I am not trying to define it. I believe Herman Kahn defined why he believed the Earth would support 25 billion in comfort and ease -- but, for that you will have to go read his book.
I have lived on a cotton farm without electricity and used battery radios. I think a lot of romantic notions exist that aren't sustainable in reality.
Ron

Thanks Ron,
That's it in a nutshell.

http://www.vuw.ac.nz/chaplains/issues/jihad.html


Shadowlands
<< Every nation has a positive side and a shadow side. One of the most vivid portrayals of this was in the fantasy novel of C.S. Lewis, “That Hideous Strength”, where he contrasts the two sides of England – as he saw them, not to everyone’s satisfaction. Rather more empirically, Germany’s shadow side undoubtedly emerged under Hitler and the Nazis. We in this country have a shadow side, which Rob Muldoon exploited, and which a certain politician who can’t speak Somali (or English after midnight) is also exploiting. Someone once said that when you jolt a Christian it should be the Holy Spirit that spills out. However, sometimes when you jolt a nation it’s the shadow which spills out.

It is my conviction that this is what has happened with the United States, since the jolt of 11 September 2001. Its shadow has spilled out, and that shadow is dangerous for the world, for Islam and for the Christian Church. Dangerous not least because the shadow is all too often shaped, expressed, couched in “Christian” discourse, however inimical that discourse may be to authentic Christian truth and values. More about this a little later.

There is also a shadow side to individuals; there certainly is to me. We could describe this in terms of Paul’s sarx, the fallen human nature, in bondage to epithumia, to desire, craving, lust, greed of various sorts. No doubt Jung also would have some interesting things to contribute here. I want to use the term somewhat broadly and loosely, and say that this shadow side of human beings takes particular expression in each individual. Your shadow, your besetting sin is not the same as my shadow and my besetting sin. Nor can I deal with your besetting sin (though I may experience some of its consequences); I have to struggle against my own. This is not too far away from one deep form of jihad in Muslim understanding.

There is a shadow side of nations; a shadow side of individuals; and there is a shadow side of religions. I would argue that there is both light and shadow in all religions, including Christianity. It is not simply that every religion is compromised by the sins and failings of its individual members, though sadly that is true enough. There is also a systemic and conceptual shadow side. Women, slaves, homosexuals, Jews and Muslims have all at various times in history experienced the shadow side of Christianity; Canaanites of old and Palestinians of today have experienced the shadow side of Judaism; I refrain from detailing who have experienced the shadow side of Islam, for that would cut across what I want to model tonight. However, it is no part of my desire to gloss over the sufferings of my brothers and sisters in Christ in many Muslim countries, in the past and in the present.

I want here to explore the relationship of “fundamentalism” with the shadow side of religion. Do you find the term “fundamentalism” useful? meaningful? I dislike it for several reasons. It is imprecise, it is usually pejorative, and its use is all too frequently a substitute for thought. Historically it refers to the defence of a set of Evangelical Protestant positions which were thought to be “fundamental” to Christian faith and under threat in the first part of the 20th Century, and which included a particular understanding of the Scriptures - their literal inspiration and inerrancy. I myself find that latter element points to the most helpful theological use of the term “fundamentalism”: a belief in the inerrancy of sacred Christian Scripture, or by extension, of other sacred Scriptures. It is not a term which should be used dismissively to describe orthodox belief in the central, “fundamental” tenets of a particular religion. Nor is it necessarily interchangeable with religious fanaticism, or religious intolerance. I know “fundamentalist” Christians who are gentle, rational, tolerant people; I know “liberal” Christians who are bigoted, irrational and intolerant.

That stated, I believe there nevertheless is a link between “fundamentalism” in the limited sense I have identified, and the shadow side of religion. When we commit ourselves to a belief in the literal inerrancy of a sacred book, we are committed to the defence of the truth of every part of it, and to the submission of our lives to every part of it. Sadly, that means we embrace the shadow side of our religion, as well as the other, for the shadow is there in the Book as well as the rest of the religion. We lose the capacity and the freedom to critique the shadow in the light of the Light; indeed, we may lose the very capacity to discern any difference.

