Fundamentalists (all faiths) are READY TO KILL

(Olivia Ward, continued, from The Toronto Star)

"But as the first decade of the second millennium reaches the halfway point, the reverse is true. In major religions there is a resurgence of fervent faith, sometimes to the point of violence, as intolerance rises along with determination to impose age-old standards of morality.

The flight to the margins, although proportionately small, is powerful. It is influencing the political agenda of governments in ways that would have been unthinkable a decade ago, threatening Western-style democracies and dampening hope for worldwide peace.

"Everywhere there is an explosion of passionate religious movements," says Peter Berger of Boston University, author of The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics. "It happens at some periods, like the Crusades. Contrary to expectations, it's a very religious world, and always has been."

Berger and others who study trends in religion call this a time of "fundamentalism," a term once coined to describe an American movement begun by religious intellectuals a century ago. They wrote a doctrine of Protestant "fundamentals" to counter a new liberalism in Christianity, and the word became identified with stern puritanism. But it is increasingly used to identify religious extremism today.
"
In most major traditions there has been a resurgence of very aggressive, passionate religious movements, because people are feeling uncertain," Berger says. "And when you're uncertain, you're more aggressive."

Karen Armstrong, a British former nun and leading chronicler of fundamentalism, agrees. Those who embrace it, she says, are mainly motivated by fear in a world in which the moral ground is shifting at record speed.

"Fundamentalists have no time for democracy, pluralism, religious toleration, peacekeeping, free speech, or the separation of church and state," she writes in The Battle for God.

"Christian fundamentalists reject the discoveries of biology and physics and insist the Book of Genesis is scientifically sound ... Jewish fundamentalists observe their revealed law more stringently than ever before, and Muslim women, repudiating the freedoms of Western women, shroud themselves in veils."

Furthermore, Armstrong says, Buddhist, Hindu and Confucian fundamentalists are prepared to fight and kill in the name of religion, and "strive to bring the sacred into the realm of politics and national struggle."

"With such dramatic and inflexible beliefs at stake, those who flee to the margins of religion inspire equally strong reactions, ranging from outrage to uncompromising devotion. . . ."

--from The Toronto Star
Article by Olivia Ward
January 2, 2005

See The Star article for the rest. The entire article is worth reading and meditating upon.