Psybermagick: Advanced Ideas in Chaos Magic - Peter J. Carroll 2000

Heresy XIII Fundamentalism

Do you feel:

Confused by post-modern life?

Unable to handle too much choice?

Fazed by information overload?

Uncertain about so many grey areas?

In need of some black & white certainties?

That you need some simple slogans to live by?

Intensely jealous of those who can handle modern life?

That you need something to hate?

Unhappy at flexible relative values?

That the past offers more promise than the future?

That the answer to your problems lies outside yourself?

Then much that now pours from the fundament of the major religions may interest you, schmuck.

Commentary 32

Just when we thought the antibiotic of rational enlightenment had finished off the worst of the theological viruses, along came virulent new strains to pollute and disease half the globe.

Ah well! Back to the lab.

We cannot allow the exhaustion of modernism to occasion a regression to pre-Enlightenment mediaeval world views.

Esoteric thought frequently acts as a precursor of entire cultural paradigms. Thus we must oppose the mediaevalism inherent in both fundamentalism and much of the New Age philosophy with a vibrant post-modernist Chaoism.

The situation with respect to fundamentalism seems to have worsened considerably since we wrote that, particularly in the third major monotheism. If the world slides further into ecological and economic problems we may expect worse to come.

Fundamentalism thrives on a vicious circle, as it worsens living conditions it drives more people more deeply into its own arms.