Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?

So there I was, at the end of what was, undeniably, a dead end street, consulting a map that claimed otherwise. It was something of a Groucho moment: "Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?" I sided with my own two eyes, thus accepting the principle that reason and experience were essential considerations for evaluating the meaning and application of the text. In a sense, I was fumbling my way toward something like Wesley's "four-legged stool."

No one was claiming, of course, that my county road atlas ought to be read as the inerrant, infallible and authoritative Word of God, so my fundamentalist teachers would not have disagreed with my choosing, in this case, to regard my own experience of the terrain as worthy of consideration.

Nor did they deny that I would encounter similar disparities when consulting the "map" of scripture. In that case, however, they taught that I must always side with the map. That is what it means to be a fundamentalist.

Thus, to cite one of the more infamous examples, we were taught that evolution was a lie. The map, the Bible, said that the world was only 6,000 years old, and if that's what the map says, then this must trump any claims of "science" or any other observation about so-called reality. If reality and the map conflict, then we must reinterpret reality to conform to the map.”

Fundamentalism has gained enormous power in our country today. Yet, fundamentalism continues to have a hard row to hoe in gaining a majority in the United States without a severe disruption occurring. Altemeyer’s observation that fundamentalism has some inherent flaws that will keep it from becoming the overwhelming worldview is reassuring. Because we are now seeing how far the Christian Right will go to create a world walled off from alien (liberal and scientific) thoughts. What Altemeyer’s research tells us is that despite the attempt to create a fundamentalist haven where no dissenting thoughts are allowed, there is still a reservoir of common sense that will resist the pressure to reject reality. Nevertheless, we need to find ways to make it easier for people to resist the lure of fundamentalism which paints a picture of black and white, the rejection of rationality and promises an end that satisfies the apocalyptic dreams of those who are targets for enrollment into the fundamentalist fantasy.

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