I just realized that I had saved on my bloglines, from way back in April, two things from Andrew Sullivan promoting the idea that fundamentalism is a mindset (short version: this ignores the history of the term.)

Let’s take a closer look. The first is a reader e-mail that seems so much fluff, but Andrew’s added commentary is definite enough:

For me, fundamentalism is not just a distortion of faith but a negation of it. Faith, in my view, should not be blind. It should have the widest eyes imaginable. Nothing that is true should stand in the way of faith, unless one has already conceded that one is believing in a lie. And so science is not to be feared but embraced. And historical scholarship is to be plumbed not ignored. And debate is to be welcomed, not policed. It is only through this process of doubt and questioning that real faith emerges.

The problem here is that fundamentalists don’t concede they’re believing a lie because they don’t concede that the claims of evolutionary biologists and liberal Biblical scholars are true. Just like Andrew doesn’t concede my view that the evils we see in the world are pretty near conclusive evidence against the existence of God. The flawed reasoning here is a little hard to classify, whether it’s just a minor variation of misclassifying fundamentalism or should be seen as something new entirely. For now I’ll just file it under *begging the question.*

The other post is a quote from a book titled /How (Not) To Speak of God/:

“Fundamentalism can be understood as a particular way of believing one’s beliefs rather than referring to the actual content of one’s beliefs.

“It can be described as holding a belief system is such a way that it mutually excludes all other systems, rejecting other views in direct proportion to how much they differ from one’s own. In contrast, the a/theistic approach can be seen as a form of disbelieving what one believes, or rather, believing IN God while remaining dubious concerning what one believes ABOUT God (a distinction that fundamentalism is unable to maintain). This does not actually contradict the idea of orthodoxy but rather allow us to understand it in a new light…

This is also a good example of *ignoring contradictions.* If one belief system says there is only one god, it mutually excludes any system that says there is more (say, twelve gods) because the number one is distinct from the number twelve. More generally, it is very difficult to be a relativist about religious claims if you pay attention to basic logic and arithmetic.