On Jun 26, 2008, at 1:03 PM, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
> Second, religion is a system of thought that provides certitude in
> everyday life. But to fulfill this function, it must rests on
> certain unquestionable assumptions and axioms that are accepted as
> given and cannot be subject to any doubt or even discussion (you
> should have gotten that from your Catholic education.) In European
> religiosity, such foundations were provided by the institution of
> church and its authorities (cf. the pope and his supposed
> "infallibility" in the Catholic church) and scholars.
>
> However, given the populist and anti-intellectual nature of the
> American society (much of which was refuges from persecution by
> religious authorities in Europe) - such solution to the certitude
> problem was not well received here. Consequently, Americans came
> with a different solution to the certitude in their religion
> problem - more compatible with their populism and anti-
> intellectualism. It was fundamentalism - or literal common-sense
> interpretation of the holy scripture. It may look laughable to any
> educated person, especially of an European descent, but it plays
> the same role as the religious scholarship, inquistion, and
> ecclesiastical authority did in European religiosity - it is a
> conventional "common sense" final authority that infuses certitude
> to religious discourse.
Except that the Pew study shows a considerable degree of flexibility, tolerance, even syncretism in a lot of American religious thinking today. What you say about white fundies is true, but they're a declining percentage of the national population. Thank God, so to speak.
Doug