In the Bible, for example, if we have eyes to see, we can discern the internal critique and purification of the simplistic Deuteronomic link between obedience to the Torah and prosperity, security and health, and between disobedience and poverty, defeat, and sickness. We can see the debate between election for national privilege and election for servanthood and universal blessing. And we can see the quite crucial tension between ‘holy war’ and what Jewett and Lawrence call ‘prophetic realism’. The one chooses the path of redemptive violence, sanctifies the wholesale slaughter of those who oppose the People of God, like the Amalekites, drives the Zealot party in Jesus’ day, resulting in the Roman destruction of Palestine as a Jewish entity, and is a significant element in some Zionist policies today. The other critiques the pride and narrow nationalism of Israel and Judah, chooses the path of the Suffering Servant and redemptive love, and is supremely embodied in the teaching, actions and person of Jesus, who if he had not been crucified by the Romans and the Jerusalem establishment, would surely sooner or later have been dealt to by the Zealot party.

“Fundamentalism” ignores, or smoothes out, or eliminates such debates, and in so doing ingests the poison of the shadow of the religion – if that is not too confused a metaphor. I make the assumption that all religions and all sacred Scriptures have such a shadow. Judaism and Christianity and Islam certainly have.

My thesis is that when personal individual shadow and religious shadow and national shadow are allowed to interact freely and reinforce one another, we are in deep trouble. My thesis is that the true jihad or spiritual struggle is with the shadow. I am called as a Christian to deal with my shadow side as an individual person, and to identify the shadow side of Christianity and minimise it, and to identify and critique and minimise the shadow side of whatever nation or civilisation I live in.

That great moral realist, Reinhold Niebuhr, put it this way:

“The man in the street, with his lust for power and prestige thwarted by his own limitations and the necessities of social life, projects his ego upon his nation and indulges his anarchic lusts vicariously. So the nation is at one and the same time a check upon, and a final vent for, the expression of individual egoism.” [Moral Man and Immoral Society] Niebuhr further recognised that religion could make things worse, and urged that “each religion, or each version of a single faith, seek to proclaim its highest insights while yet preserving an humble and contrite recognition of the fact that all actual representations of religious faith are subject to historical contingency and relativity. Such a recognition creates a spirit of tolerance and makes any religious or cultural movement hesitant to claim official validity for its form of religion or to demand an official monopoly for its faith.”
[Children of Light and the Children of Darkness]

Christian shadow, Western and American shadow, and Islam
There has all too frequently been a cooption of Christianity by those with power or the desire for power, in nation, economy, family, or race. And many people over the centuries have drawn on the shadow side of Judaeo-Christianity with its images and stories of redemptive violence, rooted in the Conquest of Canaan, in the bloody defence and purification of God’s Chosen Holy People, the desire to usher in God’s peace and justice by the total elimination of the dehumanised and demonised enemy, the projection of all this on to apocalyptic end-time scenarios, all fused definitively into that rhapsody of sacred violence called the Revelation of St John the Divine.

Until I read Jewett and Lawrence’s book, “Captain America and the Crusade against Evil”, I had not realised how deeply this shadow side of Christianity was embedded in American history, beginning with the Pilgrim Fathers, and thus embedded in the American psyche. The book’s title refers to the comic book character who the authors assert embodies the values of “zealous nationalism” and of the American “monomyth”, itself deeply influenced by Christianity’s shadow. They understand “the Captain America complex” as a bipolar form of civil religion that periodically blesses crusades against evil enemies. I quote:

“…there are six important elements of the Captain America complex, which it shares with Christian zeal and Jewish zeal as well as with militant Islamic jihad:

Each side views its anger as blessed by the deity, which thereby absolutizes zeal and jihad and eliminates normal restraint.

Each side conceives of its opponents as members of a malevolent conspiracy, originating from the realm of absolute evil, and thus sees any compromise as immoral.

The stereotypes of the actors in this conflict are stark and extreme, with all goodness on one side and absolute evil on the other. To mourn over the deaths of such opponents thus appears to make as little sense as concern over the seasonal demise of locusts.

…such opponents must either be killed or converted. Each side believes that its own violence is redemptive, while it deplores the violence of the other side as senseless and unjust.

To allow oneself to be defeated by the other side is to abandon faith itself, whether in the form of Christianity, Islam, or Judaism, and whether devoutly religious or explicitly secular.

Every action of one’s enemies is to be perceived to desecrate the holy, and overcoming such desecration is seen as a religious and political imperative.”

