What are some examples of secular fundamentalism?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I was listening to a radio talk show today on which the panelists were discussing the Muhammad Cartoon related bombings and riots and deaths. One of the in-studio leftists and some of the callers all laid the problem at the feet of the Bush administration (using the Bushitler line in a couple of them) and made comments about how the Islamic Fundies doing this were no worse in their ideology than the Christian Fundies and that our media only reports the most negative portrayals of Arabs and Islamic extremists and yadda yadda ramma damma ding dong. You probably know the drill.

I loathe and detest Bush and most of his Administration’s key players. (I should perhaps add that there are quite a few Dems I’m not much more fond of than I am of the Bush camp.) I am also no fan whatever of Christian Fundamentalism and will say that it is a dangerous thing and has led to some embarassing and damaging legislation over the years, and that to point to Fundamentalist Islam and say “THERE is the ultimate triumph of religious zealotry over reason and tolerance… is that really where you want Christianity to go?” is valid in making an argument. But to outright say that Christian Fundamentalists wanting to ban liquor sales on Sunday and gay marriage in their state is THE SAME AS SYSTEMICALLY SANCTIONED MURDER is as wacky as anything Pat Robertson has said. When I called in and made that comment and also said, in a calm and lucid tone, that as somebody who’s loathed Bush since the first time he heard him speak that I still cannot see a causal connection between his White House and the still rising death toll of people opposed to a bunch of $*@#$ing DRAWINGS is lunacy (I don’t even blame the cartoonist for the violence) I was applauded by the Republican host and the Fundie Christian panelist and boo/hissed by the Bush haters. This was an unusual alliance for a gay atheist to find himself in.

I also paraphrased Chris Rock’s comment (Anyone who makes up their mind before they hear the issue is a fcking fool. Be a fcking person spiel), for which I was labelled a neocon and found the Republican leaving the alliance. Whatever.

Anyway, in the the bickering I got into with Lefty, I made the comment that HE (the lefty) is the true brainwashed Fundamentalist on this particular issue, it’s just that he’s a Secular Fundamentalist. His cause isn’t religion but “Bush and the Christian Right are the cause of ALL evil and anybody who doesn’t see that is stupid and supports violence”, an equally indefensible premise.

So, BUSH HATING isn’t necessarily but can be a form of Fundamentalism, Fundamentalism here being defined as a black/white light/dark issue in which there’s no room for rational debate. Bush is evil, all of his actions are evil, he is the father of evil throughout the world, and the equation ‘Bush is an enemy of the Islamic zealots and the Islamic zealots are killing people, therefore Bush is responsible for their acts’ is just simple logic. On the flip side there are the Bill/Hillary Haters; while I can understand people having political and ethical issues with both or either Clintons, the complete lack of ration and debate, the complete refusal to admit that ANYTHING Clinton did as president had merit or wasn’t just self serving or that Hillary may have some positions that aren’t intrinsically amoral and corrupt is a form of Fundamentalism.

Then there’s PETA, a superficially valid cause (it IS a terrible thing for animals to suffer unnecessarily, some animal testing in laboratories really IS cruel and unusual and completely unnecessary [i.e. things that cause suffering to animals for a product that is purely cosmetic or otherwise inessential], some animals raised for slaughter do live in deplorable conditions, and things should be done about this) but one that they take to absurd conclusions (i.e. it is NEVER a worthy thing to test a product that may save millions of lives worldwide on live animals, or the death of people in the Holocaust and on 9-11 is no worse than the death of millions of chickens each day, etc.) and are incapable of accepting the merits of and intolerant of the holders of other positions (and usually incapable of rational argument as well).

And then there’s Firearm Fundamentalism. Personally I believe Americans should be allowed to own guns for their own protection and I also believe that some elements of gun control are just common sense “of course we should have 'em” things (i.e. waiting periods, background checks, you don’t really need military caliber weaponry for home protection,etc.), but to the Firearm Fundamentalists those who say that the “Right to bear arms” should stop anywhere short being able to buy a semi-automatic assault rifle loaded with armor piercing ammo out of a vending machine is indicative of a police state mentality.

What are some other forms of Secular Fundamentalism, which is “belief systems with a significant number of believers not intrinsically bound to religious beliefs [though there may be minor connections- for example many Firearm Fundamentalists are also conservative Christians or many PETAns may be some form of nature worshipper, but they’re not indelibly linked to religion like, say, the Nation of Islam’s loopier followers] whose zealously faithful are incapable of accepting any other point of view regardless of how irrational and inconsistent their own may be”?

2

I can’t come up with an example right now. I think the ones you’ve mentioned are good ones. What I really think is that humans are prone to that particular way of looking at things and it doesn’t really matter too much what the subject is, as long as they can make it the Most Important Thing. I don’t think it’s guided by the idea or the belief, I think it’s fed by it. Because it’s so much easier to get emotional about something than to think about it. It makes the world so much simpler.

