One of the distinctive features of fundamentalism is the "all or nothing" attitudes they take. Christian fundamentalists stake the authenticity of a person's faith on that person believing everything the fundamentalist says is true, must be true, has always been true and will be true for eternity. Come to think of it, the Muslim fundamentalist, the Hindu fundamentalist the Jewish fundamentalist and the capitalist fundamentalist along with the anti-gun-control fundamentalist take on the same "all or nothing" attitude, although the everything differs between each type of fundamentalist. Even within a group, Christians (for instance) one person's demand is another persons heresy.
I don't insist on what I just wrote. I am not an "Al fundamentalist". But it seems pretty accurate today, May 7, 2013. We could disagree a bit and no one would be hurt.
I got to thinking about the un-thinking insistence by Christian fundamentalists that every word in the Old and New Testaments of the Christian Scriptures is exactly, precisely true. What if they are wrong?
I think they are wrong.
Suppose, then, that the record that says God, the LORD, Yahweh, commanded the Israelites to kill ALL the Canaanites was attributed to God by people of a fundamentalist persuasion. Or, perhaps by people who were crass, craven killers who wanted Hebrew people with a tendency toward fundamentalist attitudes to believe that God told them to be weapons of mass and total destructions. The Nazis of the decades after the Hebrews crossed the Jordan River and entered the land of Canaan, so to speak. "Kill everyone not like us. God said!"
What if genocide is always wrong, and our Creator never, never sponsors it?
What do you think? Leave a comment and let us know.
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