Fundamentalists found their lives on false faith, undergirded by a mistaken conception of what faith is.

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Can you believe in the validity of what an author says to you, apart from the apparent intelligible truth, intelligible falsity or unintelligibility of what you hear? This is what faith is. Faith is an active optimism that what one hears can, with effort, be understood as true.

What faith isn’t is automatically taking what one initially understands to be true, whether it makes sense or not.

And false faith is taking that initial understanding to be the one and only truth.

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Every fundamentalism is xenophobic political ideology expressed in religious language.

The point of the fundamentalism is not the religion but the justification for a xenophobic attitude: an invalidation of others.

The invalidation of others is the invalidation of other conceptions of truth beyond the ideologue’s political-religious ideology.

And invalidation of truth beyond one’s own ideology is invalidation of what transcends oneself. And what transcends oneself…

Milton expressed it best:

Is this the Region, this the Soil, the Clime,
Said then the lost Arch Angel, this the seat
That we must change for Heav’n, this mournful gloom
For that celestial light? Be it so, since hee
Who now is Sovran can dispose and bid
What shall be right: fardest from him is best
Whom reason hath equald, force hath made supream
Above his equals. Farewel happy Fields

Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrours, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang’d by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less then hee
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th’ Almighty hath not built

Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav’n.