Link that with the recurring theme of the “Manifest Destiny” of the American people, which emerges again and again in the rhetoric of westward expansion against the Indians, of conflict with the Mexicans and Spanish, of the two World wars, of the Cold War, and now of the “war” against terrorism. (Here’s a representative sample, this from Senator Albert Beveridge at the beginning of the 20th Century: “Almighty God…has marked the American people as the chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world. This is the divine mission of America…We are the trustees of the world’s progress, guardians of the righteous peace.”) Link it also with the widespread belief amongst American Christians in pre-millennial eschatology and the Rapture, with its vision of Armageddon usually linked somehow with the State of Israel, its vision of faithful believers lifted into the sky while the world is destroyed and cleansed in preparation for the thousand year reign of the saints, and we are in a very scary place. The cresting of this thinking under Ronald Reagan:

“transformed the conservative Republican party, which had hitherto been committed to federalism, capitalism and the international rule of law, into a millenarian party resistant to federal authority, hostile to the traditional American politics of compromise, and profoundly suspicious of international law and peacekeeping. The Christian right also reached out to the conservative Likud bloc in Israeli politics, encouraging it to resist any efforts at compromise with Palestinians.”
[Jewett & Lawrence]

As a reality check I invite you to measure all this against two things: the rhetoric, and many of the actions, of George W. Bush (after these words were written); and the scenarios played out in countless American films, television dramas, comics, the lot. We can be thankful that there is another side to the United States and to Americans, drawing on the prophetic realism of the Scriptures and on the rational values of the Enlightenment present in the United States Constitution. Make no mistake, good theology and bad theology have consequences in the wider world.

And where does Islam fit in? Well, schizophrenia rules: Western diplomacy says “we are not making war on Islam”; conditioned cultural reflexes say “Islam is the enemy”; and more and more Muslims are saying “the West is treating us like the enemy”. >>

What you are calling the shadow side of individuals I see as original sin. What you are calling the shadow side of religions and nations is another matter. Nations are simply geographical/political areas. They cannot have shadow sides, it is impossible. The rulers of the people in these geo-political areas certainly have shadow sides. The shadow side of Nazi Germany was the free reign of the sinful nature of it's rulers at that time, and the people who supported them. There were many Germans who didn't support them, many who did nothing out of fear or because it wasn't them personally being persecuted. Blanket blame over the entire nation of Germany is unjust.
A religious doctrine can have a shadow side. I don't know a lot of Muslim doctrine so I can't speak for that. Christianity as in living as Christ taught does not have a shadow side. The individuals who are Christians certainly do have shadow sides (sinful natures), but these are flaws of the Christians, not Christianity. The two are separate things.
My observation has been that the term fundamentalist is generally used to describe those Christians who place the rule of God over the rule of man. They do not accept that other men have the right or are fit to rule them. This is extremely threatening to those who believe men should rule each other, that people can be made good or should be controlled by the "right" people....state worshippers. That said, I do realize that a lot of professed Christians are really state worshippers, wanting to enforce their way of life and beliefs through the state rather than trust God to gather His flock. This drives would be Christians who realize this is wrong away from Christ, ironically. Why is it easier to believe that entire nations are collectives with a collective "shadowside" than to believe that man has a sinful nature?

"My observation has been that the term fundamentalist is generally used to describe those Christians who place the rule of God over the rule of man."



H. L. Mencken's definition: a terrible, pervasive fear that someone, somewhere, is having fun.

LOL. Yeah, Mencken wasn't a Christian, had no respect for the "booboisie" in general and religious "booboisie" in particular. But I really don't see the term "fundamentalist" used except in cases where a doctrine is espoused that threatens state sovereignty over men and asserts God's. This includes those misguided types who push for government to enforce their notions of what God wants, which may be right or wrong. For example, churches that lean leftward and "call" for government to bring "social justice" (economic redistribution and gatekeeping) are never called "fundamentalist". The Catholic Church is not considered "fundamentalist", it is no longer perceived as a threat to the state and many of the Church's priests are socialists, pretty much state worshippers and without faith in God. Ironically, I kind of think it's an appropriate term, What can be more fundamental than deciding what/whose laws to follow and realizing God's law is the base of all peace and justice?