Extreme Fundamentalism, What?

These Ultra-Christian t-shirt designs scare the hell out of me. How can these people claim to be so different from, say, the ex-Taliban? The similarities can be striking, and yet one side is consistently cast as evil: a religion of death, of discrimination, of abuse. Still, there are a huge numbers of Fundamentalists in the United States, with views just as extreme and right-wing. They even breed the occasional terrorist like Eric Rudolph, who expresses his religion with bombs. Sounds familiar. Yet, without a proper amount of education and perspective, this understanding is utterly lost on those trying to comprehend the state of the country and of the major religions of the world. Read a proper survey of world religions some time (check out The Religions of Man, by Huston Smith), and you'll discover something of the highest importance: we're not all so different as you might think.