Après church

I found myself listening to a bit of an ambush interview on a seemingly pretty fundamentalist web site that posted on youtube.  I haven’t read that much by Doug Pagitt but what I have seemed pretty sound to me.  The interviewer just won’t let him explain his perspectives and it saddened me that there was no desire for dialogue.  You can read the comment thread I started at the bottom of the post (its the last comment, number 83 or so - so scroll to the end).  I don’t think there is much to be gained by the very polarised positions people on the site tend to retreat to and I try my best to engender discussion rather than point scoring.  However now that I’m told that even Tom Wright is of the devil, I’m seeing that there is no point to this discussion. 

What annoys me is that they just label one teacher as ’sound’ and another as ‘heretical’ - after that they drink in everything one says as if it is pure truth and refuse to listen to anything the other guy says as if it would infect them.  Now I’m sure Tom Wright wouldn’t claim to be correct about everything and would welcome debate but these people seem to lose the ability to deconstruct an argument.  They can’t accept that even if they disagree with some of what Tom says, he’s still a leading theologian and probably has some good stuff to say.  It’s as if they are trained not to think for themselves but just defend the party line to the death. This is where fundamentalism feels like a cult to me.