This leads to the fundamental fact that there is a significant minority in both the Arab/Muslim world and in the United States who are literal worshippers of Scripture and the Koran that propels them into the political arena demanding that their respective countries be turned into a theocratic strongholds where religious zealots attempt to guide the destiny of the nation.
And as to America's Puritan roots, the country's political metamorphosis cannot be divorced from religious fundamentalism and violence. Today's Grand Old Party whose ranks are filled with people like Rick Santorium, still embrace a neo-Calvinist ideology. Puritans believed that a select and elected few were predestined by God to success and wealth while the many, "the others," were predestined to perdition, misery and hell on earth.
In this modern Jeudo-Christian climate American Christians' one desire is to be "born again." This is an evangelical legacy of the Puritan tradition; to be born again is to be an adamant "true believer" intolerant of any "other religion" that is seen as evil and the work of Satan. It's an "out world" belief that is fascinating to the onlooker as the baptized born again Christian struggles daily with worldly mundane things and events while remaining aloof, alienated and divorced for the realities of daily life. This at its very core is fanaticism even though it is not angry or violent.
Is anything more fatal to humanity than "either/or" thinking? If all who disagree with you are -- by definition -- irredeemable sinners and anti-God, then no real democracy is possible. Such a state of affairs, by extension to our own day and time, is what ultimately concerns me about those on the American religious and political right. They typically present themselves as knowing, better than anyone else in the world what America as a nation needs to do, impetuously brushing aside questions from those who differ with them in the slightest.
Such intolerance makes that ilk no different to their brethren in Egypt or Libya.
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