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What is the measure of "holiness"? Different traditions seem to have
different standards.

Most of the measures I will discuss can be seen as variations on
obedience. There is some Supreme Authority, and holiness consists of
obedience to this authority; hence "holier than thou" directly means
"more obedient than thou". But the variations can be significant.

I first learned about spirituality from Ananda Marga (a sect in the
Hindu tradition) in the years 1974 through 1979. The underlying
metaphysical story was that in the beginning there was only pure
undifferentiated Divinity, and the Divinity was bored. So to
entertain itself, it divided into a myriad parts, the self-imposed
challenge being to pull everything back together into divine Unity
again. Spiritual progress meant progress toward merging back into the
pure divine, ending your separate existence; this was not just what
human life was about, it was what the Universe was about. You made
progress by applying effort in that direction; "sadhana" is Sanskrit
for "effort". Ananda Marga taught a comprehensive system of different
kinds of Sadhana- spritual practices to develop your divine inner
nature. Most of it was classic Yoga; ethical rules, asanas
(postures), meditation of multiple kinds, devotional practices, and
social-service work. In the earlier years, only a few practices were
obligatory, and the atmosphere was exciting and fun. Being holier
meant doing more sadhana, and more advanced and difficult kinds of
sadhana. So, holiness was not so much obedience as a kind of athletic
development. We worked at spirituality as if we were training for the
Olympics. After 1977, though, the Guru and his heirarchy of monks and
nuns asserted their "divine" authority boldly, demanding much
stricter observance of multiple lists of rules, more work, more
contributions; they wanted you to organize your life around
maximizing your contributions to Ananda Marga- ideally, all your
time, all your money, all your thought. "Holier" inescapably became
"more obedient".

A somewhat different emphasis can be seen in orthodox Judaism. I am
hardly an expert on that tradition, but it seems there "holier than
thou" means "more observant than thou". Holiness is measured by how
many rules you follow. The purpose of the rules is to maintain
purity; the sacred is divided from the profane by rules defining
which is which, the rules coming partly from "revelation" in the
scriptures, and partly generated by new rabbinical interpretations of
how to apply the spirit of the rules to new situations. The more
rules you define and follow, the purer you are, and the dirtier the
rest of the world is, by definition.

In the Catholic tradition there was a time when "mortifying the
flesh" was considered a mark of holiness. For a period of about 200
years, "holier than thou" meant "more ascetic than thou". Monks would
practice self-flagellation, wear devices meant to inflict pain on the
wearer ("Hair shirts" being the best-remembered today, but there were
many others), practice fasting for long periods, go without bathing
for years, allowing lice and leeches to live on their bodies. In my
humble opinion, this was an unhealthy development in the history of
Christianity; one could say pathological.

I practiced vegetarianism for a number of years, and found that some
people make a religion of that; there are degrees of purity (possibly
asceticism) there also. The varieties of vegetarianism spring from
different theories amd motives, but a scale can be drawn, measured by
how many foods you abstain from. Red meat, all meat, all animal
products; beyond that there are different spiritual grades of plant
food. At the extreme are a handful of folks who live on alfalfa
sprouts and water, and aspire to "breatharianism".

The defining characteristic of fundamentalism is having faith in the
plain, literal meaning of the scriptures; in the words of Cal Thomas,
"God had enough strength left over after creating the Universe to
cause his prophets to write down his words accurately." Some apply
this only to the original manuscripts, some also claim word-by-word
divine inspiration for a particular English translation. Since the
Bible is often NOT literally true, in many places is
self-contradictory, and in many places barbaric, this requires the
fundamentalist to ignore evidence and logic, to reject science, to
practice rationalization, to become a "fool for Christ". Instead of
mortifying the flesh, they mortify their intellect. Their leaders
praise them for this; "holier than thou" effectively means "stupider
than thou."

If anyone thinks I am being too harsh here, consider the article
"Darwin's Rib" by Robert S. Root-Bernstein in the Sept. 1995 issue of
DISCOVER. (See the archives at www.discover.com.) The author is a
teacher of biology (including the theory of evolution) in a
midwestern college. He writes: "I have come to expect 10 percent of
each class to tell me that men and women differ in rib count." In
other words, women have one more pair of ribs than men, because God
took a rib out of Adam to make Eve. They learned this in Sunday
school. I do not think this is due to any conspiracy of preachers who
got together and said, "Let's see if we can make them believe
something REALLY stupid." This is just the sort of thing we would
naturally expect, if "holier" means "more faithful to the literal
reading of scripture" and there is disdain for evidence and logic. In
the newspaper (Roanoke Times Oct 10, 1999) I read that Creationists
are beginning to attack the Big Bang theory of cosmology; they say
"there are legitimate scientific doubts that the universe is more
than several thousand years old."

Once they develop the habit of being righteously stupid regarding the
scriptures, fundamentalists discover that they can be righteously
stupid about other things- politics, law, education, medicine,
child-rearing, crime control, anything. In my humble opinion, this is
also an unhealthy development in the history of Christianity.