Letter to the Editor: Fundamentalist Christians negatively influence campus

With the new academic year, the fundamentalist Christians return to campus as faithfully as swallows to Capistrano. They peddle an intolerant brand of religion fully comparable to those most Americans find abhorrent in distant lands. They are content to ignore the intellectual achievements of our civilization over the past 500, 1000, 5000 years. They are proud of their ignorance of geology, cosmology, physics, chemistry, biology, our Constitution and the history of humanity recorded in rock and word. I suspect even I know more about the Bible than their collective knowledge of all this other stuff. It would be amusing except …

Fundamentalists have acquired influence on our political institutions far beyond what is just and healthy for a reasonably tolerant democratic country. (We certainly have had our bouts of intolerance, some quite horrid, and continue to exhibit this predilection. But by world standards, we seem to be doing  pretty well. The fact that I can write this letter testifies to our above-average tolerance. Without this tradition, my immediate ancestors would never have made it out of Eastern Europe.) Witness, for example, the excessive influence that fundamentalists have had on the decision about whether embryos destined for destruction can be used as sources of stem cells. Stem cell technology offers great promise for alleviating some forms of human suffering.    

Excessive influence by the intolerant reflects both apathy and naiveté on the part of the rest of us. We risk the establishment of a theocracy based on a narrow-minded interpretation of one set of texts sacred to some people, in fact just a minority of humans on earth. De facto theocracy would have disastrous consequences on education, health care, social welfare, conservation, etc. The list goes on and on. De facto theocracy already exists in some places in our country and already has had such consequences. Fundamentalists  in Texas have had excessive influence on high school science texts and forced the inclusion of science fiction where it does not belong.   

Fundamentalism has contorted a religion based on love into something far darker. A university is supposed to be Pirsig's "church of reason," not the "domain of demagoguery." They certainly have the right to be out there peddling their tracts - our Constitution guarantees that. But we all need to be alert to the appeal to irrationality and intolerance fundamental to their pursuit. Especially because intolerance, irrationality and anti-intellectualism seem to be sweeping the country. After all, we as a species have achieved some greater sophistication since our ancestors were pastoralists wandering in the desert 8000 years ago.

Peter Goldman

Professor Emeritus of Biology