288 Quotes About Fundamentalism

Larsson was an active and lifelong feminist, partly for personal reasons but also because he saw that ending gender slavery was as crucial to next-stage evolution as ending race slavery was to the last stage. It's a noble fight, not least because the various fundamentalisms threatening Western democracy are united in their urgent need to re-cage women's sexuality.

He that hath liberty ought to kepe it wel, for nothyng is better than liberty.

Sixth, fundamentalism, properly understood, is not about religion. It is about the inability to seriously entertain the possibility that one might be wrong. In individuals such fundamentalism is natural and, within reason, desirable. But when it becomes the foundation for an intellectual system, it is inherently a threat to freedom of thought.

The enemy for the fanatic is pleasure, which makes it extremely important to continue to indulge in pleasure. Dance madly. That is how you get rid of terrorism.

lately I'd been thinking about the girl I used to be. The zealot. Scrawny and shy, seventy-five pounds soaking wet, operating with the only currency she had. She knew she wasn't enough on her own. She needed to make allegiances. She wanted power, the kind that heals the sick and raises the dead and lifts small girls from backwoods farm towns into the glittering, bustling, half-evil world. A world that for all its faults was still beloved to God.

When I was a girl experiencing it for the first time, that rollicking religion seemed to have come organically, from the world itself, like water or air. Pentecostals aren't much for history, and the only origin story I'd ever heard was the story of how the Holy Spirit had descended on Jesus's disciples centuries ago when they gathered to mourn his death.

Mrs. Afolabi adre me if I was a Christian. I knew what she was asking: Are you a good person? Can I trust you? I hedged and then answered yes, ignoring the unsettled feeling that rose up in me when I said those words. The typical Christian testimony was one of being lost, then found. But my own testimony ran backward. I had been found once, but somewhere along the way I had gotten lost.

Our God was a God of great power and great authority, and the world danced on his axis, not our own. If I had forgotten all of that, then it was no wonder I'd also forgotten that the Devil's agents were everywhere among us, scratching and crawling at our edges, searching for a way to get inside.

Whenever I visited, I felt like I was going back in time, funneling back to an America I didn't think much about anymore. An America of fields and farms and barns and clapboard churches, where children said yes ma'am and no ma'am, where strangers greeted each other with a nod in the grocery stores, where chances were that every stranger you met had some relation in common with someone you already knew.