Quotes About Dogma

every day—every twenty-four-hour rotation of Earth—people kill and get killed in the name of someone else's conception of God, and that some people who do not kill in the name of God, kill in the name of needs or wants of political dogma.

Après l'avoir condamnée, l'Église a fait de la pensée de Thomas d'Aquin sa doctrine officielle. Elle lui a assuré à la fois une gloire sans égale mais l'a aussi enfermée dans une espèce d'enfer dogmatique dont il n'est pas sûr qu'elle soit aujourd'hui sortie.

I leave it to the faithful to burn each other's churches and mosques and synagogues, which they can be always relied upon to do

The forces of piety have always and everywhere been the sworn enemy of the open mind and the open book.

And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true—that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.

The level of intensity fluctuates according to time and place, but it can be stated as a truth that religion does not, and in the long run cannot, be content with its own marvelous claims and sublime assurances. It must seek to interfere with the lives of nonbelievers, or heretics, or adherents of other faiths. It may speak about the bliss of the next world, but it wants power in this one.

Dogma in power does have a unique chilling ingredient not exhibited by power, however ghastly, wielded for its own traditional sake.

One indictment of the religious right is not that it is heartless – a tautology in any case – but that is brainless.

I leave it to the faithful to burn each other's churches and mosques and synagogues, which they can always be relied upon to do.

Thus the mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the most devastating one. Religion is man-made.

The liberality of the age, or in other words the weakening of the obstinate prejudice, which makes men unable to see what is before their eyes because it is contrary to their expectations, has caused it to be very commonly admitted that a Deist may be truly religious: but if religion stands for any graces of character and not for mere dogma, the assertion may equally be made of many whose belief is far short of Deism.

Religion poisons everything

We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true—that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.

It's often been observed that the major religions can give no convincing account of Paradise. They do much better in representing Hell; indeed one of the early Christian dogmatists, Tertullian, borrowed the vividness of the latter to lend point to the former. Among the delights of Heaven, he decided, would be the contemplation of the tortures of the damned.

Tertuliano de que cuanto mayor es la estupidez, más fuerte es la creencia en ella, que la fe alcanza su cota máxima cuando sus enseñanzas son menos asimilables por la razón.

wrong. Religious opinion is wrong by definition. We can't avoid

Estamos seguros de que se puede vivir una vida ética sin religión. Y de hecho sabemos que el reverso es cierto: que la religión ha ocasionado que innumerables personas no solo no se comporten mejor que otras, sino que se concedan licencias para comportarse de formas que dejarían estupefacto al regente de un burdel o a un genocida.

it is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity

A virgin can conceive. A dead body can walk again. Your leprosy can be cured. The blind can see. Nonsense. It's not moral to lie to children. It's not moral to lie to ignorant, uneducated people and tell them that if they only would believe nonsense, they can be saved. It's immoral.

To believe in a god is in one way to express a willingness to believe in anything. Whereas to reject the belief is by no means to profess belief in nothing.

Thomas Paine was not wrong in saying that he could not believe in any religion that shocked the mind of a child.)

To this day, religious people kill each other and kill each other's children for the right to exclusive property in this unidentifiable and unlocatable hole in a hill.

croire en un dieu est une façon d'exprimer une disposition à croire en n'importe quoi. Tandis que rejeter la croyance n'est d'aucune manière professer que l'on ne croit en rien.

It was never that difficult to see that religion was a cause of hatred and conflict, and that its maintenance depended upon ignorance and superstition