Fundamentalism

There are a lot of mistakes, either by ignorance or misinformation, in this article. The idea that India willingly submitted to British rule is just poppycock. The present mosque-temple controversy in Ayodhya is a legacy of British rule. About the middle of last century, the ruler of the local area, who was a Muslim, wanted to turn over the site to the Hindus. But the British would not allow it to keep up their divide-and-rule policy! For the past 40 years, a Ram idol had been installed inside the masjid area and continually worshiped by Hindus.

Columnists and reporters from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch have shared their views with Times readers during the National League Championship Series. Reality-TV America might not have liked it much, but the St. Louis Cardinals sent Mickey Mouse, the Goofy in right field and the whole Disneyland gaggle of characters back to Southern California to begin their off-season grooming. Main Street America is headed back to the World Series. The Cardinals made surprisingly swift work of ace pitcher Clayton Kershaw and the Dodgers in a 9-0 thumping in Game 6, putting an end to the National League Championship Series and the baseball culture war between the two franchises.

Tuncay Gunc, who sells carpets at the Grand Bazaar here, is a thoroughly modern Turk. He is a businessman who looks west, and he is a Muslim. "I pray," Gunc said the other day, "but only on Fridays--if I don't have a customer." Such religious pragmatism, more the rule than the exception in a Muslim nation that is also officially secular, is being challenged in Turkey today by small but growing numbers of Muslim fundamentalists, seemingly aided by Iran. The result is that in major cities throughout the rapidly modernizing country, new bouts are being fought in an old tug-of-war between a Middle Eastern heritage and official aspirations for a European future.

There are two ways to think about how far we've come in protecting against a repeat of the financial meltdown five years ago that plunged the world into recession. You can conclude that we've pretty much eradicated the risk of another such crisis. That's the bankers' viewpoint. Here's how Morgan Stanley Chief Executive James Gorman put it in an interview with Charlie Rose earlier this month: " The probability of it happening again in our lifetime is as close to zero as I could imagine.

There's nothing more cutting edge than fundamentalism. The women swathed in veils in Picadilly Circus, the "facts on the ground" settlers in Jerusalem, the values voters who never give an inch. They wrap themselves in tradition and rage at the godlessness of modernity, but ultimately they are products of the very modernity they hate. Not that long ago it was the secularists who thought they were ahead of the curve, in the vanguard of progress. They wrapped themselves in the illusion that modernity would eradicate religion.

For decades now, liberals have been agonizing because conservatives seem to win even when polls show that the public generally disagrees with them. In their postmortems, liberals have placed blame on the way they frame their message, or on the right-wing media drumbeat that drowns out everything else, or on the right's co-opting of the flag, Mom and apple pie, which is designed to make liberals seem like effete, hostile foreign agents. It's understandable that liberals prefer to think of their subordination as a matter of their own inadequacies or of conservative wiles.

Re "21st Century Tribes," Opinion, Dec. 12: The roles of sociology and psychology in human behavior are invaluable. Whether to explain tribalism, nationalism or fundamentalism, we cannot know enough about what motivates us. But we cannot persist in the belief that only foreign cultures are vulnerable to the propaganda and manipulation of ill-intentioned colloquial influence. The rise in Christian fundamentalism as a tool for political exploitation signals that it is time to talk about American gullibility.

I, too, am a non-Orthodox Jew who identifies strongly with the Jewish people and resents any particular Jewish denomination or other subgroup dictating the criteria for who is a Jew. It is particularly offensive when the dictation comes from one of the smallest grouping of the Jewish people--the religious fundamentalists. We in the Jewish community are well aware of the efforts of this small sect to dictate their terms to all Jews but the larger Southern California community is quite unaware of it. Your objective depiction of the issue is, however, more than a journalist's effort to bring attention to hitherto relatively unknown facets of our civilization.

