Religious Fundamentalism is Malware

It may have its place in the survival of the species, but you better hope you're not there when or if it's needed.

When I was young, the Crusades (a series of religious wars initiated, supported and sometimes directed by the Roman Catholic Church of the medieval period) were adventurous stories about good men combating evil. Robin Hood, Ivanhoe, El Cid, Richard the Lionheart and others were heroes fighting for the rightness of God and Christianity. In real history, Pope Urban II in 1095 called the Councils of Placenta and Clermont to mobilize Western Europe to conquer Jerusalem and establish a Christian kingdom in the Holy Land. This was the most successful of the Crusades, the First Crusade, and in late 1099 the Christian Army breached the walls of Jerusalem, sacked the city and established the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Cue the stories of the French Knight who failed to return home with the Holy Grail, only to be found by Indiana Jones centuries later. Or the story of some other French knights discovering amazingly sacred texts in Jerusalem, and founding a secret religious cult called the Knights Templar who ruled the known world for the next two centuries. Suffice it to say the Crusades were a source for much history, fictional history and conspiracy theories that fascinate to this day.

It was later that I learned of other Crusades (depending on how you count them, there are as few as eight, but also dozens of smaller ones), including the Albigensian Crusade (also named the Cathar Crusade). This Crusade, which lasted 20 years from 1209-1229 was a military campaign initiated by Pope Innocent III (what a name - you can’t make this stuff up) to eliminate a sect of Christianity known at Catharism in Southern France. These poor Cathars were a threat to the Church and the clergy, as they believed in the anti-materialism of the Christian message of perfection, poverty and preaching with a rejection of the physical realm. Their theology also threatened blasphemy, as they believed in Gnosticism and a dualistic nature of God. This attracted the rage of Innocent III, his clergy and local churches, one of which (in Tours) declared all Cathars should be put in prison and their property confiscated in 1163. Eventually, open war began in 1209 and by 1244 the Cathars were gone, either dead or gone underground. Estimates (while sketchy, considering the time frame and that winners write the histories) are that at least 200,000 and perhaps as many as 1,000,000 Cathars were killed. In fact, the scholar who coined the term “genocide” in relation to the Jewish Holocaust in Germany and Eastern Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, Raphael Lemkin listed this Crusade as one of histories genocides.

So the Christian fundamentalists of the medieval period between 1095 and 1291 fought dozens of Crusades across Europe and the Middle East to eliminate populations of infidels and to win back sacred lands in Jerusalem and the Levant. Estimates are that between 1.2 million and 4 million died across these wars to annihilate blasphemers, infidels and heretics of the approved religion. This was all begotten approximately 1100 to 1300 years after the life of Jesus. Today we face existential threats from another group of religious fundamentalists, in this case radical Islamists, who wish to rid the world of blasphemers, infidels and heretics of the approved religion, about 1400 years after the life of Muhammad. From where does this fundamentalism arise?

Steven Pressfield says it best in his book “The War of Art”, p.34-35:

In [the Fundamentalist’s view] the truth is not out there awaiting revelation; it has already been revealed. The word of God has been spoken and recorded by His Prophet, be he Jesus, Muhammad, or Karl Marx.

Fundamentalism is the philosophy of the powerless, the conquered, the displaced and the dispossessed. Its spawning ground is the wreckage of political and military defeat, as Hebrew fundamentalism arose during the Babylonian captivity, as white Christian fundamentalism appeared in the American South during Reconstruction, as the notion of the Master Race evolved in Germany following World War I. In such desperate times, the vanquished race would perish without a doctrine that restored hope and pride. Islamic fundamentalism ascends from the same landscape of despair and possesses the same tremendous and potent appeal.

What exactly is this despair? It is the despair of freedom. The dislocation and emasculation experienced by the individual cut free from the familiar and comforting structures of the tribe and the clan, the village and the family.

It is the state of modern life.

The fundamentalist…cannot stand freedom. He cannot find his way into the future, so he retreats to the past. He returns in imagination to the glory days of his race and seeks to reconstitute both them and himself in their purer. more virtuous light. He gets back to basics. To fundamentals.

Certainly, the Fundamentalism program (employing the useful model that imagines the human brain is a computer, running dozens of different programs for different needs at any one time) must have gotten the human race through tremendously hard times. As the world caves in and all lose hope, the fundamentalist solution can be a short term fix for the survival of the tribe. Perhaps fundamentalism has its place in such a time, just as electric shocks radiating through your chest have their place when your heart stops. Perhaps that time is now, but for all of our sake I sure hope not. It spells doom for what happens next - a fundamental collapse of society followed by a fundamental reprogramming that involves a whole lot of bad outcomes.

Today, we have again been drawn in to a war against Islamic fundamentalists who cannot stand freedom. They cannot find their way in the futuristic world of the west, so they seek to destroy it and its practitioners from the face of the Earth. There is no better symbol of modernity than the Jewish state of Israel, which is high tech, democratic and free. Obviously the roots of animosity go much deeper amongst the Jews and Arabs, but this is the best interpretation of the current struggle.

Islamic fundamentalism is not the only fundamentalist challenge in today’s world. According to Gallup, 40% of Americans believe that, “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.” This is a creationist view of the world, worked back from texts in the Bible by the Christian Fundamentalists of the post-Civil War South in America. It was and is an outright rejection of the miraculous work done since the Enlightenment to attempt to develop an accurate, tested and confirmed model of the Universe through Physics, Astronomy, Geology, Biology, Evolution and Chemistry. Almost every modern technology and convenience can be traced back to these sciences, but the Christian fundamentalist rejects them all.

As stewards of modern society and shepherds of the human story, we must remain vigilant of the Christian fundamentalists on one side and the Islamic fundamentalists on the other. They will both attempt to tear down the modern world and return it to one in which they are again superior. That path leads to death, destruction, and in most cases, genocide.

“Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering!”

-Yoda, “The Phantom Menace”