3

If you took the two most polar opposite politicans in office today, you’d find they agree on 75% of their beliefs. Admittedly, it serves a purpose to focus on their differences sometimes (there’s no grounds for choice in their similarities) but not all the time. You can’t claim that Republicans love religion so the Democrats must hate religion or Democrats hate racism so the Republicans must love racism.

4

There are such things as man-hating feminists; let me hastily clarify that I do not wish to characterise all, most, or even many feminists as man-haters, but I think it is undeniable that such people exist, group together and hold certain of their views with unwavering dogmatism.

5

Those who carried out the French Revolution?

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Extreme patriotism. Nobody’s ever been able to convince me that patriotism of any kind is more than morally neutral but most people seem to take it for granted that it’s A Good Thing and some take it FAR too seriously.

Along the same lines … racism.

7

I used to be a feminist in my late teens, and I have to agree with Mangetout.. There were some extremist publications and some’“inner circles” that, in retorspect, can’t be called anything but fundamentalist.

Having been a feminist like that gives me more insight in the attraction of fundamentalism to people in search of an identity.
I repeat my own post form an earlier thread:

With regard to the OP: how about Communism? Or Black Pride?

8

Without wanting to rekindle an outworn debate about whether atheism can be classified as a religion, I think it’s fair to say that there are atheists (perhaps anti-theists) whose position goes beyond simple non-belief and/or rejection of religion, and desires to completely eradicate religion and mock/scorn it as automatically and universally worthless; I think this group qualifies in the fairly liberal definition of fundamentalism we seem to be using in this thread.

Furthermore, there are groups that, although they have the outward appearance of being religiously-motivated or religiously-invested, are arguably nothing more than non-religious groupthink/fundamentalist hatred with a superficial religious veneer; Phred being the example that springs most readliy to mind, but also the ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’ factions in violent conflicts in Northern Ireland.

9

Ditto white pride - tends to be bound up with European mythology, so they can avoid the awkwardness of the Jewish & middle eastern background of Christianity.

Pretty much any extreme view fit into the OP’s description - anarchism, libertarianism, tin-foil-hat Montant hut-dwellers,

10

*Montana hut dwellers.

11

Anti-abortionists When someone thinks killing a receptionist in a woman’s health center is justified, someone is very very wrong.

Anti-governmentalists on the lines of Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber are very scary people.

12

First of all - Good for you Sampiro. Keep up the good fight.

Two areas I see that fit your question.

  1. Food people - those that are SURE that processed foods/meat/high fat/low fat etc. etc. = the cause of all the chronic disease in this world and untimely death.
    I have found that often people with dietary beliefs like that are absolutely rigid and truly believe that one twinkie puts them at risk of any number of diseases.

  2. Twelve steppers. If it keeps them sober, God bless them. But the fact is, one sip of alcohol does not put a person right back into the gutter. Don’t argue this with a 12 stepper, it’s a waste of time.

13

Some creationists (including some Intelligent Design followers) and some Darwinists.

(I’ll certainly admit to being a Darwinist, but at least I look at the evidence.)

14

I fixed your coding as best as possible, Sampiro. I closed the bolded and italics tags so that half your OP wasn’t bolded or leaning right, but if I got it wrong (I had to guess on at least one instance), and if I accidentally changed the meaning of anything you wanted to say, drop me a line and I’ll fix it for you.

15

Am I reading you wrong, or are you saying there are secular fundamentalist creationists? Who/where are they?

16

I suspect if you asked Shodan, Airman Doors, UncleBeer, Clothahump, and others on the board whose politics are right of board-center, they’d place me off in the left wing of the political mansion, but there’s definitely a flavor of “lefty” that I consider myself apart from, and the reason is definitely a form of secular fundamentalism.

It manifests itself as “What?? Are you implying that the morally & politically correct perspective on Issue X is in some fashion up for debate?? The fact that you are open to entertaining the possibility of some answer other than Politically Correct Position on Issue X, expressed in Officially Accepted Terms, no less, means you are an imperialist oppressive nazi pig, and you must apologize immediately although your apology will be insufficient 'cuz we’ve got your number now, we already know The Right Answers on this one and you should too.”

Example 1 — In an environment where Talcott Parsons and structural-functionalist analysis was conventionally associated with conservative conclusions, I was attacked by some folks in a classroom for starting off a rather radical analytical paper about sex & society with some observations from Parsons about marriage and family & some stage-setting structural-functional discussion of marriage and the purposes the institution of marriage serves within the larger social framework. Damn near got my head bitten off. Ewww, Parsons, structural-functionalism, ewww, you’re making a conservative analysis, ewww, sit down, sit down, we don’t wanna hear that shit!

