The challenge to fundamentalist religious must be thorough, in the present, and with teeth. The harm of those who use their beliefs based on superstitions injure people, flora and fauna, and the Earth. For individuals to put their confidence on legends of the ancients may bring them comfort and a purpose for being, however, we can not tolerate fundamentalists imposing their beliefs on others.
It isn't enough to confront the public policies and practices of religious dogma, we have to use every linguistic device we can in order to make our point. Often, poetry reaches into places of the psyche that prose does not.
"Here I swear, and as I break my oath may ... eternity blast me, here I swear that never will I forgive Christianity! It is the only point on which I allow myself to encourage revenge.... Oh, how I wish I were the Antichrist, that it were mine to crush the Demon; to hurl him to his native Hell never to rise again -- I expect to gratify some of this insatiable feeling in Poetry."
~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, letter, 3 Jan. 1811 (published in The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, vol. 1, no. 35, ed. by Frederick L Jones, 1964)
Comment
Fundamentalism?
Why not challenge the fundamental underpinning, the ingredient they have in common, the engine without which religious institutions will crumble? In any other walk of life even the devout will need to follow the dots before giving their assent. Taking on faith the message or word of someone who has something to sell and thereby gain is universally understood as a sucker's task. And few enjoy the ignominious title, sucker.
And since the apotheosis of faith is in interest of proponent and enables the dotless beliefs to flourish and the concomitant control over adherents; attacking faith is the best way I know to undermine the evil institutions and anachronisms or our ignorant past.
We do a disservice when we single fundamentalists out as aberrant extremism. Fundamentalists are purists. They believe and they act on their beliefs. The way many atheists have come to view fundamentalism is misguided in thinking that the endpoint on the spectrum of faith is what needs to be eliminated. Faith enables fundamentalism as much as it enables the comparatively benign expressions of religiosity. As long as faith is sacrosanct the spectrum it produces is beyond reproach.
Lets not give license to the enablers who refer to the fundamentalist/terrorists as extremists. Such an out of touch with reality titular misnomer serves the interests of theism and status quo. Own this shit you religious fucks! Faith is extreme.
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