Quotes About Dogma

We can do nothing about those who do, those fools who think that dogma equates with truth.

They want so hard to believe in what they've been taught that they find ways to rationalize things they wouldn't stand for otherwise. They need to keep their

he was able to explain to the clergy that 'Women are: "Satan's bait, poison for men's souls".

But…but you can't treat religion as a sort of buffet, can you? I mean, you can't say yes please, I'll have some of the Celestial Paradise and a helping of the Divine Plan but go easy on the kneeling and none of the Prohibition of Images, they give me wind. Its table d´hôte or nothing, otherwise…well, it would be silly.

Here is the woman who had seriously considered taking LSD under the supervision of a medical doctor so she could have a mind-altering experience, who had read herself straight out of Mormonism and into Eastern religious thought--but refused to replace one dogma with another.

When we are caught in notions, rituals, and the outer forms of the practice, not only can we not receive and embody the spirit of our tradition, we become an obstacle for the true values of the tradition to be transmitted. We lose sight of the true needs and actual suffering of people, and the teaching and practice, which were intended to relieve suffering, now cause suffering. Narrow, fundamentalist, and dogmatic practices always alienate people, especially those who are suffering.

If you have a gun, you can shoot one, two, three, five people; but if you have an ideology and stick to it, thinking it is the absolute truth, you can kill millions.

Judaism is not a dogmatic religion but one which loves debate, in which scholarship has played a big part. Scholars never agree about anything.

In my judgment, the American people are too brave, too charitable, too generous, too magnanimous, to believe in the infamous dogma of an eternal hell.

Religion doesn't make people bigots. People are bigots and they use religion to justify their ideology.

There are some forms of religion that are bad, just as there's bad cooking or bad art or bad sex, you have bad religion too.

Religious people often prefer to be right rather than compassionate. Often, they don't want to give up their egotism. They want their religion to endorse their ego, their identity.

Faith is never identical with piety.

Die Abergläubigsten sind ja stets die in religiösen Dingen Glaubenslosen.

Theology, I still think, is due to lack of faith.

though he's wrong about how these methods work. It's religion—facts don't matter, especially when the facts involve women's liberty.

It is surely harmful to souls to make it a heresy to believe what is proved.

the single greatest threat to organizational resilience: the unwillingness or inability of senior leaders to write off their own depreciating intellectual capital. This failing would be less dangerous if subordinates felt empowered to challenge C-suite dogma, but most middle managers are disinclined to bite the hand that feeds them. Thus myopia, like authority, trickles down.

Accumulating orthodoxy makes it harder year-by-year to be a Christian than it was in Jesus' day.

Often dogma masks a lack of true faith, so I can't say that it interests me much.

If it's the two men in suits with Bibles then he slams it shut to make sure not even one of their words enters into the hall.

Considering he was neither priest nor scholar, the young man gave sensible, thoughtful replies -- the more so, perhaps, for being untrained, for he had not learned what he should believe or should not believe. Present a statement to him in flagrant contradiction to all Christian doctrine and he could be persuaded to agree on its good sense, unless he remembered it was the sort of thing of which pyres are made for the incautious.

Rationalism is a blind faith.

But it is no good using the tongs of reason to pull the Fundamentalists' chestnuts out of the fire of contradiction. Their real troubles lie elsewhere.