Fundamentalism, whether religious or ideological, is a dangerous thing. While we can talk glibly about RPD or building Fortress Canada, living those ideals wouldn't be much fun. The following is a quote about life in Calvinist Geneva from R.H. Tawney's "Religion and the Rise of Capitalism":
It was in that spirit that he made Geneva a city of glass, in which every household lived its life under the supervision of a spiritual police, and that for a generation Consistory and Council worked hand in hand, the former excommunicating drunkards, dancers, and contemners of religion, the latter punishing the dissolute with fines and imprisonment and the heretic with death. ‘Having considered’, ran the preamble to the ordinances of 1576, which mark the maturity of the Genevese Church, ‘that it is a thing worthy of commendation above all others, that the doctrine of the Holy Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ shall be preserved in its purity, and the Christian Church duly maintained by good government and policy, and also that youth in the future be well and faithfully instructed, and the Hospital well ordered for the support of the poor: Which things can only be if there be established a certain rule and order of living, by which each man may be able to understand the duties of his position. ...’ The object of it all was so simple. `Each man to understand the duties of his position' - what could be more desirable, at Geneva or elsewhere? It is sad to reflect that the attainment of so laudable an end involved the systematic use of torture, the beheading of a child for striking its parents, and the burning of a hundred and fifty heretics in sixty years." While the foregoing deals with religion, secular ideology can be just as bad if not far worse. Hitler killed five million Jews and Stalin may have killed as many as sixty million people of the USSR. In spreading 'freedom and democracy', George Bush is building up quite a record in Iraq. Ed
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