have shown a strong entrepreneurial spirit in building effective social service agencies, medical facilities, schools, and businesses that often put the state's efforts to shame. While they are not the Christian militias, al-Qaeda cells, or Jewish extremist groups whose terrorism has attracted much attention, the Muslim Brotherhood, Shas, Comunione e Liberazione, and the Salvation Army, with their strategy of rebuilding society, one institution at a time, may well prove more successful in sacralizing their societies than movements that use violence. ~ Robert V. Robinson

There was one thing the experience had taught him. He said he'd learned that when millions of people, a whole political system, countless numbers of citizens who believed in God, said they were going to kill you - just listen to them. ~ Terry Hayes

Religion is the process of internal growth, not a lifeless bag of foolish words. ~ Abhijit Naskar

One of our forefathers must have read a forbidden book. ~ Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Year hasn't been observed since the time of the Temple (The Second Jewish Book of Why, p. 262). The Sabbath year is still observed in some form, but only in Israel (ibid., p. 320). DAY 44 I first learned about the "domino" phrase in the book Serving the Word: Literalism in America from the Pulpit to the Bench, a very interesting look at fundamentalism. The history of literalism is actually ~ A. J. Jacobs

In contrast, the a/theistic approach can be seen as a form of disbelieving what one believes, or rather, believing in God while remaining dubious concerning what one believes about God (a distinction that fundamentalism is unable to maintain). ~ Peter Rollins

Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like. ~ Walter Benjamin

She was just too curious to stay in a self-imposed mental straight-jacket for very long. ~ David Brooks

To understand our faith -- to theologize in the Catholic tradition -- we need philosophy. We must use the philosophical language of God, person, creation, relationship, identity, natural law, virtues, conscience, moral norms if we are to think about religion and defend it. Theology has some terms and methods of its own, but its fundamental tools are borrowed from philosophy.

The growth of religious fundamentalism and the collapse of religious education mean theology is more urgently needed in universities -- especially Catholic ones -- than ever before. ~ George Cardinal Pell

It's rather simple. God deliver us from people who know so little that they will kill for what little they know. ~ R. Joseph Hoffmann

Religious people claim that it's just the fundamentalists of each religion that cause problems. But there's got to be something wrong with the religion itself if those who strictly adhere to its most fundamental principles are violent bigots and sexists. ~ David G. McAfee

[…] I began to see Algiers as one of the most fascinating and dramatic places on earth. In the small space of this beautiful but congested city intersected two great conflicts of the contemporary world. The first was the one between Christianity and Islam (expressed here in the clash between colonizing France and colonized Algeria). The second, which acquired a sharpness of focus immediately after the independence and departure of the French, was a conflict at the very heart of Islam, between its open, dialectical - I would even say "Mediterranean" - current and its other, inward-looking one, born of a sense of uncertainty and confusion vis-à-vis the contemporary world, guided by fundamentalists who take advantage of modern technology and organizational principles yet at the same time deem the defense of faith and custom against modernity as the condition of their own existence, their sole identity.

[…] In Algiers one speaks simply of the existence of two varieties of Islam - one, which is called the Islam of the desert, and a second, which is defined as the Islam of the river (or of the sea). The first is the religion practiced by warlike nomadic tribes struggling to survive in one of the world's most hostile environments, the Sahara. The second Islam is the faith of merchants, itinerant peddlers, people of the road and of the bazaar, for whom openness, compromise, and exchange are not only beneficial to trade, but necessary to life itself. ~ Ryszard Kapuscinski

But The Same Sea is set precisely in this Israel, which never makes it to the news headlines anywhere. It is a novel about everyday people far removed from fundamentalism, fanaticism nationalism, or militancy of any sort. ~ Amos Oz

Doubt is the heart of the matter. Abolish all doubt, and what's left is not faith, but absolute, heartless conviction. You're certain that you possess the Truth -- inevitably offered with an implied uppercase T -- and this certainty quickly devolves into dogmatism and righteousness, by which I mean a demonstrative, overweening pride in being so very right, in short, the arrogance of fundamentalism. ~ Graham Greene

