Quotes About Dogma

The best thing about religion is that it makes for heretics.

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

I don't know whether I want to improve religion or not. I prefer to get rid of it.

Religion is the frozen thought of man out of which they build temples.

You know, around 14 or 15 I rebelled against Christianity pretty hardcore. I was reading a lot of other esoteric Eastern philosophy and getting into everything that wasn't dogmatic Christian. But I will say that it did kind of prime me for a more spiritual lifestyle. I didn't walk away with bitterness, even though there was some condemnation.

From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion: I know no other religion; I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion; religion, as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream and a mockery.

My first dissatisfaction has always been with religion.

The facts of science are real enough, and so are the techniques that scientists use, and so are the technologies based on them. But the belief system that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith.

When you look at other countries that are developing the capabilities and the technology to deploy missiles of very significant destructive capability with nuclear, chemical, or biological warheads, then the MAD dogma makes even less sense.

I grew up Catholic, and when you've grown up, and these belief systems have been presented to you at a young, impressionable age, I don't know that you can shake them. Even if your rational mind tells you something else, sometimes they're so deeply ingrained that they are with you for the rest of your life.

I don't have the sort of temperament that submits to Christianity or Islam.

It is an old habit with theologians to beat the living with the bones of the dead.

Let us put theology out of religion. Theology has always sent the worst to heaven, the best to hell.

Blasphemy is an epithet bestowed by superstition upon common sense.

Theology is a superstition—Humanity a religion.

The religionist is a living fossil, embedded in that rock called faith.

Religion can never reform mankind, because religion is slavery.

Science has nothing in common with religion. Facts and miracles never did, and never will agree. They are not in the least related. They are deadly foes. What has religion to do with facts? Nothing. Can there be Methodist mathematics, Catholic astronomy, Presbyterian geology, Baptist biology, or Episcopal botany?

Whenever a man believes that he has the exact truth from God, there is in that man no spirit of compromise.

we are taught that God is exceedingly anxious that we should believe a certain thing.

Mental slavery is mental death, and every man who has given up his intellectual freedom is the living coffin of his dead soul. In this sense, every church is a cemetery and every creed an epitaph.

What has religion to do with facts? Nothing

Heresy," Hilaire Belloc reminds us, "is the dislocation of some complete and self-supporting scheme by the introduction of a novel denial of some essential part therein. We

Think of the lives it has blighted – of the tears it has caused – of the agony it has produced. Think of the millions who have been driven to insanity by this most terrible of dogmas. … It is a great pleasure to drive the fiend of fear out of the hearts of men, women and children. It is a positive joy to put out the fires of hell.