I Don't Know About That...

This web poll says I am a fundamentalist and that I believe that science has brought on corruption of society. Oddly enough, I answered favorably to virtually every question about science, save for the one that evolution has helped us become more spiritual (as a whole, I think regardless of one's position concerning evolutionary theory, it is hard to assert that it has made the world more spiritual). I took the quiz twice, actually; the first time it said I was a “cultural creative” (which it reported as being “spiritual, but not religious”). I went back through because I realized I'd marked a few wrong, and also tried to read their questions a bit more closely.

As a whole, I think the poll is flawed. While I've been accused of being a fundamentalist, I generally do not fit well in true fundamentalist circles. I've come to the conclusion I am not a fundamentalist at all. I'm certainly not a post-modernist though, I'm more of about anything than a po-mo. I tend to see post-modernism as the enemy of rational thought — scientific, religious and philosophical. I do probably fit somewhat into the Romanticists, though.

I think the big problem here is that the quiz had questions such as whether religious texts should be taken symbolically, wherein the meaning is somewhat ambiguous. Sure, they are filled with symbols and even literal parts can have a secondary interpretation that is symbolic. On the other hand, I suspected what the author meant was “scriptures should be read only as mythological truths,” to which I had to answer in disagreement. In truth, then, despite this poll's support for varying levels of agreeing and disagreeing on statements, it really is rather polar. When I answered that statement as being somewhat true, I was a cultural creative; when I answered it as false, I was a fundamentalist. There is no middle ground in the poll, which is too bad, because it could have been interesting.

I'm not a polar person. I agree with fundamentalists on many things, but I reject the anti-intellectualism that I am seeing in the fundamentalist movement presently. For that matter, not only anti-intellectual, but just generally anti-all-kinds-of-things attitude, from Harry Potter to the Da Vinci Code. I find myself attracted most closely to the neo-Orthodox theologians such as C.S. Lewis, and more recently, Karl Barth (from what I've read of him thus far). I neither reject rationality nor revelation, but believe that both will ultimately be true. Seek truth knowing that there can be no conflict between God and truth.