Quotes About Dogma

Religion works on some people but not on everyone, because it says, 'Stop thinking and accept what I tell you.' That's not valid for people who want to think and reflect.

Skepticism is my only gospel, but I don't want to make a dogma out of it.

After all, enforced national bilingualism in this country isn't mere policy. It has attained the status of a religion. It's a dogma which one is supposed to accept without question.

Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview - nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty.

All fanatics loathe the questioning mind and fear the truth.

Where there is spirituality there is freedom, but religion is rigid. To be spiritual you have to step aside from the belief and go more into knowing, which gives you a greater freedom, including the freedom to question. Unless you question you're not going to get past the beliefs.

All those bickering worshippers, each one convinced their version is the right one. Imagine getting prayers from ten million believers, not one of them believing the same thing as the one kneeling beside him or her. Imagine all those Holy Books, not one of them agreeing on anything, yet all of them purporting to be the word of that one god. Imagine two armies annihilating each other, both in that god's name. Who wouldn't be driven mad by that?

Beliefs are collars to which leashes can be attached

a person who thinks should not try to persuade others to his belief; that is what puts him on the road to a system; on the lamentable road of the man of conviction; politicians like to call themselves that; but what is a conviction? It is a thought that has come to a stop, that has congealed, and the man of conviction is a man restricted.

Human life is bounded by two chasms: fanaticism on one side, absolute skepticism on the other.

Faptele inseamna prea putin fata de o anumita stare de spirit. Combaterea zvonurilor sau a unei stari de spirit e tot atat de zadarnica si de inutila ca si incercarea de a risipi in ochii unui credincios dogma despre imaculata conceptie.

Modern stupidity means not ignorance but the non-thought of received ideas.

I don't believe in Jesus or God. But I do believe that fundamentalists in religion or anything else are bad, and that they have more hate than love.

There's one thing worse than a failed old religion: a naïve and arrogant new one.

he encouraged them to explore their doubts, ask their questions, and express themselves honestly. Many people crave certainty. They don't want to have to think, agonize, or grapple with life's difficult questions for themselves. Instead they want dogma. They want guaranteed answers.

If religion, she also liked to say, is the opiate of the masses, fundamentalism is the amphetamine.

The price of purity is purists.

Science is based on experiment, on a willingness to challenge old dogma, on an openness to see the universe as it really is. Accordingly, science sometimes requires courage - at the very least the courage to question the conventional wisdom.

A central lesson of science is that to understand complex issues (or even simple ones), we must try to free our minds of dogma and to guarantee the freedom to publish, to contradict, and to experiment. Arguments from authority are unacceptable.

If we're absolutely sure that our beliefs are right, and those of others wrong; that we are motivated by good, and others by evil; that the King of the Universe speaks to us, and not to adherents of very different faiths; that it is wicked to challenge conventional doctrines or to ask searching questions; that our main job is to believe and obey—then the witch mania will recur in its infinite variations down to the time of the last man.

Science is based on experiment, on a willingness to challenge old dogma, on an openness to see the universe as it really is.

Except by sealing the brain off into separate airtight compartments, how is it possible to fly in airplanes, listen to the radio or take antibiotics while holding that the Earth is around 10,000 years old or that all Sagittarians are gregarious and affable?

Freedom of belief is pernicious," Bellarmine wrote on another occasion. "It is nothing but the freedom to be wrong.

Ideology always paves the way toward atrocity.