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Re: Is Ted Cruz Satan? Discuss.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
Somewhere up there, TM focused a bit on fundamentalism, and I think that is right. Fundamentalism of all sorts causes bad shit - there are Buddhist fundamentalists you do not want to deal with. Islam is not the only religion to experience a wave of fundamentalism, but it has experienced a wave of it and, perhaps of more concern to us, that fundamentalism has been tied up in anti-Western sentiment, to a great extent because it grew in reaction to some of our friends doing bad shit. Maybe part of the problem here isn't just Islamic fundamentalism, but the fact that we get included in its targets.
No one complains about Hinduvatta in the US because they target mostly Muslims. No one complains about fundamentalist terrorists in China or Japan here, because they don't target Americans. And American fundamentalists may target us, but they don't scare us as much because they are our neighbors and we like playing with guns, too. And we sure as shit don't care much about Jewish fundamentalists yelling "Death to Arabs" in Jerusalem because, well, they target mostly Muslims whom they simultaneously attack and label terrorists.
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Fundamentalism is, necessarily, a reaction to modernity and change. It's an effort to return to a simpler time and set of answers, and that requires a rejection of what has come since. No one thinks of the Amish, e.g., as fundamentalists because they don't make such a point of rejecting what's recent -- they have just kept doing their thing.
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“It was fortunate that so few men acted according to moral principle, because it was so easy to get principles wrong, and a determined person acting on mistaken principles could really do some damage." - Larissa MacFarquhar
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