A Commonplace Book

...for all their differences, the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim worlds have responded to modernity -- increasingly desacralized, technical, and, for many terrifying -- in surprisingly similar ways.... Indeed Armstrong [Karen Armstrong, author of The Battle for God] maintains that all these fundamentalist movements are closely related. They were all prompted by what she calls a "terror of extinction" that gripped many of those who wished to go on believing in the face of the social forces that first began to shape today's world: atheism, 18th-century rationalism, "liberal" religious accommodation to modern life, and the terrors of political decay and upheaval.

And yet, as Armstrong notes, fundamentalism isn't modernity's opposite, but a pure product of it. The premodern religious world did not demand literal truth from its great scriptures. The Torah, Bible, and Koran were mythos -- timeless spiritual truth, not "information." By insisting on the quasi-scientific truth of the scriptures, and by organizing themselves into airtight enclaves suspicious of outsiders, modern fundamentalists from Texas to Tehran reveal themselves as mirror images of the secular absolutists they hate. Their rigid intolerance betrays what Armstrong sees as the humane, balanced ethic of traditional religion.