Quotes About Dogma

I'd had a strict religious education.

A lot of people have a belief system that is strictly based on religious dogma.

There is no dogma that the organ or harmonium can be used in church, but not the drum.

I'm against organised religion of any kind.

In the Church, considered as a social organism, the mysteries inevitably degenerate into beliefs.

The persecuting spirit has its origin... in the assumption that one's own opinions are infallibly correct.

There may be men who think they are attacking Christianity when they investigate the historical origin or the morality of some dogma; I do not think so. Honest investigation can result only in growth.

I never found much comfort in overly organized religion of any sort.

I wasn't overwhelmed by dogma, and that sort of freed me up to look at things differently.

Religion is not merely the opium of the masses, it's the cyanide.

most religious people had given up their right to being human beings by claiming they had the God's truth and nobody else had any truth.

All religions are a scam . . . except for yours of course.

Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives.

Throughout time, certain consensus beliefs have imprisoned us, kept us from evolving as a species, as individuals.

Poetry resists academic pretension, just as the mystery of religious faith evaporates on contact with dogma.

to rid the people of their old beliefs and insert new ones.

The established religions no longer ask fundamental questions about our identity and our reason for living. Instead, they concentrate purely on a series of dogmas and rules concerned only with fitting in with a particular social and political organization. People in search of real spirituality are, therefore, setting off in new directions, and that inevitably means a return to the past and to primitive religions, before those religions were contaminated by the structures of power.

The root of these fundamentalist tendencies, these dogmatic tendencies, is a fixed identity—a fixed view we have of ourselves as good or bad, worthy or unworthy, this or that. With a fixed identity, we have to busy ourselves with trying to rearrange reality, because reality doesn't always conform to our view.

We sometimes think that dharma is something outside of ourselves—something to believe in, something to measure up to. However, dharma isn't a belief; it isn't dogma. It is total appreciation of impermanence and change.

Disagreements between incompatible beliefs cannot be settled by reasoned argument because reasoned argument is drummed out of those trained in religion from the cradle.

The modern materialists are not permitted to doubt

A cup is useful only when it is empty; and a mind that is filled with beliefs, with dogmas, with assertions, with quotations is really an uncreative mind.

Christianity in its ideas was never the art of the possible.

There is, in any art, a tendency to turn one's own preferences into a monomaniac theory.