Your editorial presents with great clarity, brevity and conviction the main evidence for placing the age of the Earth at more than 4 billion years. You must be aware that it will sway none whose mind-set is that of the creationists. Let us hope, though, that some who read it are teetering between absolute religious fundamentalism and common sense. Perhaps they can be brought back to reality. H.W. ANDERSON La Jolla

The plight of writer Taslima Nasrin (June 11) should raise the conscience of all who support the Bill of Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The arrest warrant and other reported demands to kill her are appalling in this day and age. Similar threats and a "death warrant" were issued against author Salman Rushdie. These are symptoms of the rise of religious right groups and obscure fundamentalism all over South Asia from Afghanistan to Bangladesh. India, which proclaims itself to be a "secular" state, has not been able to combat the rise of Hindu fundamentalism and its aspiration to bring fascism in the name of nationalism.

WASHINGTON - The National Security Agency is facing its worst crisis since the domestic spying scandals four decades ago led to the first formal oversight and overhaul of U.S. intelligence operations. Since former NSA systems analyst Edward Snowden's flood of leaks to the media, and the Obama administration's uneven response to them, morale at the spy agency responsible for intercepting communications of terrorists and foreign adversaries has plummeted, former officials say. Even sympathetic lawmakers are calling for new curbs on the NSA's powers.

No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish . - David Hume Last week the Vatican announced that a meeting of cardinals and bishops had ruled that the late Pope John Paul II was responsible for a second miracle, and thus the way was cleared for sainthood. The Congregation for the Causes of Saints decided he had cured a woman from Costa Rica in 2011 after a panel of doctors apparently ruled that her recovery was otherwise inexplicable.

SAN DIEGO -- When the U.S. takes the field Friday for an international friendly with Guatemala, it will mark Landon Donovan's first appearance with the team in nearly 11 months. And Juergen Klinsmann says it's up to the 31-year-old to show he has the form necessary to merit consideration for next summer's World Cup squad, should the U.S. qualify. But Donovan, who lost his spot on the national team when he took a three-month winter break from the sport, says he's not thinking that far ahead.

Is hydraulic fracturing - used for more than 60 years to produce oil and natural gas - safe? The "safe fracking" question has been asked and answered many times over by government regulators, scientists and other technical experts, and they have concluded that hydraulic fracturing is a fundamentally safe technology. Interior secretaries and EPA heads have repeatedly said that fracking can be done, and is being done, so that it doesn't present environmental or public health problems.

Edward Snowden may represent the archetypal leaker of the Internet age - a tech savant who justifies his civil disobedience as a righteous rebuttal to the big institutions he believes have intruded too far into ordinary people's lives. But it's not just the mole in the National Security Agency surveillance story who is operating in new channels. The reporters who brought his account forward also represent something distinct in journalism. In some cases, their profiles loom larger, particularly on the subject of security and spying, than those of their publications.

Before coming to the Dodgers last summer, infielder Nick Punto played for Ron Gardenhire and Tony La Russa , two managers famous for demanding accountability. So he had no problem understanding the larger message in Don Mattingly's recent criticism of the team's play. "I know where the manager's coming from," said Punto, who had three hits and a walk, scoring twice in Saturday's 5-3 win over the St. Louis Cardinals. "We're not playing up to our capabilities. We're not doing the little things.

The Clippers' play on defense has slipped since the All-Star break in mid-February. And that bothers Clippers Coach Vinny Del Negro to no end. "I don't think our defensive intensity is where it needs to be right now," Del Negro said. In their three losses since the All-Star break, the Clippers have given up 116 points to San Antonio, 108 to Oklahoma City and 107 to Denver. "You see some of our defensive numbers dropping a little bit," Del Negro said, "and I don't like that.

RAMADI, Iraq - The call to prayer echoes across the quiet highway in western Iraq and a few hundred men gather along the roadside in the frigid night air. Each has a story to tell: a father whose son languishes in jail without trial; a veteran who cannot get a job; a student so terrified of the police that he avoids Baghdad. In the morning, they know the area will fill with thousands of people like them, with stories like their own. Under the flutter of tribal flags, they will shout boisterously the same words heard from protesters across the Arab world: Down with the regime.