The Islamic State's ideology exerts powerful sway over a certain subset of the population. Life's hypocrisies and inconsistencies vanish in its face. Musa Cerantonio and the Salafis I met in London are unstumpable: No question I posed left them stuttering. They lectured me garrulously and, if one accepts their premises, convincingly. To call them un-Islamic appears, to me, to invite them into an argument that they would win. If they had been froth-spewing maniacs, I might be able to predict that their movement would burn out as the psychopaths detonated themselves or became drone-splats, one by one. But these men spoke with an academic precision that put me in mind of a good graduate seminar. I even enjoyed their company, and that frightened me as much as anything else. ~ Graeme Wood

In every state of the Union, Fundamentalists still fight to ban all the science they dislike and prosecute all who teach it. To them, 'traditional family values' denotes their right to keep their children as ignorant as their grandparents (and to hate the same folks grand-dad hated.) ~ Robert Anton Wilson

The United States has 250 Billion tons of recoverable coal reserves - enough to last 100 years even at double the current rate of consumption.' We humans have inhabited the earth for many thousands of years, and now we can look forward to surviving for another hundred by doubling our consumption of coal? This is national security? The world-ending fire of industrial fundamentalism may already be burning in our furnaces and engines, but if it will burn for a hundred more years, that will be fine. Surely it would be better to intend straightforwardly to contain the fire and eventually put it out! But once greed has been made an honorable motive, then you have an economy without limits. It has no place for temperance or thrift or the ecological law of return. It will do anything. It is monstrous by definition. ~ Wendell Berry

Monsters always make more trouble before they die. ~ Melinda Gebbie

Sarah Palin appears to have no testable core conviction except the belief (which none of her defenders denies that she holds, or at least has held and not yet repudiated) that the end of days and the Second Coming will occur in her lifetime. This completes the already strong case for allowing her to pass the rest of her natural life span as a private citizen. ~ Christopher Hitchens

A physicist that I know commented that many other scientific disciplines, such as geology, anthropology, astronomy, are also challenged by biblical fundamentalism, but their people seem to be able to get on with their work without worrying unduly. Only Darwinians seem thrown into a frenzy that sends them running to litigation and demanding censorship. His explanation was that it's a rival religion. ~ James P. Hogan

You can be moderate in a way and still intense in your views. It's the extremism that gets frightening; religious fundamentalism and wacko-left liberalism is crazy. ~ Sydney Pollack

When fundamentalism comes to kill, it can kill with the language - the Apostle James says this, not me - and even with a knife, no? ~ Pope Francis

What good is faith if it causes pain for another? What good is religion if it does no good? What good is any belief that leads to hate? ~ Jared Brock

If you don't act now, the day is not far, that this beautiful planet of yours, which you call home, shall be turned into a dry barren wasteland by the blood-sucking fundamentalists. ~ Abhijit Naskar

In effect, Saudi Arabia legitimizes fundamentalism, religious discrimination, intolerance and the oppression of women. Saudi women not only can't drive, but are also told by some clerics that they mustn't wear seatbelts for fear of showing the outlines of their bodies. ~ Nicholas Kristof

Religion and ethics were not always - or even frequently - mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often deflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture or prejudices rather than a system which both man and God could live under with a sense of real justice. ~ Dan Simmons

Superstition is the need to view the world in terms of simple cause and effect. As I have already said, religious fundamentalism was on the rise, but that is not the type of superstition I am referring to. The superstition that held sway at the time was a belief in simple causes.

Even the plainest of events is tied down by a thick tangle of permutation and possibility, but the human mind struggles with such complexity. In times of trouble, when the belief in simple gods breaks down, a cult of conspiracy arises. So it was back then. Unable to attribute misfortune to chance, unable to accept their ultimate insignificance within the greater scheme, the people looked for monsters in their midst.

The more the media peddled fear, the more the people lost the ability to believe in one another. For every new ill that befell them, the media created an explanation, and the explanation always had a face and a name. The people came to fear even their closest neighbors. At the level of the individual, the community, and the nation, people sought signs of others' ill intentions; and everywhere they looked, they found them, for this is what looking does.

This was the true challenge the people of this time faced. The challenge of trusting one another. And they fell short ~ Bernard Beckett

Since the 1970s, we have witnessed the forces of market fundamentalism strip education of its public values, critical content, and civic responsibilities as part of its broader goal of creating new subjects wedded to consumerism, risk-free relationships, and the destruction of the social state. ~ Henry Giroux

Destroy such shining altars that spread bigotry - demolish such glorious churches and temples that proclaim divine supremacy - burn such glistening crucifixes, scriptures and idols that are used to preach weakness and segregation - obliterate every single trace of orthodoxy from the face of this planet, not with violence, but with awareness - and work - work to uplift the downtrodden - work to elevate the impoverished - work to raise those abandoned by fortune and opportunity - only then you shall have the rightful place under the sun as a holy human being. ~ Abhijit Naskar

There is a dark side to religious devotion that is too often ignored or denied. As a means of motivating people to be cruel or inhumane, there may be no more potent force than religion. When the subject of religiously inspired bloodshed comes up, many Americans immediately think of Islamic fundamentalism, which is to be expected in the wake of 911. But men have been committing heinous acts in the name of God ever since mankind began believing in deities, and extremists exist within all religions. Muhammad is not the only prophet whose words have been used to sanction barbarism; history has not lacked for Christians, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, and even Buddhists who have been motivated by scripture to butcher innocents. Plenty of these religious extremist have been homegrown, corn-fed Americans. ~ Jon Krakauer

I was a fundamentalist because my security and self-worth and sense of purpose in life were all wrapped up in getting God right - in believing the right things about him, saying the right things about him, and convincing others to embrace the right things about him too ... I was a fundamentalist not because of the beliefs I held but because of how I held them: with a death grip. ~ Rachel Held Evans

Fundamentalism is still on the march. ~ David Brooks

I'm a fundamentalist in the true sense. That is to say, I follow the fundamentals of religion ... But for over 1,400 years people have been interpreting and re-interpreting the religion to suit their own purpose! ... These [extremist and terrorist acts] are not Islamic fundamentals any more than the Christians who burned people at the stake are fundamentalist. They are actually deviating from the teachings of the religion! ~ Mahathir Mohamad

What remains of the old Protestant fundamentalism is politics: abortion, gays, evolution. these issues are what binds congregations together. but even here things have changed as Americans have become more tolerant of many of these social taboos. Today many fundamentalist churches take nominally tough positions on, say, homosexuality but increasingly do little else for fear of offending the average believer, whom one schollar calls the "unchurched Harry". All it really takes to be a fundamentalist these days is to watch the TV shows, go to the theme parks, buy Christian rock, and vote Republican. The Sociologist Mark Shilbey, calls it the Californication of conservative Protestantism. ~ Fareed Zakaria

Science at least, is aware of its capabilities as well as shortcomings, whereas, organized religions, in most cases delude themselves with narcissistic glory. ~ Abhijit Naskar

The moral certitude of the state in wartime is a kind of fundamentalism. And this dangerous messianic brand of religion, one where self-doubt is minimal, has come increasingly to color the modern world of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. ~ Chris Hedges

Religion knew the truth of metaphor and symbol for almost all of history until the past few hundred years, and especially until the wrongly named Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries. Then we started confusing rational and provable with real. We actually regressed and went backward. In trying to defend its ground in the face of rationalism and scientism, religion tried to become "rational" itself and lost its alternative consciousness, which many of us call contemplation. It's as though we tried to deal with Mystery with the entirely wrong "software". We lost access to the higher levels of consciousness, the transrational, the transpersonal, the transcendent itself. Most tragic, we lost most inner experience of our own outer belief systems. That is the heart of religion's problem today, and it is indeed a deep and serious problem for upcoming generations. My generation took the symbols to literally, and now the following generation is just throwing them all out as useless. We are both losing. It might surprise you, but both religious fundamentalism and atheism are similar in that they are self-contained rational systems. Such a system works if you stay inside its chosen logic and territory. ~ Richard Rohr

We can't keep thinking of gay people as being ostracised; we can't keep thinking of Muslim people as being ostracised because of the fundamentalism that occurs in Islam. Muslim people have to do something about speaking up about it. We can't judge a book by its cover. ~ Elton John

By ignoring the apparent contradictions of scripture, fundamentalism ignores its questions, reducing its complexity to implicit equations. Hate equals love; obedience is freedom. ~ Jeff Sharlet

I now know that to do a worthwhile family history I must interpret the past without falling into either demonizing or unquestioning acceptance ... As a playwright, what I object to right now is any form of fundamentalism, whether it's nationalistic, religious or ethnic ... I think it is ridiculous - and fundamentalist, by the way - to say that I am not changed by the culture around me. ~ David Henry Hwang

