Fundamentalism Defined
The term fundamentalist has come to be a pejorative term. However, it need not be. Fundamentalism is a synonym for orthodoxy. A religious fundamentalist is one who is faithful to the tenets of his religion.
It is common today to profess or practice a religion in ways that are not orthodox. There are, for example, nominal Christians, nominal Muslims, or nominal Jews, etc. They take on the label of the religion, but not the beliefs or practices. They may even attend worship services, but in their own mind reject many of the core beliefs.
To get an understanding of Christianity and Islam, we consider irrelevant what Sally and Omar may improvise about their respective religions. Anybody can make up their own religion, for example, by taking from the Bible whatever they want and tearing out the pages they don't want. But this is disingenuous, hypocritical, eternally dangerous— and is probably heretical to whichever religion one claims allegiance. On what basis does one claim to know more about the religion than the founders of the religion themselves?
We are interested in exploring here what the source documents say concerning these two major world religions, Christianity and Islam. That is, we will explore and compare the Bible and the Quran (plus the written traditions of Islam).
As we compare orthodox (that is fundamental) Christianity and orthodox (fundamental) Islam, we hope to speak to a variety of audiences, including:
- Those people who sincerely want to learn more about these two religions. Most Christians know very little about Islam (the Muslim religion). Likewise, most Muslims have mistaken ideas about Christianity. Indeed, many people of both faiths do not even know enough about their own religion to validate its truth claims.
- We also are addressing those people who are under the false belief that all religions are equally valid, or that all religions lead to God. We will clearly show that Christianity and Islam are irreconcilable.
