Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A usually religious movement or point of view characterized by a return to fundamental principles, by rigid adherence to those principles, and often by intolerance of other views and opposition to secularism.
- noun An organized, militant Evangelical movement originating in the United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s in opposition to Protestant Liberalism and secularism, insisting on the inerrancy of Scripture.
- noun Adherence to the theology of this movement.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun A system of beliefs based on the interpretation of every word in the Bible, both old and new testaments, as literal truth. It is primarily held by a branch of American Protestants.
- noun The beliefs or practises based on a rigid adherence to some traditional doctrine; extreme conservatism.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun religion The tendency to reduce a religion to its most fundamental tenets, based on strict interpretation of core texts.
- noun finance The belief that fundamental financial quantities are the best predictor of the price of an instrument.
- noun The beliefs held by those in this movement.
- noun Strict adherence to any set of basic ideas or principles.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun the interpretation of every word in the sacred texts as literal truth
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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President Meles raised it as another threat to the security of the region; what he described as fundamentalism seeking to destabilize the region.
Press Briefing By National Security Advisor Sandy Berger ITY National Archives 1998
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Each "fundamentalism" is a law unto itself and has its own dynamic.
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Others in turn, such as Christian theologian Alister McGrath, have used the term fundamentalism to characterize atheism as dogmatic. "
blurbomat.com 2009
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We see how religious fundamentalism is working in Iran.
DeMint says Tea Party activists leading spiritual revival 2010
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Now that you put it that way, I guess we can be thankful that brother Doran has saved fundamentalism from a painful episode of humility and soul searching.
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Islamic fundamentalism is to blame; the plotters are to blame.
7/7 Bombs – Police To Blame SHOCK! « POLICE INSPECTOR BLOG Inspector Gadget 2010
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Religious fundamentalism is marked by a fanatical concern with a universally valid and context-free "truth" along the lines of the Hellenistic tradition.
David Shasha: Monolingualism, Scriptural Translation and the Problem of Western Civilization David Shasha 2010
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“I think the fact that your anti-torture fundamentalism is so unpopular with the American public is precisely because Americans are keenly aware of the possibilities of ticking time bombs and city-destroying nuclear weapons that you prefer to ignore or dismiss.”
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And if there had recently been a bunch of crimes committed against religious fundamentalists by atheists, would that justify banning books by people like Dawkins and Hitchens (who do argue that religious fundamentalism is a significant cause of problems in modern society)?
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One could argue that Islamic fundamentalism is not nearly the global threat that communism posed at that time.
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