Fundamentalism is not bred in poverty. There are plenty of poor countries in the world that don't have violence because amid the poverty there is a kind of justice and in some countries a democracy. ~ Robert Fisk

Larsson was an active and lifelong feminist, partly for personal reasons but also because he saw that ending gender slavery was as crucial to next-stage evolution as ending race slavery was to the last stage. It's a noble fight, not least because the various fundamentalisms threatening Western democracy are united in their urgent need to re-cage women's sexuality. ~ Elizabeth Farrelly

Looking at Great-Great Grandpa Baldwin's photograph, I think to myself: You've finally done it. It took four generations, but you've finally goddamned done it. Gotten that war against reason and uppity secularists you always wanted. Gotten even for the Scopes trial, which they say was one of many burrs under your saddle until your last breath. Well, rejoice, old man, because your tribes have gathered around America's oldest magical hairball of ignorance and superstition, Christian fundamentalism, and their numbers have enabled them to suck so much oxygen out of the political atmosphere that they are now acknowledged as a mainstream force in politics. Episcopalians, Jews, and affluent suburban Methodists and Catholics, they are all now scratching their heads, sweating, and swearing loudly that this pack of lower-class zealots cannot possibly represent the mainstream--not the mainstream they learned about in their fancy sociology classes or were so comfortably reassured about by media commentators who were people like themselves. Goodnight, Grandpa Baldwin. I'll toast you from hell. ~ Joe Bageant

You know, in America, Christian fundamentalism vs. science. You know, be it teaching Darwinian evolutionary theory or stem cell res- You know, the whole thing, and then the issue of women being educated in Middle Eastern - I mean, it just seems so contemporary. In terms of spirituality, it's interesting because I actually think (her character in Agora) Hypatia is very spiritual. ~ Rachel Weisz

Growing religious fundamentalism is directly linked to globalization and to privatization. The Indian government is talking about selling its entire power sector to foreign multinationals, but when the consequences of that become hard to manage, the government immediately starts saying, "Should we build the Ram temple in Ayodhya?" Everyone goes baying off in that direction. Meanwhile, contracts are signed.
It's like a game. That's something we have to understand. It's like a pincer action. With one hand they're selling the country out to multinationals. With the other they're orchestrating this howling cultural nationalism. On the one hand you're saying that the world is a global village. On the other hand governments spend millions and millions patrolling their borders with nuclear weapons. ~ Arundhati Roy

Holiness in the purest form is independent of all textual doctrines, all churches and all institutions. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Fundamentalism isn't about religion, it's about power. ~ Salman Rushdie

In the domain of true religion, mere book-learning has no right to enter. ~ Abhijit Naskar

If religion, she also liked to say, is the opiate of the masses, fundamentalism is the amphetamine. ~ C.D. Wright

An unexamined faith is not worth having, for fundamentalism and uncritical certitude entail the rejection of one of the great human gifts: that of free will, of the liberty to make up our own minds based on evidence and tradition and reason. ~ Jon Meacham

This was the first time I had come face-to-face with the other side of fundamentalism. The fundamentalism that I saw in my neighborhood was sexist and misogynistic and small-minded, but it wasn't violent. It was giving and loving and brotherly. It was about helping the poor, and since everybody was poor, that meant everybody helping everybody. There wasn't the kind of urban meanness you find in many American cities. It was as if a farm community had been transplanted to the city. ~ Richard Engel

Whenever we are tempted to despair about the shape of American Christianity, we should remember that Jesus never promised the triumph of the American church. He promised the triumph of the church. ~ Russell D. Moore

Our time has changed, and it's changed and changed, and it continues to change so fast, that what was proper fifty years ago is not proper today. So the virtues of the past are the vices of today, and many of what were thought to be the vices of the past are the necessities of today. And the moral order has to catch up with the moral necessities of actual life in time, here and now, and that's what it's not doing, and that's why it's ridiculous to go back to the old-time religion. ~ Joseph Campbell

I used to flirt with fundamentalism, and I had this idea that creation was something that happened. Now I see creation as something that is happening. Hundreds of millions of stars are still being born every day. Creation is an ongoing process. The Artist has not yet cleaned out the brushes. The paint is still wet. Human beings are the small clumps of clay and breath, and we have been handed brushes of our own, like young artist apprentices. The brushes aren't ours, nor the paint or canvas, but here they are in our hands, on loan. What shall we make? ~ Michael Gungor

