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sacrifice to make, and therein cooks the great lie; for there is scarcely a greater or more foolish sacrifice of oneself and one's precious life possible.

Fundamentalism may say that Jesus is the Answer; and if you don't get the right Answer, of course, you will suffer eternal damnation. Fundamentalism can tell us that "either you're with us or you're with the terrorists"; and if you fall into the latter camp, you will be hunted down and your home/city/nation destroyed. Fundamentalism is a cubicle with no opening; a house with no doors or windows; an earth with no sky except the painted ceiling, just inches above your bowed head.

What fundamentalism is not is truth. For truth in Nature is alive and continually transforming in both essence and expression. Fundamentalism foreshortens both our feeling for and vision of Nature, including our own nature. It displaces the energy of our bodily currentshunger, thirst, sexuality, relationship, love, knowledge, and variety in experienceand points them toward a system of belief that is portrayed as final, inflexible, unquestionable, and eternal (in a purely linear sense). Last year, I expressed this as follows:

...[it] is meant to turn you on, and then to turn you away. Away, that is, from yourselffrom your body and its inviolable connection with Nature. Thus, in fundamentalism, the eroticism is a passing expedient, meant to arouse energy toward a violent ideology of the Exclusivea picture of a world in which the adherents of a narrow system of belief and behavior will be rewarded according to the same organic terms that Nature had already placed within them, before the birth of any religious creed.

Learn more about this author, Brian Donohue.
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