Gerald Vann Quotes

I'm opposed to fundamentalism in any form.

Islamic fundamentalism in its activist manifestation is bad news. Religious fundamentalism in general is bad news. We know about religious fundamentalism in South Africa. Calvinist fundamentalism has been an unmitigated force of benightedness in our history.

Over the centuries, and even today, the Bible and Christian theology have helped justify the Crusades, slavery, violence against gays, and the murder of doctors who perform abortions. The words themselves are latent, inert, harmless - until they aren't.

A lot of Christian extremism has done a great deal to discredit religion; the main religious traditions have abandoned their own intellectual cultures so drastically that no one has any sense of it other than the fringe.

I cannot comprehend fundamentalism. It's fundamentally wrong.

The most rabidly religious people are the most rabidly evil.

I regard Christian and Jewish fundamentalism, and all other forms of fundamentalism, as the enemies of God - and I hope you'll quote me on that.

Time and again we see leaders and members of religions incite aggression, fanaticism, hate, and xenophobia - even inspire and legitimate violent and bloody conflicts.

I always distrust people who know so much about what God wants them to do to their fellows.

If religious people deny paradise to their opponents or to 'non-believers,' atheists would likewise seek to eliminate 'dangerous' believers with their 'childish' ways and their heads in the clouds.

I'm not altogether certain that a fundamentalism of necessity has to argue that it is the only reading of the human experience in order to stay alive.

In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all.

Cruel persecutions and intolerance are not accidents, but grow out of the very essence of religion, namely, its absolute claims.

Obstinacy in religious understanding leads to backwardness as in Muslims’, prevalence of violence and intolerance.

She died of galloping Christianity of the malignant California type.

Those Islamists and their apologists who argue for 'religious toleration' are arrogantly dishonest.

Religious extremism. We hear about it all the time. We see it all the time. Heck, most of us are just sick of talking about it all the time.

Fundamentalists are crazy. They're the real world equivalent to the evil geniuses of our spy fiction and our superhero comics. They want to mold the world into a specific shape that they really believe in, and if you don't believe in that, if you can't relate to that, it just seems crazy.

We believed it was a Good vs Evil situation: that the WBC was right and everybody else was wrong, so there was no questioning. It was a very public war we were waging against the 'sinners.'

The Fundamentalist Christians have told me that I am a slave of Satan and should have my demons expelled with an exorcism. The Fundamentalist Materialists inform me that I am a liar, charlatan, fraud and scoundrel. Aside from this minor difference, the letters are astoundingly similar. Both groups share the same crusading zeal and the same lack of humor, charity and common human decency. These intolerable cults have served to confirm me in my agnosticism by presenting further evidence to support my contention that when dogma enters the brain, all intellectual activity ceases.

There is no wild beast so ferocious as Christians who differ concerning their faith.

I think that there are no forces on this planet more dangerous to us all than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism, of all the species: Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, as well as countless smaller infections. Is there a conflict between science and religion here? There most certainly is.

It's absurd that we're so quick to criticize Muslims for being fundamentalist when Christians can be just as extreme and fanatical and frightening.

Often in history we see that religion, which was meant to raise us and make us better and nobler, has made people behave like beasts. Instead of bringing enlightenment of them, it has often tried to keep them in the dark; instead of broadening their minds, it has frequently made them narrow-minded and intolerant of others.

In the eyes of the Associated Press, American Christianity, which springs from the Protestant Reformation, is fundamentalist. And Christian Fundamentalists, radical Muslims, Hindu extremists, and fanatical Zionists are all the same - bloodthirsty lunatics.