I have read a range of books about Fundamentalism. The best I've found isn't even ostensibly about fundamentalism - Terry Eagleton's 'After Theory' but the final chapters expose the nature of the beast brilliantly. For example (p. 219);The fundamentalist, of course, is not necessarily evil. But he reaches for his watertight principles because he feels an abyss of non-being yawning beneath his feet. It is the unbearable lightness of being which causes him to feel so heavy.
The heaviness of course becomes something to impose on others. It is of course as Karen Armstrong so brilliantly says, a 'lust for certainty'. Of course the fundamentalist is looking in the only place where high degrees of certainty can never be found - in concepts, language, doctrine. Religion in its true expression is encounter, encounter with the whole that is beyond mind. It is experience not doctrine. It is centred in the now. It is centred in experiences of being beyond the egoic self, experiences of non-being, experiences of the Whole except when we try to imagine as opposed to experience the Whole it isn't! As the beloved Heschel said concepts are delicious snacks but are no substitute for the real thing - the state of wonderment, of awe, of no-self.
The birds have vanished into the sky,
and now the last cloud drains away.
We sit together, the mountains and me,
until only the mountains remain.
Li Po (701-762)
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