First 9/11, now Oslo. When is the world going to understand that all denominations of Fundamentalism — “Christian” or “Islamic” or whatever — are dangerous sociopathic perversions of the religions they claim to epitomize? Fundamentalism is a single religion of universal conflict over infinitely proliferating points of irreconcilability which split groups into ever-tinier, ever-angrier warring denominations.

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Belief is the fundament of ideology, not religion.

A religion might produce a belief as easily as it produces a deed or a ritual or an aesthetic sensibility, but the religion is not reducible to any one of these things.

To reduce a religion to one of its many manifestations is to corrupt it and make it into an ideology: the faithful of a religion become believers of an ideology. Believers stop believing that God manifests most memorably in the act of learning something profoundly surprising from another person, and this is the rejection of the cornerstone.

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Fundamentalism is a parasite religion that infects other religions and turns them into their opposite. The infection is spread through violence, retaliation and intensified polarization. It’s only human to react this way, but religion is about being more than only human.