Strict Religious Beliefs in the Modern World

In My Humble Opinion
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Hello Everyone,

My question this time is about strict religious beliefs today.

Was it easier to be fundamentalist earlier in history than it is in our generation?

I’m undecided. It is clear that technology and the interconnectedness of the global community would have some sort of impact on fundamentalism, but what is that impact?

Maybe it was easier in the past, without access to so much information. The ultra-religious did not have to “swim” in the same pool as everyone else. They could just stand on their high mountain and preach, so to speak.

Or maybe it’s easier today, when like-minded people are just a click away on a website that espouses your own beliefs.

How is ultra-orthodoxy (e.g. Haredi Jews) even possible today? Are they fundamentalists? How can they, and other staunchly religious groups reconcile their beliefs when the world is becoming smaller and smaller? It’s so easy to go on the Internet and find hundreds of arguments debunking certain tenets of a given religion. It’s easier to find that as staunchly religious as you might be, maybe your friends are not. Is the goal of your religion to adhere to it or to try and convert others? Something’s gotta give, for you as an ultra-religious person to function in a society with differing beliefs.

Do the ultra-religious just insulate themselves from any criticism? Surely they have the internet. How do they justify themselves given all the accusations of hypocrisy from the non-religious?

Many are the ways that the ultra-religious have bent or twisted their religious beliefs to fit the modern world, which leaves them open to charges of hypocrisy. Were these religious doctrines intended to be modified to fit the times, so to speak?

Take the Haredi, the Ultra-Orthodox Jews. Obviously we don’t sacrifice animals anymore, as written in the Torah, but who decides what religious commands are valid? And if we don’t sacrifice animals anymore, what makes any other religious rule more or less important?

I’m not intending this as an indictment on religion, or a championing of the oft-held belief that religion is about control and power. Frankly, I’m Jewish. I enjoy it and I don’t begrudge anyone else their right to enjoy their own religion in peace.

However, I’d like to know the mechanisms by which the ultra-religious have rationalized the practice of their religion and convinced themselves that they aren’t engaging in hypocrisy if they don’t, for instance, stone adulterers, as in the Torah. Obviously they’d be arrested for those acts today, because society as a whole has condemned them, but these people have to make concessions in which beliefs they choose to follow. Would even the most ultra ultra ultra orthodox say they are adhering to everything in the Torah? If they can’t sacrifice animals or stone adulterers, do they wish they could? Is it something they’d want to do–after all, it’s written in the Torah!

This question doesn’t only apply to the Haredi, by the way. You can generalize it to include any devout religious person who believes any religious command in any religious book.

I hope I don’t start a fight! :slight_smile:

Thanks,

Dave

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Generally we only identify a religious belief as “strict” if its counter-cultural. Christians have fairly strict views about murder, for example, but we don’t regard them as fundamentalists for expressing those views, or seeking to have them reflected in public policy. Whereas a refusal to eat bacon or work on a Friday, while in themselves matters of much less moment, do mark you out as “different”.

Whether it’s easy or difficult in any society depends on how much conformity that society expects. Historically in the Islamic world, to take one example, you had diffenent communities who not only practiced their own faiths individually, but also to some extent collectively - so that Christians, for example, had their own marriage, inheritance, etc, laws, and their own courts for implementing them. Whereas in West nowadays, the scope for this is much more limited. On the other hand, if you wanted to hold and express religious views which put you apart not only from wider society but from the particular sub-group of which you are a member, I suspect you’re better off in the modern western world than in the pre-modern Islamic world.

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Many are the ways that the ultra-religious have bent or twisted their religious beliefs to fit the modern world

Pianodave, I, for one, “have never bent or twisted my religious beliefs to fit the modern world”. What I will do is modify my behavior to fit Christ’s teachings. An entirely different situation, wouldn’t you say?

Serious Christians only try to do as we are instructed, neither adding to nor taking away from the Lord’s word. Where problems arise is when people attempt to reinterpret God’s intentions in a different manner of their own liking much like a certain radical religious group in the middle east.

However I am sure there are many who have done exactly as you suggested. In a free and open society as the United States that encourages open dialog of course. But when other people are forced to pray a certain number of times a day how sincere can their prayers be? Don’t those men realize they were only one sperm away from being female themselves? And when they kill themselves committing suicide trying to kill infidels, when they go to heaven it is supposed to be forever. So there will be no need for reproduction, hence no need for genitalia. What is it they’re going to do with those 72 virgins???

