Soap-Bubble Fundamentalism

I've been meaning to link to Slacktivist's excellent post about the brittle nature of extreme fundamentalism for a couple of days, but I didn't have one of those round tuits.

That's part of the fundamentalist "worldview" -- to use one of their favorite words -- that only these two options exist. Option No. 1: Total and unquestioning belief in the God of the fundies' literalist text. Option No. 2: Nihilism.

Her three young children are being taught this binary worldview. What will become of them? I've seen this story play out before, dozens of times. The only way to preserve the fragile faith they are being taught is to keep it sheltered from the world, like John Travolta in The Boy in the Plastic Bubble -- they have to be sent to fundie school, or to be home-schooled, until they are old enough to attend Bob Jones University. In the meantime they must be kept away from Bill Nye, and the Discovery channel, and NASA.gov. They can't even be allowed to watch The Boy in the Plastic Bubble lest they begin to ask dangerous questions about Buzz Aldrin.

Some few of these kids will somehow manage to maintain this soap-bubble faith all the way through to adulthood. They'll marry within the bubble and teach this fundamentalism to another generation of children. But those cases are the exceptions. Reality is too hard and pointy a place for soap bubbles to survive very long and most of these kids will end up being forced by reality to reject Option No. 1. Unsurprisingly, they tend to turn to what they have been taught is their only alternative.

Read the whole thing, as the saying goes.

It does make you wonder how fundamentalism manages to perpetuate itself long-term. I can only assume there's a two-way traffic between fundamentalism and self-destructive nihilism.