Liverpool Tales from the Mersey Mouth - A book by John Williams

• Liverpool's alien nation A short history of discrimination
• Guernica Liverpool Manhattan Time for me to get off the fence
• There ain't half been some clever bastards The mendacious cretins who instigated the Shoah
• The scent of a conman Raising a stink in Liverpool
• Show 'em the door The Phillistines are back in Liverpool
• The fourth Grace A new addition to the Liverpool family
• Those base football players How football taught us to clock in on time
• Liverpool Maze Rainy days and Mondays
• Staying alive Travelling light
• A fundamental error Not all Muslims are terrorists
• Upstarts The smaller they are the harder we fall
• Flake An open letter to Fred 'Fruit-cake' Leuchter
• Black is not the only shade Musings on the language of racialism
• Liverpool's Big Macs what Scousers might have been called
• The world's oldest crime A male point of view of women's violation
• Be a sport Fashion for laid back athletes
• Nobody is indispensible The diminished role of men
• Trees When blossom appears to wither on the branch
• What's cooking? The debt that civilisation owes women
• Know thy self Clipping time's wings
• Once there was a way Aberfan and corporate terrorism
• Me granddad's on a preservation order Liverpool world heritage site
• You say potato I say spud
• Doctor Yes Good doctors are the norm
• Top of the world Ma A man of peace
• Like a bird on a wire I have tried in my way to be free
• The writing's on the wall Little known Liverpool sayings
• Fortress Anfield or Maginot Line? Au Revoir Gerard Houllier
• The leaving of Liverpool Adieu Steven Gerrard?
• Working on the chain gang The age of innocence
• In my life Turn and face the strangers
• Suicide is painless it brings on many changes
• Breaking down the walls of heartache The cementing of hatred
• Danse macabre

In these days of rage and anguish when the smoke from the massacre in Manhattan is still curling skywards I think it is more important than ever before that we make a clear distinction between fundamentalists and ordinary believers.

What is a fundamentalist? As I understand it, a fundamentalist is someone who believes that their religion has become so weighed down with doctrinal arguments between competing factions that the identity and ideals of the original founder has been obscured, if not completely lost.

The Catholic Church had its fundamentalists in Torquemada and Martin Luther. The former was responsible for the death of countless non-believers, while the latter unleashed a schism in Christianity that has never healed. Some Buddhists adopted Zen in an attempt to 'get back to basics' and strip away the encrusted layers of dogma and so reveal Buddha the man as opposed to the Buddha of a million texts. Superficially this appears laudable, but can in fact be incredibly destructive.

It appears to me that fundamentalism is comparable to the flaying of an old man's skin in an attempt to rejuvenate him. While it's true that the man no longer looks old, it's also true that he no longer looks human.

When fundamentalists decide to purge religion of its human contribution they are not only destroying the compact between man and his God but they necessarily unleash forces of destruction. The fact is all religious founders are in some way zealots, or at least zealous, and so we should not be surprised when fundamentalists trying to re-discover their spiritual leaders turn out to be zealots too.

The problem for the rest of humanity is that the fundamentalists believe that by participating in this process of purification that they too have been purified, and, because to the pure all things are pure, even murder and massacre are seen as the actions of the pure in heart. The idea that they are clean and so can kill the impure with impunity seems to lie at the heart of their actions, even if the 'impure' are babe in arms. They can even kill their own brothers.

This process of 'purification' has its secular counterpart in the political arenas where internecine murder is commonplace as new groups emerge to purge the old order of its doctrinal 'errors'.

So while there are people today who simply see all Muslims as fundamentalists, which is about as logical as labelling all Christians as Catholic, Methodist or Protestant, the rest of us have to make sure that the ordinary devout Muslim is granted the same rights as the ordinary devout Catholic, Protestant or Jew. Of course, this involves a concept alien to all fundamentalists, tolerance.

September 2001

May 18th 2005

This quote of Jesus might be enlightening vis a vis this point,"Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one's foes will be members of one's own household.

Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it."(Matthew 10:34)

The quotes above and those below represent fairly zealous outlooks.