Religious moderates are what make up the bulk of each of the major religions today. Generally a religion can be split into two groups – fundamentalists and moderates. This is most commonly seen with Islam although it can apply to any religion, there are plenty of examples in Christianity too and I have no doubt other religions that I simply haven’t had enough exposure to to be able to see clear examples of.
Fundamentalists tend to follow the religion to it’s exact words, they subscribe to it’s a teachings in whole. Moderates however relax the rules in order to fit into society. They don’t follow their holy book as closely. Therein lies the problem.
The fact is a term like Christian moderate or Islamic moderate is just a cover term. For bad Christian or bad Muslim. If you believe in one of the major religions then you believe that there is a god and he wrote (or dicated) the holy text and that we should all follow it. Whereas non-religion people don’t, that is the difference.
A fundamentalist will do this, they will follow the holy text as exactly as they can. A moderate however will not. They pick and choose what is appropriate in our society and what isn’t. What they are essentially asking us to believe is that this all-powerful all-perfect god that wrote the holy book got some of it right and some of it wrong. The all-perfect god that is therefore inherantly incapable of making mistakes didn’t get the holy book quite right and so therefore there are parts of it we should ignore as they don’t work in our society.
That is where the problem lies. When a fundamentalist starts a holy war or burns someone at the stake it’s because they are following their religon. And the reason why the moderate doesn’t do the same is because they aren’t. Of course this isn’t always the case but as a general rule it works quite well. The lesson here? it is the religon at fault because the fundamentalists that are blaimed in these events are only following their religion. They have not being dragged off their path of their faith, it is the religious moderates that have.
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This entry was posted on Sunday, May 28th, 2006 at 6:23 pm and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.