Pick and Choose Fundamentalism

I forget exactly where I heard this, but someone pointed out about year ago that this situation is somewhat new and brought on by the sudden surge of fundamentalist converts starting with the "Jesus Freak" movement circa 1970.As the explanation goes, those churches used to minister mainly to those who were born into the faith and so they had a life-long program of Bible study laid out for the youth as they would grow up. They strove for developing a thorough knowledge of the Bible -- colored by their theology, of course. Part of the Baptist tradition used to be that each member would study the Bible and come to their own conclusions and interpretations of Scripture, only able to agree to disagree. The denomination wasn't really in a position to dictate the members' beliefs.Then suddenly they were deluged with new members, brand-new adult members, who had never gone through their educational program. These new members had to be brought up to speed immediately. So the churches had to pick and choose key passages to spoon feed them and to tell them exactly what those key passages had to mean. This changed the climate within the churches and the denominations to where the ministers and the denomination started to dictate exactly what the congregations' beliefs had to be. And the congregations largely failed to carry through with their Bible study -- and even those who did continue their studies were already a couple decades behind in their homework -- and so they would cling to those key picked-and-chosen passages while ignoring the rest of the Bible.That was the explanation that had been given by a former fundamentalist (I'm pretty sure he was). FWIW.Personally, I think that while they fervently hold to their beliefs, most fundamentalists have no idea where those beliefs come from. In one email exchanged a creationist had started with me, he insisted absolutely that he only believed the Bible and that if the Bible were to be found to contains even a single error then the entire thing was a lie and should be thrown into the trash and he would have no choice but to become an atheist. So I asked him where in the Bible that it said that; ie, what exactly did he base that belief on. And he was suddenly far too busy to continue the correspondence.

Yes, certainly there's a lot in the Bible that's just too inconvenient for them so they turn a blind eye to it.To provide some context, as I thought about it more I remembered that the person who related that explanation was talking about how creationists think nothing about lifting everything they reference out of context. His explanation for that was that they think it's proper scholarship to do so because they do it to the Bible all the time. And then he related the explanation I posted earlier.

That seems related to something that Bertrand Russell is supposed to have once pointed out: if a Catholic becomes a freethinker, then he will tend to become an atheist, whereas if a Protestant becomes a freethinker then he just creates a new sect.My understanding of what he was saying is that the Catholic view is that there is only one true faith and everything else is heresy. So if they give up that one true faith then there is no other faith to turn to. OTOH, Protestist history has been filled with groups splintering off from a parent church over some doctrinal difference and forming their own church.The impression I get from fundamentalists (I spent many years as a "fellow traveller", since several of my friends have been fundamentalists) is that theirs is the only true interpretation of the one true faith, so they'd be in the same boat as Russell's Catholic.

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{When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy.
("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984)Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.
(from filk song "Word of God" by Dr. Catherine Faber, No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WORDGOD.HTML)Of course, if Dr. Mortimer's surmise should be correct and we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one.
(Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles)Gentry's case depends upon his halos remaining a mystery. Once a naturalistic explanation is discovered, his claim of a supernatural origin is washed up. So he will not give aid or support to suggestions that might resolve the mystery. Science works toward an increase in knowledge; creationism depends upon a lack of it. Science promotes the open-ended search; creationism supports giving up and looking no further. It is clear which method Gentry advocates.
("Gentry's Tiny Mystery -- Unsupported by Geology" by J. Richard Wakefield, Creation/Evolution Issue XXII, Winter 1987-1988, pp 31-32)

I first heard about the Christian Reconstructionist movement in the late 80's from a three-part series Bill Moyers did for PBS on the Religious Right. Extremely scary stuff.Thank you for the current links.

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{When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy.
("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984)Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.
(from filk song "Word of God" by Dr. Catherine Faber, No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WORDGOD.HTML)Of course, if Dr. Mortimer's surmise should be correct and we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one.
(Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles)Gentry's case depends upon his halos remaining a mystery. Once a naturalistic explanation is discovered, his claim of a supernatural origin is washed up. So he will not give aid or support to suggestions that might resolve the mystery. Science works toward an increase in knowledge; creationism depends upon a lack of it. Science promotes the open-ended search; creationism supports giving up and looking no further. It is clear which method Gentry advocates.
("Gentry's Tiny Mystery -- Unsupported by Geology" by J. Richard Wakefield, Creation/Evolution Issue XXII, Winter 1987-1988, pp 31-32)

I forget who it was and in which topic, but some time within the past one or two months somebody posted statistics of the current trends in church membership in the US. As I recall the statistics he reported, overall membership is declining, such that atheist/agnostic/non-religious segment of the population is growing. Within the religious segment, most of the decline is in the mainstream denominations. Fundamentalist/conservative/evangelical denominations are growing, not shrinking. As is a liberal denomination, the Unitarian Universalists (though our membership has traditionally been small, about 100,000 circa 1990).So basically, we are seeing US religion becoming increasingly polarized.

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{When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy.
("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984)Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.
(from filk song "Word of God" by Dr. Catherine Faber, No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WORDGOD.HTML)Of course, if Dr. Mortimer's surmise should be correct and we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one.
(Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles)Gentry's case depends upon his halos remaining a mystery. Once a naturalistic explanation is discovered, his claim of a supernatural origin is washed up. So he will not give aid or support to suggestions that might resolve the mystery. Science works toward an increase in knowledge; creationism depends upon a lack of it. Science promotes the open-ended search; creationism supports giving up and looking no further. It is clear which method Gentry advocates.
("Gentry's Tiny Mystery -- Unsupported by Geology" by J. Richard Wakefield, Creation/Evolution Issue XXII, Winter 1987-1988, pp 31-32)