I think he means the fundies have no genuine passion. There are no swooning St. Theresas in fundamentalism, no real self-sacrifice, no St. Francis, no beautiful church music (unless you count Gospel as fundie), no stigmata, no poetry.
I know what you mean about the architecture, Chuck. Moscow is a city of churches, with one seemingly on every culture and many hundreds of years old (like St. Basil's, built by Ivan the Terrible in honor of the only man brave enough to tell him to piss off: http://www.moscow-taxi.com/churches/st-basils-cathedral.html ). Mostly I just look at them from the outside and think, "oooh, pretty," but on the very rare occasions I've actually been inside one in all its grandious beautiosity, especially during a service with the priest swinging around the incense and chanting in Church Slavonic and all the people lining up to kiss the icons, I feel obligated to cross myself. Otherwise it would almost feel like I was insulting the building or something.
Incidentally there's an interesting anecdote about St. Basil's. When Lunachersky received information that the Bolsheviks were going to dynamite it, he resigned from the government in outrage. Fortunately his information was false.
--- Robert Wrubel <bobwrubel at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> If you mean Xian fundamentalists are mainly
> interested
> in secular power, you could be right. However, that
> seems true of Xianity and Judaism for most of their
> history. If you mean fundamentalism substitutes
> group
> rituals for true belief, that also is true of
> earlier
> religions. And if you mean fundamentalists are more
> interested in condemning non-believers than in
> examining themselves, well, that goes back a long
> way
> too.
>
> BobW
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