Quotes About Dogma

Confidence and superiority: It's the usual fundamentalist stuff: I've got the truth, and you haven't.

When this faculty of imagination is not kept alive, there is no more story to be told, and institutions begin to stiffen and become dogmatic. Their objectifications then take on the quality of absolutes. When imagination becomes stuck or frozen, creation and poetry are no longer possible, and this also closes the door to democratic processes as well the arts and sciences. If people lack imagination, how can they find solutions to the challenges of life?

Every religion in the world has had a subset of devotees who seek a direct, transcendent experience with God, excusing themselves from fundamentalist scriptural or dogmatic study in order to personally encounter the divine.

DOGMA: a political belief one is unreasonably committed to, such as the notion that freedom is good and slavery is bad. BIAS: predeliction for a particular dogma. For example, the feminist bias is that women are equal to men and the male chauvinist bias is that women are inferior. The unbiased view is that the truth lies somewhere in between. (an early comment on backlash, from Glossary for the Eighties)

But as I grew up, I felt the tension one surely must feel when being simultaneously taught the importance of a specific dogma and the importance of freedom from dogma.

All I will say is my brother's narrow idea of Christianity seems to bring more suffering into the world than relief.

once people stop believing in the God of the Bible, they don't believe in nothing--they begin to believe in anything.

One can often recognize herd animals by their tendency to carry bibles.

Religion seems to have a way of making people abandon logic.

What is fanaticism today is the fashionable creed tomorrow, and trite as the multiplication table a week after.

How can you tell when a political ideology has become the equivalent of a religion?

We must give Trump credit for asking many politically incorrect questions and challenging mainstream Republican dogma on immigration.

Conservatives are always right about everything. We are. We are.

I like contradictions, and I like exceptions. I don't like rules and dogma.

People will politicize religion; we see it in every faith, in every religion. We see it with Pat Robertson, in my opinion, and we see it with the Taliban.

The condition that the Taliban part with al Qaeda is not just a condition, it is an objective. We must convince them that al Qaeda ideology and dogma will not help them.

Organized Christianity has probably done more to retard the ideals that were its founders' than any other agency in the world.

compared to individuals, groups tend to be more dogmatic, better able to justify irrational actions, more likely to see their actions as highly moral and have a tendency to form stereotypical views of outsiders.

Doctrine is a wonderful servant and a horrible master.

An image of God doesn't contain God, in the same way a word about God or a doctrine or a dogma about God isn't God; it only points to God.

Some things that religious people make a big deal of are rather pointless. Avoid the insanity.

History does not record anywhere at any time a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. But, like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it.

Anyone who can worship a trinity and insist that his religion is a monotheism can believe anything.

Religion is a solace to many people and it is even conceivable that some religion, somewhere, really is Ultimate Truth. But in many cases, being religious is merely a form of conceit.