What is a "fundamentalist"?

OK, they're in every religion and creed, it seems. But what is a "fundamentalist", anyway? Are they people who read the bible/Koran/US Constitution/etc and take every word in that document literally, and exclude none?

So how is that being "fundementalist", and not just being pedantic?

Either the Koran says that all Jews and non believers should be killed, or it doesn't. Same with passages in the bible that make antisocial or unreasonable demands.

If these documents had been created nowadays, they'd have been deemed to hate literature, and rightly so.

Isn't it time we just threw away these documents? Aren't they the cause of this "fundamentalism", worldwide?

I mean, could you imagine such a thing as a non-fundamental nazi, who was so purely because he didn't read or take in every word of Mein Kampfe?

Or a non fundamental, middle of the road communist, who ignored certain passages of Marx's ideologies, for convenience sake?

Surely the roots of fundamentalism isn't in the minds of those who practise it, but in the documents they read.

Just as the bible is now a redundant book, in that many parts of it missed the mark many years ago, so is the Koran, and other religious books.

The understanding of God and spirit has moved on, just as mathematics has moved on from Euclid.

Just as Euclidean geometry doesn't apply in the real, space age, 21st century world, neither do the religions and the religious books of many centuries ago.

But the fundamentalists don't see that.

It's time for everyone to point out that the old religions are dead, before all the people become dead.

But it does mean recognising that there's no such thing as a "holy" book!