Korean Job Discussion Forums

[laogaiguk]

What's up with all the fundamentalism? I know it's been around forever and will continue, but I never got it.
I am talking about any and all fundamentalists, including but not limited to...

religion (including athiesm)
nationalism
vegetarianism (and it's meat eating counterpart, I don't know the word)
sexism (or anything to do with differences in the sexes)
.
.
.
dog/cat lovers

I have not met a fundamentalist I have ever liked (in anything). Do you think humans will ever grow past it or grow more into it (or neither)?

[Rteacher]

This isn't gonna be a very popular topic, but I'll copy a short quote from Wikipedia's entry - which seems to indicate that it is often a response to perceived corruption of ideals:

The fundamentalist phenomenon

Although the term fundamentalism in popular usage sometimes refers derogatorily to any fringe religious group, or to extremist ethnic movements with only nominally religious motivations, the term does have a more precise denotation. "Fundamentalist" describes a movement to return to what is considered the defining or founding principles of the religion. It has especially come to refer to any religious enclave that intentionally resists identification with the larger religious group in which it originally arose, on the basis that fundamental principles upon which the larger religious group is supposedly founded have become corrupt or displaced by alternative principles hostile to its identity.

This formation of a separate identity is deemed necessary on account of a perception that the religious community has surrendered its ability to define itself in religious terms. The "fundamentals" of the religion have been jettisoned by neglect, lost through compromise and inattention, so that the general religious community's explanation of itself appears to the separatist to be in terms that are completely alien and fundamentally hostile to the religion itself. Fundamentalist movements are therefore founded upon the same religious principles as the larger group, but the fundamentalists more self-consciously attempt to build an entire approach to the modern world based on strict fidelity to those principles, to preserve a distinctness both of doctrine and of life...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalism