Quotes About Dogma

Many people tend to look at programming styles and languages like religions: if you belong to one, you cannot belong to others. But this analogy is another fallacy.

Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.

[History is] the story of the magnificent rear-guard action fought during several thousand years by dogma against curiosity.

Traditional religion's dogma of selflessness is essentially an externalization of the individual's voice and therefore has a powerful negative influence on behavior. The haranguing voice of the fundamentalist minister castigating sinners and urging them to seek redemption directly resembles the self-critical "voices" of the members of his congregation.

Anti-intellectualism remains strongly entrenched in many parts of the church, but it is grounded in fear, not in faith. (p. 19)

Faith as assensus is "relatively impotent, relatively powerless. You can believe all the right things and still be in bondage.

Fundamentalists are to Christianity what paint-by-numbers is to art.

A fundamentalist is someone who wants to substitute what he believes for what you believe," Max said. "And someone who thinks he knows the will of God better than anyone else.

To identify faith with the holding of a certain number of beliefs that come to us from the distant past actually makes a mockery of Christian faith and reduces it to the schoolboy's definition: "Faith is believing things you know ain't true".

It's true that if your religion failed to deliver a miracle, that a human sacrifice would certainly follow. Ah...quite. You are a man of acute insight. That's not insight. That's a personal guarantee.

The first causalities of a religion are the intentions of its founder

Certitude leads to violence.

No aceptar ningún dogma sino hasta ver si es capaz de resistir un buen chiste

Fundamentalism isn't about religion, it's about power.

Where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.

He wanted, for example, to investigate why one should hold fast to a religion not because it was true but because it was the faith of one's fathers. Was faith not faith but simple family habit? Maybe there was no true religion but only this eternal handing down. And error could be handed down as easily as virtue. Was faith no more than an error of our ancestors?

The problem with religion, because it's been sheltered from criticism, is that it allows people to believe en masse what only idiots or lunatics could believe in isolation.

The faith of religion is belief on insufficient evidence.

When the stakes are this high- when calling God by the right name can make the difference between eternal happiness and eternal suffering, it is impossible to respect the beliefs of others who don't believe as you do.

I]t is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions.

Religious faith is the one species of human ignorance that will not admit of even the possibility of correction.

The truth, however, is that the conflict between religion and science is unavoidable. The success of science often comes at the expense of religious dogma; the maintenance of religious dogma always comes at the expense of science.

People of faith tend to argue that it is not faith itself but man's baser nature that inspires such violence. But, I take it to be self-evident that ordinary people cannot be moved to burn genial old scholars alive for blaspheming the Koran, or celebrate the violent deaths of their children, unless they believe some improbable things about the nature of the universe.

The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism.