Armstrong's central case rests on the confusion between mythos and logos, using these in the technical sense suggested by Johannes Slok.[2]
Myth concerns "what was thought to be timeless and constant in our
existence...Myth was not concerned with practical matters but with
meaning".[3]
By contrast "Logos was the rational, pragmatic and scientific thought
that enabled men and women to function well in the world". In religion,
logos appears in legal systems and practical action. By the eighteenth
century, "people in Europe and America began to think that logos was the only means to truth and began to discount mythos
as false and superstitious." Armstrong suggests that fundamentalists
have turned their mythos into logos using the mindset of the modern
scientific age.[4]
The first part of the book, "The Old World and the New", compares the
progression of the three monotheistic faiths between 1492, when Columbus discovered America,
and 1870, when "The Franco-Prussian War had revealed the hideous
effects of modern weaponry, and there was a dawning realisation that
science might also have a malignant dimension."[5] It traces the way Jews and Muslims modernized during this period.
This leads to the modern period described in part two, “Fundamentalism”, when there was a growing adoption of a literalist interpretation of scripture in the United States, which eventually gave rise to The Fundamentals, a series of 12 volumes refuting modern ideas published shortly before and during the World War I,
of which 3 million copies were distributed to every pastor, professor
and theological student across America by the largesse of oil
millionaires. Though this led to a distinctive ideology, it was not till
the 1980s that it emerged as a political force.
In Judaism, the growth of Zionism was given its biggest boost by the Holocaust which led to the establishment of the State of Israel
in 1948. Although many traditional Jews migrated there, the most
conservative rejected the secular interpretation of Zionism and it
wasn't until the emergence of Gush Emunim after the Yom Kippur War in 1974 that fundamentalism emerged in Israel as a political force.
In Islam, fundamentalism did not emerge until modernization had taken hold, first in Egypt with the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood by Hasan al-Banna. Armstrong traces the development of Sunni fundamentalism under Sayyid Qutb and Shia fundamentalism under Ayatollah Khomeini.
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