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Challenge fundamentalist religious on public policies and practices

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)

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Comment by Lmnopicue on January 28, 2015 at 2:48am: The miserable hope for God. The opportunist realises; soliloquy can easy be disguised as dialogue. Or one, confident in abductions taken from information provided by deceiving faculties, may thrust, with insane confidence, an idea on their kin. This idea, that gave validity to their unique predilections, is something worth sharing. Sharing may lead to agreement, agreement provides rigidity to an idea. Affirmations continue to strengthen the resolve of an idea. People with the idea can become fearful of its repudiates, enter pogroms.

This said; the spread of an absolute truth could provide some social cohesion. Social cohesion is the precursor to common ideals, which leads to the establishment of common laws. But we have, over centuries, established common law. A common law effected and enacted by the democratic process, not divine mandate. A common law in need of no amendments or addendum's provided by one purporting an absolute truth. Any such person is either an opportunist, in possession of faulty faculties or one of the many miserables. They should be treated with caution and pity.

Comment by Frankie Dapper on January 26, 2015 at 11:46pm: 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.