bobbymike said:
I am not even remotely a Christian (I have a number of problems with it), and thus have no particular personal need to defend Christianity. However, to declare Breivik a "Christian fundamentalist" is a logically unjustifiable claim.
On the one hand, I do *not* accept the common arguement that "since he did these evil things, that means he's not a Real Christian." This is a cop-out. The Bible, even the New Testament, is loaded to the gills with God or God's people massacring the innocent. So claims that a modern religious massacre are un-Biblical are not easily supportable.
On the other hand, read Breivik's manifesto. I don't know what the guy actually *was,* but he was not "Christian fundamentalist." He was raised in and believed in the Norwegian state religion, but at this point appears to be either a casual believer in God or perhaps an agnostic. Still, he wants Christianity to dominate Europe (Catholicism, specifically), not because he's a "fundamentalist" believer, but for purely political reasons. He's a "cultural Christian" who wants the trappings of Christianity to become uniform and universal throughout Europe, but he doesn't seem to actually believe in the theology. Only in the power of Catholicism to unite Europe against the threat of Islam.
It's interesting. The majority of mainstream news pieces about Breivik *seem* to include some variation of "Christian fundamentalist" in their description, or claim that he was motivated by his Christianity. But the same mainstream media sources seem to try to avoid pointing out the religious motivations of the Ft. Hood Shooter and other Islamic terrorists.
