Quotes About Dogma

Yesterday's heresy becomes tomorrow's dogma," the bishop replied mildly, and Polly thought once again of Giordano Bruno.

When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons.

Within the House of Islam, the penalty for learning too much about the world—so as to call the tenets of the faith into question—is death.

The dogma of a "chosen people," while at least implicit in most faiths, achieved a stridence in Judaism that was unknown in the ancient world.

the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish.

We have this kind of shibboleth which says: what wasn't reasoned into existence can't be reasoned out. The truth I think is rather much closer to this: that people are making desperate efforts, rather heroic efforts, to be reasonable, to have a coherent worldview, and when those efforts become too costly or too embarrassing… dogma loses.

Now, I've argued that the motivation for Islamists and jihadists is ideological dogma, fed to them by charismatic recruiters who play on a perceived sense of grievance and an identity crisis. In fact, I believe that four elements exist in all forms of ideological recruitment: a grievance narrative, whether real or perceived; an identity crisis; a charismatic recruiter; and ideological dogma. The

Religion is the one area of our discourse where it is considered noble to pretend to be certain about things no human being could possibly be certain about.

religious moderates are themselves the bearers of a terrible dogma: they imagine that the path to peace will be paved once each of us has learned to respect the unjustified beliefs of others.

We have been slow to recognize the degree to which religious faith perpetuates man's inhumanity to man.

every religion preaches the truth of propositions for which it has no evidence.

Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever.

In places where scholars can still be stoned to death for doubting the veracity of the Koran, Gould's notion of a loving concordat between faith and reason would be perfectly delusional.

They believe in the literal truth of the Koran.

But what about love, compassion, moral goodness, and self-transcendence? Many people still imagine that religion is the true repository of these virtues. To change this, we must talk about the full range of human experience in a way that is as free of dogma as the best science already is.

But faith is still the mother of hatred here, as it is wherever people define their moral identities in religious terms.

The link between religion and "morality"—so regularly proclaimed and so seldom demonstrated—is fully belied here, as it is wherever religious dogma supersedes moral reasoning and genuine compassion.

Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything—anything—be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in.

The doors leading out of scriptural literalism do not open from the inside. The

Dogma is by definition nothing other than an interpretation of Scripture. The defined dogmas of our faith, then, encapsulate the Church's infallible interpretation of Scripture, and theology is a further reflection upon that work.

Belief is the enemy.

The Creationists, like all bigots, derive their fervour from rejection--the more they can reject, the more righteous they themselves feel.

They fight against popular creationism, but at the same time they fight fanatically for their own creationism," he

The lure of the various isms, though hardly unknown to religious people, may be even more intense for those who avoid religion.