There are, likewise, Reconstructionists who are thoroughly separatist, but not many: a much smaller group, they tend also to be far better educated, wealthier, and more at ease with "high" culture than their premillennialist cousins. (Howard Ahmanson Jr., some may be surprised to learn, is an Episcopalian.)
[nodding head approvingly] Thanks for the link to the article. I'm hungry to learn what is actually thought, felt, and done by people who are intelligent and rational as well as religious.
Most of the impressions I get of the "religious right" make them seem typically insular: they generally seem to speak and act with intolerance / contempt / anger towards behaviors or beliefs outside their ken, or else to sing unconditional and uncritical hosannas towards members of the in-group, never noticing any contradiction. For me, the scary aspect of a group dominated by such folk is not the possibility of hastening the apocalypse, but the likelihood of suppressing dissent and encouraging lockstep conformity, à la 17th-century Salem, Massachusetts, or McCarthy-era Washington, D.C.
While I personally much prefer to deal with a tolerant foward-looking faith than with fundamentalism, I don't know how it works -- how does a nonfundamentalist religiosity reconcile received wisdom and tradition with dissent and change? If the Bible is considered divine truth but not literal truth, who gets to decide this decade's dogma from amongst the possible interpretations, and by what process?
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Agreed
Date: 2004-04-10 03:50 pm (UTC)- Projecting.
- Assuming people, especially politicians, are logically consistent.
.Ists and ismists and ayya
Date: 2004-04-11 04:05 am (UTC)So many WORDS!
Fun:fundamentalist ::?:: jelly:evangelical
Date: 2004-04-15 08:40 am (UTC)Thanks for the link to the article. I'm hungry to learn what is actually thought, felt, and done by people who are intelligent and rational as well as religious.
Most of the impressions I get of the "religious right" make them seem typically insular: they generally seem to speak and act with intolerance / contempt / anger towards behaviors or beliefs outside their ken, or else to sing unconditional and uncritical hosannas towards members of the in-group, never noticing any contradiction. For me, the scary aspect of a group dominated by such folk is not the possibility of hastening the apocalypse, but the likelihood of suppressing dissent and encouraging lockstep conformity, à la 17th-century Salem, Massachusetts, or McCarthy-era Washington, D.C.
While I personally much prefer to deal with a tolerant foward-looking faith than with fundamentalism, I don't know how it works -- how does a nonfundamentalist religiosity reconcile received wisdom and tradition with dissent and change? If the Bible is considered divine truth but not literal truth, who gets to decide this decade's dogma from amongst the possible interpretations, and by what process?