Even a little messing with God’s intentions can have serious results. I am with you regarding those that have bent or twisted their religious beliefs. But it’s not hard to tell who the ‘problem children’ are. I hope you will join me in praying that all this can be resolved without heavy bloodshed if this turns out to be the conflict as the Bible has correctly prophesied so many times before.

Phu Cat

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Moderator Action

I think the nature of this topic is by necessity going to involve opinions, so let’s move this over to IMHO.

Moving thread from General Questions to In My Humble Opinion.

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What do you mean, “reinterpret?” All religion is interpreted, then translated and reinterpreted by scholars, then fractioned and reinterpreted again in the sermon, then interpreted by the individual.

There is no meaningful way to judge whether your interpretation is right or wrong, only whether in conforms to the secular standards we have laid out for our society.

The whole idea of trying to denominate a book of parables is absurd.

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Make people believe that they are the only ones knowing the truth, that they are something special and that evil forces are trying to corrupt them, any counter argument will actually strengthen their beliefs. Mind Control 101.

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I can’t speak about all Haredi (and I certainly can’t speak for any Jews), but I do live near one of the major Hasidic communities in New York. Hasidim are ultra-orthodox, but I don’t know if they would call themselves Haredi.

I suppose we could call them “fundamentalists,” but it seems to me that “fundamentalism” is a Christian concept that doesn’t necessarily work that well in describing degrees of Jewish faith/observance.

As to going on the internet, or interacting with friends who aren’t religious, the Hasidim (or at least the group I see regularly) don’t. Although they live in a big city, they might as well be living in an isolated village somewhere. They just don’t interact with the outside world that much. And even when they do (taking their kids to the park, for example), they seem to be able to pretend that the rest of the world isn’t there.

They, or most of them, don’t have the internet.

And that’s how they keep their community going and maintain their strict religious beliefs (actually, I guess it’s not the beliefs that are so strict, but the observance of the law. For people who grow up in that community, there is nothing else. They’ve never lived in any other community, they don’t go on the internet, many of them don’t even watch television. To leave the community is unthinkable (of course, some do).

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Christian fundamentalism is (mostly) a relatively recent phenomenon in the US. That would seem to refute the OP’s thesis.

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  1. “Fundamentalism” is to some degree a term that can only be defined in reference to an others. In a community of early American Puritans such beliefs (beliefs that would be extremely fundamentalist by today’s standards and were somewhat so by Anglican standards of the time) were normative and not fundamentalist. Some of today’s fundamantalists would be stoned for their aposty if they existed then.

  2. Connected to that however is the scale of the analysis and from where it is being looked at. Within their own communities the Haredim are the majority view, for example. Within some Islamic countries views that are extremely fundamentalist to the rest of the world are the normal and the rest of the world is out of touch. From the POV of those within a fundamentalist community, be it Islamic or Haredim, they are conforming to the norms or their group. The rules that matter are the rules that the group as a whole have identified as important and even a non-believer will comply out of a desire to belong to this group and to maintain a reputation within it.

  3. There is no fact based argument that can force one to conclude that Christ did not die for our sins, or that God does not want us to commerate the Shabbat and make it holy in very particular ways. The internet can expose you to those who call such things “idiotic” but usually those people have little appreciation for what these beliefs bring to these people’s lives. Many (not all) will accept science for the truths it can and does address, but moral truths do not emerge from science, and for some believers certain revealed truths are to be believed no matter what. Believe falliable humans or the word of god? Again however science does not replace revealed moral truths, and for some the group membership that matters is primarily or exclusively that based on religious subgroup identification. The rest are to them (not that they’d know the allusion) granfalloons.

  4. Specific to the Haredim - the who were the Talmudic scholars and since then arguments between Rabbinical scholars and to some degree the same sort of consensus building that decides when a scientific hypothesis becomes accepted as “true.”

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Indeed, fundamentalism is basically a reaction against the modern world.

(At least, that’s my understanding; and upon checking Wikipedia, I see that the first sentence in its article on Fundamentalism is “Fundamentalism has been defined by George Marsden as the demand for a strict adherence to certain theological doctrines, in reaction against Modernist theology.”)

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There are many more types of “problem children” than you apparently realize.