A fundamental Christian and a Christian fundamentalist walk into a bar…well, apparently, one would not go into the bar and the other would blow it up—and rightly, in Jesus’ name (or so it is claimed).
Following up on the fracas that was caused by misrepresentations of his article Taking The Gloves Off… (which was reviewed here part 1, part 2 and part 3), American Atheists’ Al Stefanelli wrote Christian Fundamentalists: Deeply Disturbed Psychotic Sociopaths. Something which is not misrepresented is that in this piece he claims that one thing that “True Christians” do is, for example, commit murder.
He, rightly, notes:
…my words were turned and twisted and headlines appeared in thousands of newspapers and blogs stating that I was calling for the murder of Christians
This is because he stated that “fundamentalist Christians and radical Muslims…want us to die” yet, when he stated that “they must, must, must be eradicated” he was referring to “beliefs and doctrines that serve only to promote hatred, bigotry and discrimination” and not to the people who hold such beliefs.
His article was certainly fallacious and vague (for example, he states that it is “in the best interests of atheists to be intolerant of fundamental Christianity and radical Islam” but does not detail how such intolerance looks) but his context is clear.
In fact, he affirms:
I have a very long history of condemning all forms of violence and any activism that is done outside the bounds of the law.
However, as an atheist he can offer no justification for condemning, anything at all actually. This is perhaps why he references “the law”—manmade laws conceived and administered by the majority opinion de jour (the fittest bio-organisms of the day). In fact, the article Taking The Gloves Off… is subtitled “When Diplomacy Fails, It’s Time To Fight Using The Law.”
Al Stefanelli seeks to respond to complaints that he lumped Christians with Muslims. Actually, the complaint should be the specific lumping of “fundamentalist Christian and radical Islamic doctrines.” Indeed, he offers no academic citations to a definition of “fundamentalist Christian” as those holding to the sorts of doctrines which he described. Why not correlate fundamentalist Christian with fundamentalist Islam or radical Islamic with radical Christians?
The fact is that he complains of being taken out of grammatical context but he takes “fundamentalist Christian” out of historical context (and the Bible out of every context). This is because, as one would think is common knowledge, “fundamentalist Christian” refers to Christians who adhere to the fundamentals, the basics, of their faith. Specifically, the term “fundamentalist Christian” comes from the 1917 AD book, or series of 4 volumes, The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth which is a collection of essays on various topics to which Christian leaders of the day wanted to respond: from theology to science and beyond.