How do you identify a hardcore fundamentalist from an everyday believer?
The few Fundies i have known personally (it's a hard slog to be around them) have been INCREDIBLY naive, believing pretty much anything anytime. Maybe that's why they were incredibly poor as well....send all your money to some loud- mouth on the tv to insure you get to heaven.
And when you mention that the money goes for earthly mansions, etc, such anger!
Believing on the level they did had obviously stunted their thinking processes
... and the irony is, at least for the protestant kind, the whole reason protestantism exists is that Martin Luther and his cohorts were disgusted by the popes' insistence on donations from believers in order to be granted admission to heaven. The hypocrisy of it al!!
Fundies are angry that their sense of justice hasn't been exacted on sinners. They love the idea that AIDS was God's punishment on gays. That earthquakes are God's judgement on a nation. But God hasn't punished mankind's sin enough, so they take it into their own hands by flying planes into buildings, bombing abortion clinics, etc. What makes a fundie's mind tick? Pure ego.
welllll ... lets see. The Fundies tend to "know" exactly what God is thinking, and God is usually thinking you have to be part of their group or you are headed for the brimstone and sulphur regions. Everyday believers, as I know them, tend to take comfort in the idea that despite all the appearances ( from useless parasitic ticks to the Holocaust) there is a loving creator/ ess that although quite impossible to understand, can feel like a safety net for your whole life, and afterlife, even if shit does happen, which it usually does. The best believers take quite seriously that Jesus said: don't judge ( like what others do) . They also like to take seriously the "what you have done to the least of your fellow humans you have done unto me." We are indeed one family. Good God, I'm starting to preach! Sorry Guys, ooops!