The basic error of fundamentalism is that it overlooks the contribution of the receptive side in the revelatory situation and consequently identifies one individual and conditioned form of receiving the divine with the divine itself. ~ Paul Tillich

Similar to religious fundamentalism, unrestrained intellect can make a person blind to the psychological necessities of others, for physical necessities are much easier to notice than those of the psyche. ~ Abhijit Naskar

It is my responsibility to make sure that the fear is overcome ... This attack must instead free our speech about Islamic fundamentalism. We must not be silenced. ~ Marine Le Pen

I am convinced that Christian fundamentalism is a far greater threat to this country than Muslim terrorists could ever be. ~ Mel White

Van Gogh's view of the world becomes a lamp that reveals corners of my heart that I didn't know were there- and all of this happens immediately, even though he died 88 years before I was born.
So ask yourself this:

Is The Starry Night infallible?
The questions doesn't make sense. Though grammatically sound, it is a query with no meaning. I could just as easily ask "How much does a sunset weigh?" The beauty of The Starry Night isn't in it being fallible or infallible. It's a window into another person's soul.
Let's try another question:

Is The Starry Night true?
If we're talking logic or math, this question is as nonsensical as the first. But if we ask with the perspective of an artist or philosopher, we might find that, yes, The Starry Night is very true- it tells us truths about the human experience. It's a testament to how grief feels and the numinous quality we often experience when we peer deeply into the night sky...

It is somehow more true than facts- it resonates in some deeper chamber of the human heart.
So let me ask you two more questions:

Is the Bible infallible? Is it true? ~ Mike McHargue

The liberating truth is not static; it is alive. It cannot be put into concepts and be understood by the mind. The truth lies beyond all forms of conceptual fundamentalism. What you are is the beyond - awake and present, here and now already. ~ Adyashanti

Fundamentalism is a 20th-century phenomenon, but that kind of religious fervor actually has not always been associated with conservative goals. ~ Jeff Sharlet

Today when the Fundamentalists are once more insisting that the fundamentals of fundamentalism are fundamental to our being No. 1 on the Lord's totem pole, it's very brave of you to invite the "resident atheist" of mid-Missouri to share her thoughts with you. ~ Ruth Hurmence Green

Fundamentalism has stood aloof from the liberal in self-conscious superiority and has on its own part fallen into error, the error of textualism, which is simply orthodoxy without the Holy Ghost. Everywhere among conservatives we find persons who are Bible-taught but not Spirit-taught. They conceive truth to be something which they can grasp with the mind. ~ A.W. Tozer

In a world torn by every kind of fundamentalism - religious, ethnic, nationalist and tribal - we must grant first place to economic fundamentalism, with its religious conviction that the market, left to its own devices, is capable of resolving all our problems. This faith has its own ayatollahs. Its church is neo-liberalism; its creed is profit; its prayers are for monopolies. ~ Carlos Fuentes

A religion that demands absolutely irrefutable obedience, is anything but religion. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Like the people of Israel who created a golden calf to represent God while Moses was away, fundamentalist Christians have built their own idols to represent God until Jesus returns. The religion of fundamentalism is idolatry. ~ Mel White

Arab-led Islamic fundamentalism destabilizes nations from Algeria to the Philippines. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

Fundamentalism is the triumph of Paul over Christ. ~ Will Durant

I have been thinking about the notion of perfect love as being without fear, and what that means for us in a world that's becoming increasingly xenophobic, tortured by fundamentalism and nationalism. ~ Bell Hooks

Over the years I realized the damage fundamentalism did to my own spiritual and mental health. I've spend time recovering, studying scripture, sessions with a therapist, twelve step recovery. ~ Richard Rossi

In our modern complex world, fundamentalism is dangerous because of its rigidity and its imperviousness to other ideas. ~ Michael Crichton

That sort of fundamentalism which treats possession of private property not as a desirable economic and personal asset but as a condition of liberty is a form of primitive religion. ~ Neil Kinnock

The billionaire investor George Soros has coined a term to describe this perspective: "free market fundamentalism." It is the belief not simply that free markets are the best way to run an economic system, but that free markets are the only way that will not ultimately destroy our other freedoms. "The doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism holds that the common good is best served by the uninhibited pursuit of self-interest,"36 Soros wrote. ~ Naomi Oreskes

