RELG 307 Chapter : Schimmel chapter 7 summary

• School: McGill University
• Department: Religious Studies
• Course: RELG 307

Document Summary

The tenacity of unreasonable beliefs: fundamentalism and the fear of truth. Chapter 7 talks about positive and negative aspects of scriptural fundamentalism and raises a lot of important and thought-provoking questions. Schimmel talks about factors that are relevant to the ethics of challenging fundamentalism which is very interesting. One purpose of schimmel writing this book is to encourage fundamentalists to question their fundamentalist beliefs. He asserts that while there are certain positive consequences, scriptural fundamentalists often cause harm: it does provide comfort to a lot of people, provides moral principles. In that case, it would be unethical to not to try to undermine them: schimmel writes that things like women"s rights, racial prejudice, and homophobia, among others, are negative. It"s difficult to measure how good the positive consequences are and how bad the negative consequences are. [are] given priority over the rights and interests of the non-believer .