Top 10 Signs You’re a Fundamentalist Christian — with Commentary!

This image, “Top 10 Signs You’re a Fundamentalist Christian,” has been circulated around quite a bit, and a friend of mine recently shared it with me on Facebook. I haven’t blogged lately, and i wanted to write something, so i’m throwing that list at you, along with a bit of commentary for each entry. Enjoy!

1. You vigorously deny the existence of thousands of gods claimed by other religions, but feel outraged when someone denies the existence of yours. Ironically, you most often don’t even refer to your god by name, given that there is no real consensus over what his name should be. So you call him “God,” akin to naming your pets something like “Dog” or “Cat.”

2. You feel insulted and “dehumanized” when scientists say that people evolved from other life forms, but you have no problem with the biblical claim that we were created from dirt. I know it’s more about the fact that evolutionary thought completely does away with the myths of “creation in God’s image” and “breath of God leads to man becoming a living soul.” I find it more insulting & dehumanizing to hear that i somehow share image or soul-essence (however you want to word it) with such a god.

3. You laugh at polytheists, but you have no problem believing in a triune God. “Not three gods, but three personalities,” i hear you object. Fair enough, but that’s only really relevant in the theology text books. In practice, there are three distinct persons in Christianity, with three very different roles. (In some sects of Christianity, we could even lump Mary into that group, if not angels & saints as well.) More to the point, though, the Bible speaks of gods (plural), endows angels with godlike dominions (such as the “angel of the bottomless pit” mentioned in Revelation, an angel analogous, perhaps, to Hades or Anubis. The point is, Christianity isn’t all that dissimilar from polytheism; it’s a distinction primarily of semantics & vocabulary.

4. Your face turns purple when you hear of the “atrocities” attributed to Allah, but you don’t even flinch when hearing about how God/Jehovah slaughtered all the babies of Egypt in Exodus and ordered the elimination of entire ethnic groups in Joshua including women, children, and trees! When God is set up in the psyche of man as the rule of law, the judge of righteousness, etc., then it follows that everything God does is right & good, never mind that we find the same actions repugnant when attributed to other gods. Yet in the religions which ascribe to those deities, those deities are the rules of law, making their actions no better or worse in the context of their religions than God’s actions are within the context of Christianity. Morality should not be derived from belief in any god; morality should be derived from our humanity, our rationality… from the simple & easily arrived at conclusion that “do unto others” or “do no harm” ought to be the core of our morality. Yes, the Bible contains that lesson (amid numerous violations of it, committed or endorsed most often not by Satan but by God), but it is by no means the only (or even the first) to contain it.

5. You laugh at Hindu beliefs that deify humans and Greek claims about gods sleeping with women, but you have no problem believing that the Holy Spirit impregnated Mary, who then gave birth to a man-god who got killed, came back to life, and then ascended into the sky. It’s pretty simple: All non-Christian claims to miraculous events are simply nonsense; all Christian (or perhaps more strictly, all biblical) claims to miraculous events are to be accepted with no further evidence than “because someone/the Bible says so.” Incidentally, the amount of evidence available for the non-Christian miracles and the amount of evidence available for the Christian miracles are pretty much identical.

6. You are willing to spend your life looking for little loopholes in the scientifically established age of Earth (~4.5 billion years), but you find nothing wrong with believing dates recorded by Bronze Age tribesmen sitting in their tents and guessing that Earth is a few generations old. Judeo-Christianity has quite the problem here. On the one hand, it is believed that the Bible’s record, which includes genealogical records going back to the purported first humans, is absolutely accurate due to having been inspired* by God. On the other hand, Judeo-Christianity also places at least some credence on so-called natural revelation, or the ability to look at nature and somehow arrive at the Judeo-Christian God’s existence & majesty. So then what are we to do when the natural record is found to, very obviously, reveal a very old Earth, one which vastly predates the biblical record? The rational thing to do is to admit that the Bible is obviously mistaken, discard it as myth as countless other myths have been discarded throughout history, and to move on with our lives, in awe & wonder at the beauty of nature.

7. You believe that the entire population of this planet with the exception of those who share your beliefs — though excluding those in all rival sects – will spend eternity in an infinite Hell of suffering. And yet consider your religion the most “tolerant” and “loving.” Curiously, when one looks at the Bible carefully, there are only one or two ways to get thrown into Hell. From a Calvinist’s perspective, Jesus didn’t die for your sins unless you are one of the elect; those who are not fortunate enough to be among the elect are damned to Hell, ultimately not for their sin, but because God created them in order to showcase his wrath. From an Arminian’s perspective, Jesus did die for your sins, but you’re thrown into Hell because you did not choose to believe in him; in other words, you burn in Hell for an eternity for nothing more than unbelief. In both cases, God is described as love. It is fortunate for God that he gets to define love for his believers, and that he includes himself in that definition; no rational person would find true love in the actions of the biblical god, with perhaps rare actions (exceptions to the rule).

8. While modern science, history, geology, biology, and physics have failed to convince you otherwise, some idiot rolling around on the floor speaking in “tongues” may be all the evidence you need to “prove” Christianity. Certainly this doesn’t describe mainstream Christians, but it does touch on an important point, which for a much larger percentage of Christian looks like this: feeling “God in your heart” or having an “emotional experience” or “hearing God” or any number of other such “evidences” are put forward as reasons to believe. Visiting fundamentalist churches during “camp meeting” time provides ample opportunity to see the emotional manipulation in action, if you’re interested in seeing it for yourself. But ultimately, appealing to the human heart, feeling, emotion, or attitude as “evidence” creates another nice paradox of Christianity; the Bible declares the human heart to be deceitful above all things. Scientific evidence, we are thankful, is subject to rigorous peer review and is thus open to examination as to whether it passes muster.

9. You define 0.01% as a “high success rate” when it comes to answered prayers. You consider that to be evidence that prayer works. And you think that the remaining 99.99% FAILURE was simply the will of God. Jesus spoke quite a bit on prayer; among other things, he stated that if you ask in his name, you shall receive it. Elsewhere, he referred to repeated supplication not going unanswered. He even said that all it takes is a tiny amount of faith, and you would be able to command trees. This all sounds good, theologically. But in practice? I can only conclude that the vast majority of Christians lack faith, simply by the success rate of their prayers. There is a theological defense that states that God has three answers to prayer: Yes, no, and later; these three answers, it is claimed, are enough to explain the results of every prayer ever uttered, and God is much more fond of the “no” answer simply because his will is so far beyond ours. If you were paying attention, you’ll no doubt have noted that the theological answer doesn’t match up with what Jesus said at all. Curious, isn’t it?

10. You actually know a lot less than many atheists and agnostics do about the Bible, Christianity, and church history – but still call yourself a Christian. The Bible, by and large, is ridiculously easy to understand. However, it seems theologians don’t want folks believing exactly what the Bible says; rather, they devise complex frameworks for interpreting the Bible. It is these frameworks which become unnecessarily complex. Additionally, it is accepted that the Bible cannot be understood except by means of the Holy Spirit’s illumination, allowing the simple straightforwardness of the Bible to be shrouded in theological complexity. It is a source of much irony that a book written by & for the uneducated of an ancient, superstitious nation is claimed by men in our enlightened era to be a source of unending knowledge, that to understand it takes a lifetime of study, and that major seminaries & universities devote countless years of study and teaching toward expounding it.