Hindu fundamentalism is a contradiction in terms, since Hinduism is a religion without fundamentals; there is no such thing as a Hindu heresy. How dare a bunch of goondas shrink the soaring majesty of the Vedas and the Upanishads to the petty bigotry of their brand of identity politics? ~ Shashi Tharoor

Kovacs to a female believer in New Revelation: ..I'm calling you a gutless betrayer of your sex. I can see your husband's angle, he's a man, he's got everything to gain from this crapshit. But you? You've thrown away centuries of political struggle and scientific advance so you can sit in the dark and mutter your superstitions of unworth to yourself. You'll let your life, the most precious thing you have, be stolen from you hour by hour and day by day as long as you can eke out the existence your males will let you have. And then, when you finally die, and I hope it's soon, sister, I really do, then at the last you'll spite your own potential and shirk the final power we've won for ourselves to come back and try again. You'll do all of this because of your fucking faith, and if that child in your belly is female, then you'll condemn her to the same fucking thing ~ Richard K. Morgan

230Our Internet debates ... tend to be dominated by a form of openness fundamentalism, whereby "openness" is seen as a fail-safe solution to virtually any problem. Instead of debating how openness may be fostering of harming innovation, promoting or demoting justice, facilitating or complicating deliberation - the kinds of debates we are likely to have about the uses of openness in the messy world that we live in - "openness" in networks and technological systems is presumed to be always good and its opposite ... is always bad. ~ Evgeny Morozov

Mis-information is rampant in this great age of mass-information. While we have more access to learning than ever before in the history of the world, we're actually getting dumber it seems. The amount of (mis)information at everyone's fingertips has lured us into a false sense of knowing. Whether it be information about science, politics, or theology, our society is suffering from an inability to research, process, filter, and apply. At the same time we seem entirely oblivious to the zeitgeist (spirit of the age) that is nihilistic and libertine, making everything relative and subjective. And Satan himself rushes to blur our vision, stirring up the dust of confusion. The church must respond by teaching the critical faculties of logic and spiritual discernment, embedded in a cohesive framework of fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding). We must obtain a reasonable faith that is consistent with historic Christianity and relevant for our post-modern age. Otherwise, those rejecting the blatant errors of religious fundamentalism will be susceptible to every wind of false doctrine and repackaged heresy imaginable. They will leave the orthodox faith and accept something that vaguely resembles Christianity, but in reality is a vile concoction of demonic lies. ~ David D. Flowers

In this respect fundamentalism has demonic traits. It destroys the humble honesty of the search for truth, it splits the conscience of its thoughtful adherents, and it makes them fanatical because they are forced to suppress elements of truth of which they are dimly aware ~ Paul Tillich

They have a nostalgia for a world that never existed. - On Nationalists ~ Lamine Pearlheart

Every fundamentalism focuses on end times, and Armageddon is, in a sense, a rhetorical trope, an emphatic and overwhelming conclusion, meant to wrap up and make tidy the mistaken wanderings of history. For a fundamentalist the end is one of the forms desire takes, a passion no different from lust or avarice, intense with longing and the need for fulfillment and relief. It's like they're horny for apocalypse. They get off on denouements, which partly explains why Hell House never amounted to much more than a series of murderous conclusions. It focused only on that part of a story where life finds itself fated. Inside every act a judgement was coiled. Real people with their ragged and uncertain lives, their stumbling desires, their bleak or blessed futures, would only break into the narrative, complicating the story, dragging it on endlessly. ~ Charles D'Ambrosio

New Age values are conscious evolution, a non-sectarian society, a non-military culture, global sharing, healing the environment, sustainable economies, self-determination, social justice, economic empowerment of the poor, love, compassion in action, going beyond religious fundamentalism, going beyond nationalism-extreme nationalism, culture. ~ Deepak Chopra

There is an unraveling, a great unraveling that I believe is occurring. Not without its pain, not without its frustration. Perhaps the fundamentalism we see within America right now is in response to these changes. We fear change, and so we cling to what is known. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

The stories from Iran's present and past are reminders that freedom, democracy and human rights, or fundamentalism, fascism and terrorism are not geographically and culturally determined, but universal. ~ Azar Nafisi