Autism is defined through a triad of impairments: a difficulty with language, with social understanding and with generalisation/flexibility. Could autism be a metaphor for fundamentalism, could fundamentalism be seen as a kind of religious autism? Fundamentalism takes scripture literally; it struggles to deal with genre, nuance, with internal tensions and contradictions that all texts (and collections of text (and traditions)) have. It cannot properly handle language. Fundamentalism seeks ‘purity’: it wants ideological and praxiological uniformity and anyone disrupting that must be ejected from the group. Isn’t this both a failure to understand how groups work (that difference of opinion will and should exist) and an inflexibility in dealing with disagreement? Fundamentalism often eschews dialogue, which seems to be part of the same failure, as if talking was compromising but the sheer ideological rigidity of fundamentalism makes this dangerous to it. To push this further, fundamentalism is a kind of religious developmental disorder. There is no cure for autism but autistic people can learn strategies to help them cope with the world. I think fundamentalism requires some kind of coping strategies to deal with cognitive dissonance between what fundamentalists think and the flaws they perhaps perceive in their own views (creationist science springs to mind). An important difference is that people don’t stop being autistic but they do stop being fundamentalist.
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