Quotes About Dogma

I do not believe in self-proclaimed parties.

Faith cannot tell us who is right and who is wrong, because each will simply assert that his or her faith is the true one.

The habit of religion is oppressive, an easy way out of thought.

It's only religion. Faith is faith, but religions are no better than the people who practise them.

Every effort to safeguard what is considered truth inevitably leads to the crippling of truth, for the very act of enshrining a belief and treating it as settled truth and infallible doctrine is to declare that the search for truth has concluded. Any religion with a regard for truth must resist every effort to bring its search for truth to an end. This includes the formation of creeds, which by their nature are presented as conclusive and indisputable.

Avoid those persons who claim always to have believed the same thing and demand you do the same. What they are really saying is that they have refused to permit their encounters with God to reshape their lives.

That was the problem with religion. You no sooner made up your mind about something than you had to change it.

Giovanni Sartori has distinguished two approaches to problem solving: the empirical and the rational. 15 The empirical approach is concerned with what is and what can be seen and touched, proceeding on the basis of testing and retesting and largely rejecting dogma and abstract or coherent grand designs for change. The rationalist approach, by contrast, is concerned with abstraction rather than facts, stressing the need for deductive consistency and tending to be dogmatic and definitive.

We made up our own religions and pretended they came from outside us.

Woe to him who doesn't know this Christian faith is bourgeois.

I think I would abolish schools which systematically inculcate sectarian beliefs.

We want to have our beliefs, and we want to enforce them on everyone else, but we don't want to have to think about everything that comes along with it.

Organized religion is hate masquerading as love.

But men have been committing heinous acts in the name of God ever since mankind began believing in deities, and extremists exist within all religions.

Religious zealots like bin Laden, David Koresh, Jim Jones, Shoko Asahara,* and Dan Lafferty are common to every age, just as zealots of other stripes are.

All religious belief is a function of nonrational faith.

for devotees of doctrine tended to fall in love with their own righteousness, ignoring inconvenient facts.

You could harbor a man in your bed or your body, play on his nervous system like Paderewski at the keyboard, and not shift his brain one inch out of the concrete of dogma. (p. 5)

Some men, under the notion of weeding out prejudice, eradicate virtue, honesty and religion.

Instead of clearing his own heart the zealot tries to clear the world.

Heresy is the life of a mythology and orthodoxy is the death.

Todos los males del alma humana provienen del temor y del deseo. Las amenazas y las promesas son los grandes medios de corromper y embrutecer a los hombres. El dogma que anuncia el privilegio y que amenaza con un castigo exorbitante, monstruoso y sin fin a las multitudes ignorantes no es ni divino, ni humano, ni razonable, ni civilizador

Fundamentalists thrive in times of rapid social change. Fundamentalists generally champion emotionally charged issues that can be reduced to unambiguous black and white terms.

Religion works on some people but not on everyone, because it says, 'Stop thinking and accept what I tell you.' That's not valid for people who want to think and reflect.