Fideism is the offensive offspring of ignorance and arrogance, which is identified with religion. By themselves, ignorance and arrogance are seriously tyrannical, but together their malice is compounded. When cultures fixate belief in time-stopped intelligence, it creates “fideism.” Fideism builds its own discipline of absolutism to justify fixation; it imposes social controls that presume divine blessing. The imposition of institutionally insisted religion is unbearable, even as Jesus found in his time.
The corrective of cultural/ religious ignorance and arrogance is evolving consciousness based on real-life experience and open communication that advance insights into errors of fixation and opportunities of change. Fixation of faith and intelligence in time-locked understandings can and does become tyrannical and culturally degrading, a condition prevailing in and underlying the crises of the day.
Fideism is idolatry for it fixates closed thinking that presumes to be absolute, and is used to identify and compromise divinity—an intrusion that puts self-arrogation on a par with God. Theism and atheism are equal opportunity idolatries, for both have self-determined fixations that are closed to common sense and experience.
The Second Vatican Council addressed the defect of cultural religions; its enduring gift is the illumination of a process that engages cultures to shift from fixation to process by letting faith and reason speak to the consciousness of evolving experience, that is, in admission of the reality that nothing in human experience is time-stopped, including faith and reason. The process is evolution. (Const. IV, Vatican II, “Gaudium et spes”, Intro. 4)
The mutuality of faith and reason is the universal corrective to fixated belief/ intelligence. Tragically, old-guard religions do not admit to the deception in fideism, its ignorance and arrogance; nor do they accept the necessary evolution of faith.
Biblical history documents justification of wars and violence in divine electionism. People dare to put words in God’s mouth and invoke self-justification for their violence in God’s name. Wars are about access and control of people, public resources and nature. Wars work to the ultimate destruction of nature and people. As to the wasting of people and nature in our time nothing is of greater importance than shifting cultures from justifying wars to waging peace that heals relationships and restores nature.
The universal crises of today (ecological spoliation) also root in the idolatry of cultural self-electionism and presumption on God; this cultural insolence can and must change. Process-faith/ reason brings new insights to cultural experience and makes change possible away from violence to reconciliation and restoration — what is “intentional symbiosis”, nature’s pattern, God’s plan.
http://ncronline.org/news/vatican/vatican-welcomes-anglicans-react-story-no-2
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