Liberation Community Presents
True and False Fundamentalism
Among the various religions there are two types of
fundamentalism. True fundamentalism holds God
at the center of all things and makes God
the focus and direction toward which all
religious activity is aimed.
For Christians the question of what the
fundamental religious teachings are
is brought up in the book of Matthew Chapter
22 verse 36 when a Pharisee challenges Jesus
in the same manner
as the Gentile challenged Rabbi Hillel a
generation before (see
The Two Golden Rules.) The Pharisee's question
to Jesus is, "Which is the great
commandment in the law?" He is asking
Jesus what the fundamental teaching is.
Jesus answers and explains, "Thou shalt love the
Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with
all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is
the first and great commandment. And the
second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy
neighbor as thyself. On these two
commandments hang all the law and the
prophets." Jesus was not simply saying
that these were the two greatest
commandments, he was saying that these two
commandments were the foundational or fundamental
commandments from which all of the rest of
the bible's teachings were derived.
For the first commandment, to love God with
all of your heart soul and mind, there may not
neccessarily be an outward manifistation. Surely
a person might spend time in religious services
as an experssion of their love and devotion to God,
but someone could be out planting crops while in
their heart and mind they are continually thinking
of God's greatness and feeling deep gratitude to
God for all of the gifts they have been given.
This farmer certainly does not love God any less
than the person attending services.
The second commandment is where we see the
outward manifistation of our love. Loving
our neighbors as ourselves has consequences
since Jesus made clear in his teachings that our
neighbor wasn't simply the person living next door;
our neighbors include every human on the planet,
especially our enemies. (Even thieves love their
friends.)
Sadly, there are people who have been deceived
into believing that they, themselves are especially
righteous and that it is their place to pass
judgement on people whom they believe to be less
righteous than themselves (Jesus' saying "Judge not
lest ye be judged" fails to persuade them.)
Their words are full of condemnation for people who
do not have the same gender orientation, or who are not
members of the same political party, or whose ancestors
many centuries before had a vicious rumor circulated
about them. They forget that Jesus prefered the company
of those poor outcasts whom society detested and
rejected, over the company of the self-righteous
Pharisees or the aristocratic elitist Saducees
(both of whose modern day counterparts are easy
to spot.)
How can someone heap vitriolic scorn on various
groups of people out of one side of their mouth
while simultaneously giving lip-service to loving
them out of the other side?
With friends like that....
Anyone who is going to claim to be a Christian
Fundamentalist should be thinking in terms of what
teachings Jesus thought were fundamental over what
they might be hearing from ultra-wealthy
tele-evangelists or even from the local pulpit.
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