don\u2019t matter<\/em>. They don\u2019t matter, at least, to my own persistence in fundamentalism or my activity as a fundamentalist.<\/p>\nSo some fellow (claiming to be a fundamentalist) cooperates with or actually participates in something I consider to be an error \u2013 so what? What difference does someone else\u2019s error make to my own philosophy or position? It may have an effect on my relationship with that fellow. In fact, I may well distance myself from him to a great degree. But my personal philosophy remains unchanged.<\/p>\n
Instead, what we see is the game of \u2018pin the tail on the fundamentalist\u2019 being played. The participants say, \u2018Yeah, it\u2019s stuff like that that led me out of fundamentalism\u2019 or \u2018move me to leave fundamentalism\u2019. So\u2026 they have pinned us, and they have left\u2026 left to what?<\/p>\n
Well, in large measure the \u2018leaving\u2019 is to go to a branch of evangelicalism which is rife with cooperation with all kinds of error.<\/p>\n
What?<\/p>\n
This is the rationale: Fundamentalists are hypocrites at separating from error, so I\u2019ll separate from them and join the guys who have very little compunction against separation from error. In fact, to them, separation is a dirty word.<\/p>\n
Yeah, that\u2019ll show them!<\/p>\n
Instead, I suggest that those who \u2018leave\u2019 fundamentalism are doing so because they never were fundamentalists in the first place. If they were, they would simply stay in (whatever \u2018in\u2019 is) and do their part to make fundamentalism better. And they wouldn\u2019t get bitter about it.<\/p>\n
Instead, we have a crowd of angry bitter people carping and criticising and claiming the high moral ground.<\/p>\n
Oh well. I\u2019m a fundamentalist. And I guess I\u2019m just pinned \u2013 maybe they missed the tail and hit me in the head and I can\u2019t think straight.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
UPDATE:<\/strong><\/span> My response to the last five comments were delayed due to illness so I have put my responses in a follow-up post here<\/a>. Comments will be closed for this post, if anyone cares to continue the discussion, please do so in the comments to the follow-up post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I\u2019ve observed a phenomenon in the erstwhile fundamentalist blogosphere. It\u2019s called the game of pin the tail on the fundamentalist. It\u2019s played this way: Everybody plays with their eyes open (the better to seem sincere and disingenuous). The root philosophy of fundamentalism is described as having been taught to the player at some point in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[37,71],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2fYWj-pz","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1585"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1585"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1585\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1590,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1585\/revisions\/1590"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oxgoad.ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}