Quotes About Dogma

Religion seemed the last vestige of man's intellectual infancy.

In short, science is well positioned to properly handle belief. Religion is not.

Gut hunches are routinely passed off as dogma while conventional wisdom flourishes even when there is no data to back it up.

Religion thrives on woolly allegory, emotional commitments to texts that no one reads, and other forms of benign hypocrisy.

Quem tem familiaridade com a vida acadêmica sabe que ela gera cultos ideológicos propensos ao dogma e resistentes à crítica.

An ideology can be dangerous for several reasons. The infinite good it promises prevents its true believers from cutting a deal. It allows any number of eggs to be broken to make the utopian omelet. And it renders opponents of the ideology infinitely evil and hence deserving of infinite punishment

So when one adjusts for population size, the availability bias, and historical myopia, it is far from clear that the 20th century was the bloodiest in history. Sweeping that dogma out of the way is the first step in understanding the historical trajectory of war.

Si algo tenían en común los pensadores ilustrados era su insistencia en que apliquemos enérgicamente el estándar de la razón a la comprensión de nuestro mundo y no recurramos a generadores de engaño como la fe, el dogma, la revelación, la autoridad, el carisma, el misticismo, la adivinación, las visiones, las corazonadas o el análisis hermenéutico de los textos sagrados.

One [dogma] is that violence is caused by a deficit of morality and justice. On the contrary, violence is often caused by a surfeit of morality and justice, at least as they are conceived in the minds of the perpetrators.

our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible. One therefore ought to seek good reasons for believing something. Faith, revelation, tradition, dogma, authority, the ecstatic glow of subjective certainty—all are recipes for error, and should be dismissed as sources of knowledge.

If there's anything the Enlightenment thinkers had in common, it was an insistence that we energetically apply the standard of reason to understanding our world, and not fall back on generators of delusion like faith, dogma, revelation, authority, charisma, mysticism, divination, visions, gut feelings, or the hermeneutic parsing of sacred texts.

For Nietzsche and Dostoevsky alike, freedom—even the ability to act—requires constraint. For this reason, they both recognized the vital necessity of the dogma of the Church. The individual must be constrained, moulded—even brought close to destruction—by a restrictive, coherent disciplinary structure, before he or she can act freely and competently.

The same pattern of creative conflict pervades the Old Testament, which is in large part a series of stories about the spirit in prophetic opposition to the inevitable corruption of dogma harnessed to serve power. It is the personality who mimics that model who might be regarded as truly Western, in the deepest of psychological senses.

The single axioms of the ideologically possessed are gods, served blindly by their proselytizers.

tedious, ideology-ridden professors.

Of course, there must be vision, beyond discipline; beyond dogma. A tool still needs a purpose.

Beware of intellectuals who make monotheism out of their theories of motivation.

Ser de la izquierda es, como ser de la derecha, una de las infinitas maneras que el hombre puede elegir para ser un imbécil.

Deben ser rigurosamente excluidas de la dirección educativa todas las influencias políticas y dogmáticas. Las primeras corrompen la moral de los educadores y rebajan el nivel de la enseñanza; las segundas conspiran contra la libertad de pensar y tienden a invadir el fuero del conciencia individual.

El sentido común es colectivo, eminentemente retrógrado y dogmatista; el buen sentido es individual, siempre innovador y libertario.

El mediocre no inventa nada, no crea, no empuja, no rompe, no engendra; pero, en cambio, custodia celosamente la armazón de automatismos, prejuicios y dogmas acumulados durante siglos, defendiendo ese capital común contra la asechanza de los inadaptables.

Creer en el primer catecismo que se nos enseña o se nos impone, es renunciar a nuestra personalidad.

La curiosidad intelectual es la negación de todos los dogmas y la fuerza motriz del libre examen

Qu'on rie des idées religieuses, ou qu'on les vénère, n'importe : elles ne forment pas moins, vraies ou fausses, la base unique de toutes les institutions durables.