Example 2 — Aiming to open the institution of childhood up to feminist analysis, I started off another presentation with a proposed reexamination of the "girls versus women / adult females are ‘girls’ but adult males are ‘boys’ " analysis — you know, the one whereby it was long ago decided that ‘girls’ is a demeaning term for women — and I got midway into arguing that perhaps instead ‘men’ is a pretentious terms for males & that adulthood, more than childhood, is a mythical social status, when some participants decided that I was saying it was OK to call adult females ‘girls’ after all, and well, that made me one of the oppressors, now was I or was I not saying that, dared I deny that I was saying that, etc.

17

Nathaniel Branden never got any clear details on what she believed about the origins of life, but he has noted that Ayn Rand wasn’t a big fan of the concept of Evolution.

18

I think political thought can resemble religious thought to an alarming degree. There are political fundamentalisms just as there are religious fundamentalisms. Many have been mentioned already in this thread. Extreme leftism, Marxism-Leninism, Radical Environmentalism, Extreme Libertarianism, Fascism, Racism, and Nationalism are all political fundamentalism. (Note: list not intended to be complete.) To me Fundamentalism is more a way of holding beliefs rather than a belief itself. Some characteristics are:

  1. Reasoning from first principles instead of empirical evidence. More a matter of degree, I suppose, since we all have some first principles, but the non-fundamentalist’s first principles tend to be few and minimal, and open to change by reason or evidence. The fundamentalist will interpret all evidence to fit a preconcieved notion. See Karl Popper for more on this.

2)All moral considerations are trumped by fidelity to said principles. The most outrageous acts of cruelty and violence are justified because they are for some principle or belief which need not be justified, whether it’s the will of God, the coming people’s revolution, or the advancement of the master race. See the Euthyphro Dillema. Briefly the dillema is “Is something good because the gods will it or do the gods will something because it’s good?” The fundamentalist takes the former position, the rationalist the second. Again, for “gods” all sorts of secular beliefs can be substituted, as the past century shows only too well.

  1. An incapability to engage in rational discourse. Sampiro has run into this phenomenon as described in his OP. Why listen to anyone else if you know the whole truth? It’s what Stephen Colbert mocks with his word “truthieness.” It applys to left and right, secular and religious.

Again my list is certainly not exhaustive.

The alternative to fundamentalism is rationalism and tolerance. Religiously, this means accepting your neighbors beliefs even though they are different from your own, making your religion a private matter between you and God. Politically this is more difficult since politics is by definition public. Laregly it means listening to others, not shouting them down, and accepting the fact that good-hearted people can differ from you. Alas this tolerance by definition cannot be extended to the intolerant themselves. Tolerance is a two way street. Sadly the only defence against violent fundamentalism is violence itself. It is one of the saddest aspects of human existence that it is the fundamentalist who often sets the terms of the debate.

Sorry if this was incoherent. Please see Karl Popper’s Conjectures and Refutations and The Open Society and it’s Enemies for more. Popper has his critics, but he’s a good place to start.

19

There’s no such thing as “Secular Fundamentalism.” Religious Fundamentalism is defined as strict adherence to a set of written precepts or laws which are believed to hold divine authority. Technically, Christian Fundamentalism is the belief that the Bible is the literal and inerrant word of God and that the bible is the only moral autthority people should live by. This sometimes (but by no means always) includes a desire to codify those beliefs into law (i.e. to create a theocracy). For Islamic Fundamentalism, substitute the Koran for the Bible and maybe a little more tendancy (ok, a LOT more) towards theocracy.

There is no secular equivalent of a scared writing or body of moral precepts so there is no way for secularists (to whatever degree such an ideology exists at all) can be “fundamentalist.” There may be anti-religious zealots but being anti-religious, in itself, does not amount to an adherence to any specific moral code. . There may be people who are extreme in certain kinds of “leftist” beliefs but I don’t see why animal rights activists or gun control freaks should be called “secular.” What do either of those issues have to do with theistic belief?

20

How about the whole concept of “politically correct”? That’s pure fundamentalism.
(I define fundamentalism as blind faith in a theory, and refusal to look at any facts which may dispute the theory)
Political correctness is the blind faith that every ethnic group and culture is equal or superior to western (“dead white male”) culture.

examples:
Remember when the president of Harvard dared to suggest that women are different than men? He almost lost his job.
And pity the poor guy who dares to say that black ghetto culture is worse than white suburbs. (Bill Cosby tried it about 2 years ago , and got shouted down, by both blacks and whites. Not many whites would dare it.)

And a person who dares to say that somehow a religion that is based on jihad might lead to terrorism is condemned for simply stating a logical fact.