I think that with fundamentalists, all of them from Islamic extremists to Presbyterian traditionalists who believe in the supremacy of the absolute and the human capacity to know it when they see it, I think there is a point reached when something turns and these people end up being the opposite of their intention. They go from being for the good to the bad. From their initial impulses that formed their beliefs they migrate from solution to problem. Then they come to do more harm than benefit. At worst they kill and maim for their cause. Or in subtler form they are simply divisive. They might engage in pious moralising, relatively harmless on the surface, but with potentially sinister manifestations.

My thinking here is that such people are out of balance. Because they are over-zealous for things to be better than they are they tend toward partisan and posture themselves on the side of the angels. This is invariably done by a necessary identifying of who they perceive to be the sinners. Scapegoats are invented. In the absence of an actual person, the Devil will do.

The danger here is to divide the psyche against itself as these identifiers become cut off from their own dark side and project it on to their invented scapegoats. The more these projections happen the more empowered the dark side as a spiritual force becomes. This process inches forward slowly by stealth until the take-over is complete. The person is now victim of the very thing they set out to avoid and what is more is usually oblivious to the fact. Hence the Jungian phenomenon of the shadow personality. One cannot always see one's own shadow. It is part of the insidious nature of the dark forces that they be hard to see. They can work away in the shadows undetected taking over the moral and psychological territory of their victims. This is how fundamentalists become easy prey. The take-over is internal and complete and they are left ignorant.

I observe this from experience having had relationships personal and professional with fundamentalist types. Their beliefs which seem benevolent on the surface, innocuous at least, turn out to have ill effects, their presence less than benign. It is almost as if they preside over a kind of karmic corruption and are able, innocently, to pass that over to others as if like a flu bug or virus. In this sense their effect is not deliberate. They are not consciously projecting necessarily. It is that they are acquiescent in the dynamic of a natural law like any other which does its thing to others unseen. Those others may then become the receptors, undeserved, for the moral decadence however slight of the projector. The transference of such karmic energies goes ahead unaware just like germs do in the physical realm.

When people are scapegoated by those purporting to be morally superior, done under the guise of protecting the world from the ill deeds of the decadent, when retribution follows with relish as it often does, then alarm bells should sound. Something has probably gone wrong. A spiritual illness, possibly an epidemic is at play. It is the death-knell to a genuine morality and should itself be identified as corruption.