Fundamentalism is a Sign of the Death of Meaning

In the West, regardless of the religion, fundamentalists respond to the increasing marginality of their world view through a frenetic, self-absorbed reaffirmation of the very beliefs that have been marginalized. Whether that religion is Islam, Christianity or Judaism (and the fact that they all share this characteristic is due to the geography and culture that spawned them) fundamentalists take offense at modernity because modernity is the realm of an expanding knowledge of the universe and our place in it that isn't dependent on really old books that have been mistranslated over the centuries into who knows how many languages. This expansion of knowledge isn't just in the physical sciences with the fundamentalist backlashes against Galileo and Darwin, but also in the primary way in which human beings of the modern age view understand themselves.

Fundamentalists believe that the Truth was defined once and for all back in some time long ago and that meaning in this life consists of believing that Once and for All Truth. It just so happens that they also believe that they are the current holders and disseminators of that very Truth. How convenient. This belief at its core is false. It's false because it doesn't know what Truth is.

This ignorance of Truth is not of the character of not knowing, for example, that "Jesus is the Christ," or that "There is no god but Allah and Mohammad is His Prophet." This core ignorance is ignorance of the essence of Truth: it is ignorance